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.

Chinese, Vietnamese and Cambodians still cluster in geographical areas like Sunnybank in Brisbane, but they are amongst some of the smartest and highest-performing students, and tend to become integrated via the professions and business.

Two groups stand out as not integrating. One is Muslims who cluster in the Western Suburbs of Sydney and the North-Western Suburbs of Melbourne. The other aren’t immigrants at all but are the indigenous.

In both cases there are demands for similar things which amount to a permanent separateness from the rest of society.

For Aborigines it is the relitigation of settlement, including separate representation, and even accommodation of Aboriginal customary law. For Muslims it is also institution of their own special law, Sharia, and the importation here of disputes from their homelands.

One of those disputes is the relitigation of the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

It is being the alleged victims of “settler colonialism” that gives both a superficial similarity, although on closer examination Arab claims to Israel are a lot weaker than Aboriginal claims to Australia.

And as occupiers of land once Aboriginal, Muslims here partake in the “original sin” of dispossession.

Aborigines have had tens of thousands of years of uncontested occupation by outsiders, while Arabs have been in control of Palestine for only around 800 years (since the Kingdom of Jerusalem was conquered), while jews have lived in that area continuously for maybe 4,500 years.

Fatima Payman and Lydia Thorpe therefore have a lot in common as renegades from mainstream Australian political parties who have taken a stand on sectarian and cultural interest. They demand to be treated not as equals, but as different.

Rather than accept the pluralist path that, while we all have different cultures stemming from our ethnicity, our families, our experiences, the jobs we have, the incomes we earn, the places we live and so on, but we have a set of beliefs that mean we are citizens of the same society, these politicians want separate development.

This path will never work.

Even more worrying is their insistence that narratives be established that cement in difference. In the case of Islamism, it currently clusters around the alleged genocide in Gaza and acceptance as legitimate of the massacre of innocent Israelis by Hamas, a terrorist organisation.

There is no genocide in Gaza, there is a war. What is being done by the Israeli Defence Forces does not amount to an attempt to exterminate a people or a culture. Gaza was one foot of a two-state solution in Palestine which Hamas has refused to accept. They broke a cease fire with the massacre and rape of innocent Israelis on a scale, having regard to the size of the population, larger than anything since the Holocaust.

This fictitious charge of genocide is being used to justify violence against not only Jews, but Western governments, and is just the latest in an ongoing, low-level campaign against Jewish and Christian societies by a determined Muslim minority.

It is only 22 years since another Islamist organisation, Jemaah Islamiyah, killed 202 people, including 88 Australians, in Bali. 9/11 was the year before that. Since those two events there have been frequent low-level terrorist attacks in the West, including in Australia the Lindt Café siege, and more recently the stabbing of Assyrian Christian Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Wakeley, Sydney.

There has also been a rise in anti-Semitism with attacks on Jewish synagogues and the offices of federal members of parliament who have Jewish heritage.

No doubt Payman will say she is not an Islamist, and I am not trying to hold her personally responsible for any of these, but along with a demand for Muslim separatism and exceptionalism goes the rise of grievance and of terrorist organisations.

This is a problem not just for mainstream Australians, but for the Islamic migrant communities themselves. With the current rise in Islamism ordinary Australians will be more likely to view them with suspicion and limit social and commercial interactions.

The rise of racial identity politics will also tempt others to play the same game.

This defeats the reason that most migrants come to countries like Australia. It is because we offer a wealthy and comfortable lifestyle unparalleled elsewhere, with opportunities for all, that the stream of migrants is basically one way.

That wealth and comfort does not happen by accident, but by nurturing an open society where things like ethnicity and class are descriptors, not limiters, and where every citizen is treated on the basis of themselves, rather than the groups from which they come.

It is not in the interests of Payman, or the group she claims to represent, that this culture be atomised into separate groups.