Multiculturalism was a wrong turn for a pluralist country

Fatima Payman, the Muslim senator who has resigned from the ALP because she couldn’t accept their policy on Palestine, and Muslim Voice, an Islamic organisation that plans to run, or support, Muslim candidates in the next federal election,  while two distinct entities, are the destructive endpoint of where we could always have expected multiculturalism to go.

This is a level of sectarianism that no one alive can recall ever seeing previously in Australia. While ethnic and religious groups can and do vote along similar lines from time to time, this is the first time they’ve organised to support candidates along entirely ethnic and religious lines.

The biggest supporters of multiculturalism in Australian politics are the Greens and the Labor Party. This is partly because they, in particular the ALP, have done better from the immigrant vote than anyone else.

It is also partly because they, as the radical parties, seek alternatives to our Western, liberal, capitalist, democracies.

While the centre right parties expected migrants to fit in, while allowing them some of the characteristics of their culture, the ALP encouraged them to think of themselves in separate terms.

“Multiculturalism” implies that you can have more than one culture in a country and mistakes the nature of the pluralistic culture that has served us so well.

Our culture is one of tolerance based upon the ethic that everyone is in principle equal, and free to pursue their own self-interest. The legal framework is based on the English legal system and the idea that the same laws apply equally to everyone.

It is an inherently Christian legal system, even if belief and church attendance are in decline.

Australia is one of the least racist countries in the world, and has absorbed huge numbers of migrants, and this has worked because most migrants who come here want something materially better than what they were leaving.

So they were happy for the most part to abandon the hatreds and habits from their homeland, and over several generations merge into the broad mass of Australians.

The Greeks, the Italians, the Serbs, the Yugoslavs, the Balts and “White” Russians that I grew up with in working class Brisbane all merged into the mass of Australia so that you can only identify them via non-Anglo surnames.

You can tell the streets where they used to live because of the churches they left behind along with the odd community hall, but they have long since migrated to the outer suburbs and brick and tile.