Following in the aftermath of recent tensions over antisemitism and social division, Australia's Royal Commission has been tasked not only with examining hatred against Jews but also with the broader state of social cohesion.Albanese has spoken of the need for unity around the essential values, beliefs, and institutions that make Australia unique. Yet the gap between those words and the direction of policy remains striking. For decades, successive governments have treated multiculturalism as an unalloyed good, a badge of moral sophistication and national virtue. The result, according to a growing body of critics, is not greater harmony but a progressive erosion of the common culture that once made assimilation both possible and expected.
Multiculturalism did not begin as a radical project. Introduced under the Whitlam government and expanded under Malcolm Fraser, it was originally framed as a pragmatic recognition that new arrivals brought their own languages, foods, and traditions, and that these could be respected without demanding total cultural erasure. Over time, however, the policy has evolved into something more ambitious and more corrosive: a doctrine of cultural relativism in which no culture is allowed to claim priority. All are treated as equal, and the very idea that some practices or beliefs may be incompatible with a liberal democratic order is ruled out of bounds. The consequence is that Australia's foundational inheritance, the English language, common law, parliamentary democracy, and the Christian moral framework that shaped its institutions, is quietly demoted from national core to merely one tradition among many.
That inheritance is not an abstract academic construct. The First Fleet carried the King James Bible and Blackstone's Commentaries on the Laws of England. Australia's legal system still rests on principles of individual rights, equality before the law, and the presumption of innocence that grew out of English common law and Christian anthropology. Democracy itself, as practised in Australia, descends from British parliamentary traditions and, more remotely, from the classical inheritance of the West. These are not neutral or interchangeable features. They explain why so many people from across the world have chosen Australia as a place of refuge: because it offered something distinct from the violence, poverty, and sectarianism they left behind. Post-war migrants from Britain, Italy, Greece and other parts of Europe largely understood this. They retained pride in their origins while joining what Tony Abbott has called "team Australia." Assimilation was imperfect, but it was real.
The same cannot be said with equal confidence today. The spectacle of crowds on the steps of the Sydney Opera House, with many celebrating the massacre and rape of Jews on 9 October 2023, was not an isolated aberration. It revealed the presence of imported hatreds that have no place in a society claiming to value tolerance and mutual respect. Jewish students on university campuses report fear, with universities doing little about it. Reports of child marriage, female genital mutilation, and the emergence of machete-wielding gangs in Melbourne point to practices and subcultures that do not sit with Australian norms of individual rights, gender equality, and the rule of law. Cultural relativism offers no coherent response to these phenomena. If every culture is equally valid, then the defence of core Australian values becomes an act of intolerance, which is exactly the line taken by the Left wing multiculturalists.
Critics of multiculturalism are often accused of nostalgia or worse. Yet the evidence from Europe is difficult to dismiss. Countries that pursued rapid, large-scale immigration without insisting on cultural continuity have seen the growth of parallel communities, declining social trust, and the rise of both Islamist extremism and reactive far-Right movements. Australia is not Europe, but the early warning signs are visible. Social cohesion is not an automatic by-product of diversity; it is the product of shared expectations, a common language of citizenship, and a willingness to choose the host culture over imported grievances.
None of this requires a return to a rigid monoculturalism of the kind sometimes wrongly associated with Pauline Hanson. Australia has always absorbed newcomers and been enriched by them. The point is more modest and more urgent: a liberal democracy cannot survive indefinitely if it treats its own foundational culture as optional or suspect. Defending Western civilisation and the Christian inheritance that shaped Australia's institutions is not an act of exclusion. It is the precondition for the very freedoms and opportunities that attract people to these shores in the first place. Without a confident centre, multiculturalism becomes not a celebration of difference but a recipe for fragmentation, a nation of tribes rather than a people with a shared story.
Words about unity are insufficient when policy continues to elevate diversity above coherence. A society that cannot say what it stands for will eventually discover that others are prepared to fill the vacuum with their own certainties. Australia's strength has never lain in the absence of difference, but in the capacity of difference to be absorbed into a larger and more enduring whole. Recovering that capacity begins with the recognition that not all cultures are equal in their compatibility with a free and stable society, and that Australia's own culture is worth defending.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2026/07/multiculturalism-and-social-cohesion/