The Marvellous Miseries of Multiculturalism

The writer is in Australia.

I start this first column of the new year with the heavy heart that I am sure all our readers have for the families of the victims of the horrific mass-murders on Bondi Beach just before Christmas. And let us not deal in the usual Labour Party euphemisms, misdirecting abstractions and Kumbaya platitudes. This was the deliberate attempt to murder Jews, by Islamic extremists, done solely because they wanted to kill Jews. And they did, with the odd non-Jewish bystander thrown in. That makes Australia, outside of Israel itself, the country where the most Jews have been murdered in a single incident since the Second World War. Embarrassed? And all this happened after (let’s be blunt and truthful) Labour governments around Australia allowed radical Islamic clerics to preach their poison. And after they (with a bit of help from the courts) allowed pro-Palestinian protesters to shut down the Sydney harbour bridge – when no sane person believes an anti-Covid lockdown protest would ever have been allowed to do that. And after this country was the only one on earth to let in large numbers of Gaza people, the very same people who have been subjected for years, both at school and in their media, to the most vile anti-Jewish indoctrination imaginable. Nor is there any remotely sane comparison to be made of Islamic terrorism to ‘far-Right, neo-Nazi’ extremism – the go-to comparison of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and his Cabinet. Go and count up whether Islamic terrorists or neo-Nazis have caused more deaths in Australia. Or Britain. Or anywhere in the last 50 years. The death count for each isn’t in the same galaxy, let alone solar system or postcode. In fact, have a look at the statistics on mass murders motivated by religion around the developed world these past few decades. One religion is the cause of well over 90% of all these myriad murders – more than all other religions put together and multiplied by your favourite integer. And you know which religion it is. I know which one. And so do the politicians.

It gets worse. You see there is good reason to be ashamed of this country that I came to in 2005. That’s because it is simply a fact, today in 2026, that many Jewish Australians now feel safer in Israel than they do here in Australia. And yes, I have Jewish friends who are leaving here to move to Israel in the name of their family’s safety. Who can blame them because that is a highly defensible call. Still, let that sink in and then feel the seething anger I feel for what the political caste in this country has done to the place over the last 40 years. Of course, this Albanese Government has been the worst. But let’s not forget that Coalition governments also ran huge incoming immigration programmes with little thought of assimilation or selectivity, all in the name of some feel-good, trite notion of multiculturalism.

And this brings me to the topic of multiculturalism. As I have said in past columns, it has been a massive failure. Be clear though. I don’t mean that sane immigration that accepts people with specific skills to offer, that refuses to deal in doling out welfare to new arrivals and that aggressively insists on assimilation has been a failure. That works. Indeed, my wife and I are beneficiaries of that sort of immigration. No, what is and has been a disastrous failure is this progressive-Left, vague-and-amorphous warm fuzzy known as ‘multiculturalism’. You see, multiculturalism deals in either untruths or patently unwise outcomes. The untruth is that all cultures are equal. In fact, they simply are not. Judeo-Christian Western culture has delivered the freest, wealthiest societies in human history, ones that gave birth to the industrial revolution and the scientific worldview. In significant part that was due to the Enlightenment (and in my view the Scottish Hume-Smith variant more so than the French Rousseau-Voltaire one). Cultures that kill or scare witless those deemed apostates have, shall we say, not done so well. Cultures that downplay curiosity and open debate and disagreement in favour of enforced orthodoxy don’t deliver those either. One of the worst things to happen to the anglosphere has been the progressive cancer from within that has eaten away at our patriotism (in the sense of love of country) and our understanding of the net-benefit greatness of our heritage, imposing a sort of hairshirt ‘only focus on our faults’ worldview. In short, our schools and universities have been captured (and in my time here Coalition governments have done nada, nothing, zero about it – in fact, unis got worse every single year of the nine years of Liberal (conservative) Prime Ministers).

And this brings me to the bluntly stated claims of New South Wales Premier Chris Minns. In effect, late last year he said that the reason we Australians can’t have freedom of speech of the sort he said you see in the US is because Australia wants to hold together a multicultural community. So the obvious inference is that Minns thinks multiculturalism comes at the cost of free speech. Or at least it eats into our scope to speak freely, to criticise and even to point out actual true facts about the world (think here of our woeful, Coalition-appointed eSafety Commissioner who tried to shut down a video of an actual attack by a Muslim extremist on a Christian Bishop). And in a way Premier Minns is correct. If (and do note the ‘if’) we are going to turn Australia into a latter-day Beirut or Lebanon, a country of tribes and competing religious blocks, then words can and will set off violent confrontations and killings. So we would then have to limit speech. And we would have to characterise open, honest criticisms of religious outlooks as ‘racist abuse’ because we would have created Beirut-style ghettos of incompatibility. Free speech is being attacked in this country because our political caste has failed us. Its members are protecting their own arses. ‘Holding together a multicultural community’, Premier Minns ultimate good, is not worth the paper it shouldn’t have been written on. Open criticism. Free speech of the sort Australians enjoyed for decades if not a century. Thick skins. A ‘names can never hurt me’ resilience. These and more are all being sacrificed by today’s political failures, the people who have brought us to where we are. It’s time for change. We need a massive cut in immigration. We need to stop propping up a Ponzi scheme university sector. We need assimilation. But Lord knows it would be miracle to expect this from the Coalition.

Dr James Allan is the Garrick Professor of Law at Queensland University. This article was first published in Spectator Australia.