During a meeting I had with a senior foreign economist at a major investment house six years ago, I explained how the mass-immigration economy would prevent any risk from engulfing the banking system.
She asked how sustainable such an approach was, given the obvious deleterious distributive effects of the growth model (that is, it is a class war).
I argued that the system has greater longevity than it appears, because Australia is better than almost anywhere at absorbing migrants without causing social dislocation.
I would not argue the same today. Au contraire.
Since then, the Australian multicultural model has come under siege.
There’s no easy answer as to why, but I’ll do my best to describe what has happened.
Foremost, the globalisation experiment has reached a tipping point at which developed-nation economies are being absorbed by developing nations as the relative weight of their wage bills converges.
As a result, the working classes’ support for open economic borders has collapsed. Understandably, this, in turn, has given rise to anti-immigration political parties everywhere.
The US is only the beginning. UKIP in the UK and various proto-fascist parties across Europe are on the rise.
Some of these parties are populist (not all) and highly selective in their use of truth. This has coincided with the decentralisation of information via the internet, which has all but ended rational discourse.
A related consequence is that policymaking processes have also collapsed, resulting in blunder after blunder and dreadful policy execution, which in turn leads to more lies. Rinse and repeat.
Australia has resisted these forces better than most. This is partly due to our exceptional ability to assimilate migrants. We remain a culture largely made of outsiders, which means fitting in is a pretty simple matter of taking the piss out of yourself.
But that success is passing fast. Several generations of Australians (of all colour and creed) have been very deliberately locked out of higher living standards.
- Home ownership is ended.
- Public service quality declines every year.
- Fair pay for fair work is finished.
- Crime and corruption are rife.
Our disenchanted youth are angry and brainwashed in equal measure. They protest meaningfully about trivial issues, but they almost never take action to improve their circumstances. They are a classic case of misplaced anger, which makes them very depressed.
This state of mind also points to perhaps the greatest collapse of all afflicting the nation. The culture now privileges identity equity over class equity, a disastrous switch that:
- promotes marginal issues at the expense of central ones and leaves economic forces of production and distribution untouched, and
- turns inside-out the self-effacing culture that multiculturalism could inhabit, such that all outsiders are considered victims.
This signifies the ultimate downfall of multiculturalism, as the fundamental values that underpin it no longer exist.
And so we have surging political parties that represent earlier, simpler times. Understandably so. The promise of economic multiculturalism has not delivered.
One Nation is the outstanding example and is rapidly becoming a legitimate third party nationally, taking as much from the ALP as from the LNP.
The situation appears to be causing a slow-dawning panic among the major parties and has spawned an attack on free speech.
The first round was the social media ban for children. This is a classic case of blaming the victim. Adults are far more toxic on the internet than kids. If you want to clean it up, then spend a few billion on creating a beefed-up E-Safety regulator. Banning doesn’t even work.
The second round is another blame-the-victim tactic. Draconian legislation for hate laws is no answer to lone wolf terrorism. We can’t gut the right to free speech to placate any minority or irrelevant foreign conflict.
If enacted, this policy will engender its opposite: a revolt that further catapults PHON into a position of power, if not of king, then certainly kingmaker.
Canberra has been misusing and exploiting Australia’s multicultural success for an extended period, and now that abuse is producing perverse outcomes for the liberal democracy. If killing free speech is now the only way to sustain it, then it is already dead.
There is a better was and that is simply to freeze immigration and let the great redistribution back to youth begin:
- Lower house prices.
- Higher wages and lower income taxes for youth.
- Tax assets and restore the quality of public services.
Then multiculturalism might again flourish rather than descend into daily skirmishes in a slowly growing civil war.
