I assume all reading this heard the recent announcement on Multiculturalism, timed for that most hallowed of our national holidays, Harmony Day.
What, you didn’t know it was Harmony Day?
Don’t tell me you missed all the fantastic taxpayer-funded Harmony Day events?
Oh, you didn’t hear about them either?
To be fair, unless you work for the Government, an NGO or one of the multitude of dodgy cultural organisations that pop up at this point of the year, it’s unlikely you had any idea that Harmony Day was still a thing. No-one wears orange to celebrate the day; no-one who doesn’t have a professional reason to care about it pays it any mind at all.
It’s a day created eighteen years ago which has been celebrated and promoted by the parasite class for that entire time without making the slightest dent in the national consciousness.
I even remember them trying to plug it on Neighbours, with one character berating another for being insufficiently tolerant around this most sacred of days. I must have missed the episode where they critiqued each other on not getting sufficiently blotto for St Patrick’s Day. The political class has done all it can to make people give a damn about this day short of actually making it a public holiday, and yet still no one cares.
The reason is obvious: multiculturalism as a concept sucks. While many like to signal their leftist virtue by singing its praises and elevating a greater choice of cuisine to the most important amenity of society, most people feel nothing for it.
Even those from recent immigrant communities see it as nothing other than an empty concept, a hollow shell where once a shared culture, history and tradition stood. If anything, recent arrivals view the concept as nothing more than a useful tool to enable entry for more people of their own background, thus making Australia more like home, but with tap water you can drink.
Fittingly for an empty concept being expounded on by an empty man, leading a party hollowed out of any values or principles, Malcolm’s statement was, dare I say it, fairly empty.
He began by saying, “Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world”. Which is a nice way of celebrating the fact that we haven’t yet begun killing each other in serious numbers.
After a rhetorical throat clearing to dispense with Australia’s Anglo-Celtic foundation, Turnbull stated that, “Australians look like every face, every race, every background because we define ourselves and our nation by our commitment to shared political values, democracy, freedom and the rule of law”.
Other values mentioned are “equality of men and women”, “commitment to freedom” and “support of freedom of thought, speech, religion, enterprise and association”. Also apparently learning English is good, but speaking other languages is good as well.
The absurdity of Multiculturalism as an ideal, let alone a practical policy, has never been clearer. The Prime Minister is asking you to celebrate how different we are while defining ourselves as a nation by how similar we are.
The values seem to have been chosen by a committee to be as deliberately vague as possible, so as to include every possible featherless biped that might one day crawl up some deserted beach and demand Centrelink. Yet they still fail.
After all, whose values are these?
If I believe God tells me that no man can make a law, that voting to create laws is anathema to God and that the only laws needed were spoken to a man in a desert cave almost fifteen hundred years ago, does that make me not Australian? What if I believe that man in the cave was told that men and women are not equal? Does that mean I have to hand in my Aussie passport?
The sad and sick irony of a man who blocked Tony Abbott from reforming the abomination that is the Racial Discrimination Act lauding the values of free speech, free expression and free association can probably go unsaid. But the question has to be asked, if you don’t believe in free speech, can we deport you now?
If the only thing that defines being Australian is a commitment to these values, then does that mean anyone in the world with these values is Australian? Do they have a right to come here or can they just collect welfare where they are?
Nations are defined by their culture, which itself is a mixture of their heritage, their faith and (unpopular as it may be to admit it) their ancestry. Does someone who arrived from Somalia three years ago have the same claim to call themselves Australian as someone whose ancestors came on convict ships, worked as slave labour for their freedom and then spent a dozen generations of sweat and blood transforming a land of dust and fire into a first world country?
The reason Harmony Day and other efforts like it have failed to take root in the public mind is the same reason Multiculturalism must be constantly pushed by every government organisation, from the army to the police to the local council: because it makes no damn sense at all.
The reason Harmony Day exists, the reason Multiculturalism is presented as an ideology in every classroom, the reason for this statement by the Turnbull government and similar statements by governments past, is so that powerful people behind both of our major political parties can continue to import votes and cheap labour.
Until the major party duopoly on power is broken, until the assumptions underpinning the official ideologies of our ruling classes both left and right are challenged, the absurdities that plague our society and civilisation will continue until we drive off the cliff of no return.
But at least we’ll still get to laugh at Harmony Day on the way down, so there’s that.
Photo by Danielle Scott 