One nation, one culture

Fourth, citizenship should be conditional on reasonable fluency, appropriately tested, in English. If ethnic ghettos are to be avoided, newcomers must learn our language.

Fifth, citizenship applicants should also have to pass a reasonable written test of citizenship's meaning: parliamentary democracy, respect for others' rights, the rule of law and a general understanding of the Australian values to which they swear commitment.

Sixth, emphasis on English in our immigration policy should be enhanced. Today, English-language proficiency earns points towards an applicant's overall score. It should be made an absolute requirement (including, in other than exceptional cases, for our humanitarian intake).

All this has nothing to do with race, but everything to do with culture, and particularly with people whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society. For the world's problem today, whence the London bombings derive, is that Islam has become a failed culture.

That was not always so. But for 500 years now Islam has turned in on itself and lost its way, while the post-Reformation West has forged ahead. It is that sense of greatness lost, of declining significance more generally, that loss of pride, that has evoked the bloody frustrations we now confront.

The roughly 330,000 Muslims in Australia today include, of course, many or even most who are thoroughly law-abiding. The problem - which those also seemingly law-abiding young men in London have revealed to the world in all its stark reality - is not only that we don't any longer know that they are, but also that we can't any longer be sure they're going to stay that way.

Our resident Muslims comprise four categories: Australian born; non-native-born Australian citizens; non-native-born yet to acquire citizenship; and some here illegally. Put aside the first two categories. As to the third, we should not only make Australian citizenship harder to acquire (for everyone, not just for Muslims), but we should also, for the time being, stop adding to their numbers.

Ultimately, only Islam can reform itself. But in the present struggle within Islam, moderates have been steadily losing to (largely Saudi Arabian financed) fundamentalists. We would be insanely complacent to assume that even those moderate Muslims now among us (and already there are those who are not) will not, over time, produce from their ranks the equivalents of the London bombers (previously, apparently, moderates to a man). Meanwhile, we must accept that we are at war and start behaving accordingly before, as in London, it's too late.