Consolation

Australia has succeeded, so far, where others have failed

As we come to terms with the likely end of American democracy, I want to offer a little bit of consolation. In a world torn apart by racism and misogyny,Australia is maybe the least bad place to be. There’s not much hope of major progress, but also no reason to fear major backsliding.

On immigration, the big source of political conflict in many countries, 30 per cent of us were born overseas, and around 50 per cent have at least one overseas born parents. That’s more than any other country of comparable size. Although “English” is the most common single ethnicity, only around 30 per cent of us claim it.

And, with the exception of some pretty horrific treatment of refugees, we’ve reached that point without any serious social conflict.

That’s true despite periodic attempts at stirring up hatred.

In the 1920s, according to WK Hancock’s Australia, it was claimed that we were “98 per cent British” (Aborigines weren’t counted), and widely agreed that we should remain so. There was an early panic about Italian migrant.

After 1945, we broke with the idea of Britishenss, and encouraged massive migration of “New Australians” from the war-ravaged countries of Europe. Despite some bigoted comments about Wogs and Dagos, the idea that we needed to populate or perish prevailed.

With the end of the White Australia policy, immigration from Asia rose in the last decades of the 20th century. Rightwing figures including Geoffrey Blainey, Pauline Hanson and (relatively briefly) John Howard, tried to make an issue of it, but got nowhere.

After the terror attacks of September 11 2001, and a series of rape cases in Sydney, the panic turned to migrants from the Middle East. The low point was reached with the Cronulla riots of 2005, fomented by the appalling Alan Jones. But again, Australian society bounced back.

The most recent outing was the “African gangs” panic, in which it was claimed that the residents of Melbourne were terrified to go out to dinner, for fear of mobs of African teenagers. That wasn’t a success for the Victorian Liberal Party.

Although it’s dangerous to predict the future, Australia is now so diverse that any attempt at the kind of white identity politics represented by Trump and others seems unlikely to succeed.

We also appear to have settled most of the culture war issues that are destroying the US without any great division. Over the past few years, issues like abortion, equal marriage, voluntary assisted dying and trans rights have been addressed through legislation which has passed without much controversy. Disputes over these questions are now found mainly within the political right, with party leaders (Crisafulli, Dutton, Pesutto) having to clamp down on their own membes.

That’s the good news. zThere’s no hope for any real progress under Labor as it stands, but also no real danger of disaster.

We might be lucky a get a minority Labor government doing deals with Teals/Greens (this would obviously mean dumping Albo). In the meantime, we can plug away on issues like climate policy.

Even if Dutton gets in, he’s unlikely to have a reliable Senate majority. And like Albo, he doesn’t seem to have any strong convictions, except on the joys of flying business class. Certainly, I don’t expect him to follow through on nuclear power, for example.

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