Is One Nation trolling the Coalition?

This was the basis of John Howard's turn towards integrationist nationalism – an emphasis on common citizenship, English language, loyalty to Australia, and the rule of law – which led to the adoption of a citizenship test in 2007, one of the last acts of his government.

Labor has been subverting this approach to immigration since the beginning of its recent term, and in October 2022 the Prime Minister announced a review of Australia's multicultural policy settings, which resulted in the report Towards Fairness: A multicultural Australia for all.

Instead of putting Albanese on the spot for his anarchic and unpopular approach, represented by that report, to multiculturalism, Taylor hedged. Not a bad hedge, but a hedge nevertheless.

A less than perfect response is survivable, but the ill-discipline of his team could be fatal. The Coalition contest that One Nation cannot govern, but it's an open question as to whether the Coalition can either. Taylor was undermined by his many members of his party, including senior ones, who all had to have their say on the issue.

At one stage we even had the coach of the team, Federal Liberal President Tony Abbott, opining on the issue. Although this was before Taylor was put on the spot, and was the best of all the responses.

In the aftermath of the Bondi Beach and October 7 massacres, I'm sure that the word multiculturalism conjures up, for many of us, images of immigrants who bring their troubles here. And to others, a form of postmodern colonialism in which migrant cultures set up enclaves where they speak their own languages, administer their own law, and owe allegiance to overseas organisations and countries within a host nation with an incompatible culture.

It wasn't just the massacres, it was the 'spontaneous' marches against Israeli genocide that sprang up even before the Israelis had responded. It was also explosion of antisemitism, condoned or promoted in our universities and cultural organisations, and barely rebuked by our governments.

I've always had problems with the concept of multiculturalism, right from the days of Whitlam. Australia has a culture of pluralism, but it is one culture with many expressions. Is that a monoculture? Not unless you could call something like a rainforest a monoculture. Just as with the forest there are boundaries, and we can identify alien plants even amongst the vast range of different species.

Tony Abbott is right when he says 'Australia has a core Anglo-Celtic culture … we have a foundational Judeo-Christian ethos that should never change'.

It is worth reading Towards Fairness to get a more detailed idea of what multiculturalism means to Labor. Every culture gets a mention, apart from the cultures that made modern Australia what it is.

The report starts with a preface by an Aboriginal leader who assures us that from the beginning Australia was a multicultural nation because it had 700 distinctive language groups before the Europeans arrived.

But there was no country called Australia until the Europeans arrived, and even then, not until 1901 with Federation. Before the Europeans it was a continent with 700, often warring, tribal groups. This is not multiculturalism.