It’s a new and improved Albo with the same old message.
“We had progressive patriotism,” Albanese said of the Labor campaign message.
“We spoke about doing things the Australian way, not looking towards any other method or ideology from overseas.
“At a time where there’s conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world.
“That says that we’re enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don’t bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here, either, and that’s really important.
“This is a project, if you like, that’s not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.”
I am a very proud Aussie multiculturalist. In my view, immigration modulated the harsher edges of Australian populism forged by a vicious squatocracy merging into a rugged young nation that fought foreign wars for its imperial forebears before fighting them closer to home as imperialism disintegrated through the mid-twentieth century.
It then forged its own path to perhaps the most successful multicultural liberal democracy on earth in the second half of the twentieth century.
This was not without its problems, as the unicultural nation eased its way into broader demographics more representative of both its European past and then Asian future, but on the whole they have been minor.
It is a proud history, and, in one way, I believe it is uniquely successful.
Australiania, if we can call it that, was a culture of self-deprecation and ready humour. These cultural features are not racial, and anybody can join them.
So long as you were willing to put yourself down and have a laugh about it, you were accepted as an Aussie. It was a culture of outsiders, so outsiders could easily join it.
Moreover, and almost certainly more importantly, the economics of the growing population made sense to all as well.
Australia was underpopulated. It had small cities and oodles of cheap land. Not to mention ready resources, cheap energy, and abundant water.
These features made for a heady cocktail of rising living standards complemented by an immigration-led population increase.
However, like all growth models, this had its limits. Somewhere around the turn of the century, the mining boom led to a population surge, and then the one that came after outstripped the features that made it work.
The high cost of land made it prohibitively expensive to build cities. Capital shallowing overtook capital deepening as the defining feature of the immigration-led economic model.
Water is now an eternal problem. Resources are depleted. Cheap energy is now crazy expensive. Industry is all but gone.
This has meant living standards have been falling for the better part of twenty years. That is regressive, not progressive.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the self-deprecation that enabled cross-cultural serenity has been replaced by top-down strictures against free speech to enforce harmony.
It is still there, but it will be destroyed over time because it is no longer consensual. It is imposed. As such, we are beginning to import foreign cultural conflicts.
Albo’s plan for more of this is not “progressive patriotism”, it is “regressive globalism” and the failure to listen to the widening seismic cracks it is producing in Australian foundations will do nobody in Australia any good at all.
