Multiculturalism and the Great Australian Levelling: From Egalitarian Impulse to Cultural Erasure

The recent surge in support for One Nation has prompted familiar diagnoses: a populist backlash against elite-driven multiculturalism, mass migration, and the technocratic consensus that treated cultural difference as an unqualified good. A more precise account, however, locates the roots of the project not solely in the cosmopolitan preferences of the 1970s political class, but in a longer Australian egalitarian hostility to English cultural authority. That hostility, present from the earliest colonial decades and intensified after the Second World War, made it possible to level not only class distinctions but the very idea that the Anglo inheritance possessed any special standing. Multiculturalism, on this reading, was less a sudden imposition than the culmination of an internal revolt against hierarchy.

The older Australia did not arrive as a blank slate. It inherited English institutions, language, legal traditions, and a differentiated culture of manners, education, religion, and social inheritance. Those distinctions were imperfect and sometimes oppressive, yet they also transmitted a coherent way of life through families, schools, churches, and public institutions. The Australian rejection of English class hierarchy, the public-school accent, inherited status, the gentlemanly ideal, was real and widely shared. Once that authority was discredited, the further step of treating all cultures as interchangeable became easier. What began as an aversion to English snobbery extended, by degrees, to an ambivalence toward cultural particularity itself. T. S. Eliot's observation that culture requires differentiation and continuity, sustained across generations rather than manufactured by policy, is relevant here: a society that systematically levels the structures through which its own culture is transmitted does not remain culturally neutral. It becomes something else.

The political form this took in the 1970s was explicit. Multiculturalism, advanced under Whitlam and continued thereafter, was not merely descriptive of the fact that migrants had arrived. It was a normative project that discouraged assimilation and treated the preservation of distinct group identities as a public good. The older expectation that newcomers would join the existing cultural and institutional framework was recast as outdated or oppressive. In its place came the principle that all cultures are equal in status and that the host society should make room for parallel ways of life. The egalitarian impulse that had mocked English hierarchy supplied much of the popular legitimacy for this shift; the intellectual and political elites supplied the policy instruments and the moral language of anti-racism and diversity.

The results have not matched the original promise of a harmonious, post-hierarchical society. The principle that all cultures are equal has proved difficult to reconcile with the practical requirements of a liberal democracy that still depends on shared habits of restraint, free speech, and the supremacy of a single legal order. Free speech has been constrained in the name of protecting group sensitivities. Parallel loyalties and imported conflicts have appeared in public life, most visibly in the wave of antisemitic incidents that followed the October 7 attacks, including violence and intimidation in places such as Bondi. Social cohesion, once underwritten by a dominant cultural framework that newcomers were expected to join, has become a managed problem of competing identities. The same egalitarian logic that rejected English cultural authority has left little basis for asserting that any particular inheritance, legal, linguistic, or moral, deserves priority.

None of this requires romanticising the pre-1970s order or denying the genuine cruelties of class distinction. It does require recognising that culture is not an optional overlay that can be levelled without consequence. The Australian revolt against hierarchy made multiculturalism politically feasible; the subsequent refusal to maintain any hierarchy of cultural authority has made the maintenance of a common public culture increasingly difficult. What was advanced, in part, as a liberation from English cultural pretensions has left a society less able to transmit the habits and institutions that once made high levels of immigration compatible with social peace. The populist reaction now visible in the polls is, among other things, a response to that outcome.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/10/multiculturalism-and-the-great-australian-levelling/