Reflections on the History Wars: The political battle for Australia's future

Wolfgang Kaspar, writing in Quadrant, was brazen enough to instruct us in the "frictional costs of Australian settlement of Muslims". This is an example of the new fascism.

Rather than celebrate the successful multiculturalisation of Australia, they seek to shear people off and play on old prejudices by the use of implicitly negative phrases like "for all of us", when they really mean "for some of us". This is a government that talks in code.

John Howard does not understand that base motivations run through a community and a polity like a virus, that these things are poison to the nation's soul. They are part of an anti-enlightenment. He has recalibrated Australia's moral compass, where due north is only for elites, whoever they are.

A national leader, I think, should always be searching for the threads of gold in a community. Nurturing and bringing them out. Focusing on the best instincts - running with the human spirit and not punishing it.

A growing public morality and probity based on notions of charity and human regard should not be traduced by slurs such as "political correctness", with implicit support for an official "incorrectness". It takes a long time to build institutions and to build new norms of behaviour, new acceptances of protocols in any country. But to build them and then have them traduced is a terrible thing.

Those who want to celebrate only our European past, rejoicing in its prejudices, and who want us to be exclusive and cocooned and who employ division and ridicule in their quest, must lose.

Many people are dispirited by this period and they think that somehow the Bolts and the McGuinnesses, the Devines and the Albrechtsons somehow have got the upper hand. They will simply be a smudge in history. What have they put into place which is enduring, which makes the heart skip a beat? Nothing. And, in the end, there will be no punctuation mark in our annals from their paltry efforts.

The game is too big for them.

This is why those of progressive mind shouldn't despair, arid as this period is. Because in the end, the vapid and heartless messages of the militant conservatives will fail to make any real headway.

Always confronting them will be these things. Who are we? Can we borrow the monarch of another country perpetually? Can we go to the region and say we've turned a new leaf but, by the way, we never got to a proper basis of reconciliation with our indigenes? How do we find our security in the region rather than from the region? How do we make our multiculturalism work better? How do we make everyone feel as though they belong, that the place, truly is, for all of us?

These questions are still on the agenda, unsatisfied perhaps and unattended. But still sitting there.

I notice people saying this debate hasn't harmed us in Asia. I don't know who they are talking to. The publicity people in foreign affairs departments around the region perhaps, certainly not those who actually run these countries.

The fact is, there are a lot of wise heads in this part of the world; those who see Australia in a longer context and who are waiting for us to recover our equilibrium.