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When I envisaged a time in Australian politics when a Labor government pushed negative gearing and capital gains tax reforms through the parliament, relying on help from the Greens, I didn’t imagine the Coalition being preoccupied about parsing the meanings of mono- and multiculturalism. I imagined instead a full-throated political fight: the Liberal leader neck-deep in conviction, fighting for civilisation as he saw it. But that’s because I imagined a normal political time in which the whole landscape hadn’t fractured.
It’s now a genuinely weird moment where the atmospherics and obsessions of politics have almost nothing to do with who’s in the parliament. All the energy, momentum and political focus concern a party whose votes don’t matter. All the actual business is getting done between Labor and the Greens, the latter of which barely has a speaking role in the current political drama. Never has there been such a disjuncture between parliamentary power and the public mood.
Right now, though, the Coalition has the benefit of neither. In the parliament, it is relevant only if Labor is pursuing something the Greens won’t accept – like its NDIS cuts – but otherwise not at all. That makes it impotent in the face of tax changes it once weaponised sufficiently against Labor to claim a miracle election victory. But it derives no power from the public mood either, so its rhetorical objections evaporate as soon as they’re uttered. Any polling benefit of Labor’s weeks of post-budget bruising went to One Nation, not the Coalition.
So, right at the crucial stage, it finds itself playing in the politics of culture, on terms One Nation sets. “Monoculture” was all Pauline Hanson had to say and the Coalition had to play fetch. The problem, as always, is that Hanson had simply given clearer voice to what the Coalition had so often nudged and winked about for 25 years. Among the most sustained features of John Howard’s premiership was its attack on multiculturalism. He struck “multicultural affairs” from the relevant government department’s name. He frequently argued it divided Australia into tribes. He repeatedly insisted migrants learn English and adopt Australian values, and introduced citizenship tests ostensibly for that purpose. “I was never comfortable with multiculturalism,” Howard said last year, removing precisely zero doubt. Everything Angus Taylor has said since is not a new release. It’s a cover of Howard’s greatest hits.
But when you give this a name – when you call your dream the monoculture – all the implications come to the surface. And that’s when the Liberals found themselves splitting. Taylor prevaricated because he didn’t want to use either m-word: monoculture is too stark, and he couldn’t suddenly embrace multiculturalism when he’s moulding himself in the shape of an established conservative tradition. Liberal leaders do occasionally support the idea, but Malcolm Turnbull aside, never with the passion with which they have attacked it – and certainly not when being outflanked on the right. Perhaps the truest description of the predicament came this week from leader-in-waiting Andrew Hastie: multiculturalism had become a “loaded political term”, he said. Certainly. But in no small measure, it has been the Liberal Party that loaded it.
Hastie has clearly decided to tackle Hanson head on. “They shall have war,” he recently declared – a war he notes One Nation has started against him personally. In that spirit, he declared the monoculture to be nostalgic nonsense. “How do you police that? Do we want government more involved in our lives, policing who fits into Pauline Hanson’s definition of Australian culture and who doesn’t?”
It’s a bracing retort, and it exposes the emptiness of the monocultural shell. It’s a symbol, not a policy. A loaded term, if you will. But Hastie’s objection also articulates the emptiness of the Liberal Party’s anti-multiculturalism over decades. The more it insisted people adopt a set of prescribed values – even as it defined them only vaguely – the closer it moved to having government tell people what they should believe. It’s one thing to urge people to speak English, but it’s pretty empty when you’re cutting government funding for the English language education services migrants use to learn it. And that’s a strange thing to do when you’re regearing the migration intake to be more Asian and less European because your economic model demands it. At that point all the bluster about multiculturalism becomes a form of gesture politics. A bit like monoculturalism is.
The result has been a total lack of results. The Coalition has been in power for 16 years this century, and the four immediately before that. For all its politicking against multiculturalism, for all Howard’s Australian values talk, for all Peter Costello’s condemnation of “mushy misguided multiculturalism” and Tony Abbott’s “Team Australia” missives, we are no closer to the monoculture than had these words never been said. When Angus Taylor points to the Bondi terrorist attacks, and says the standard of migrant has been too low, he leaves out that the only migrant involved was a Howard-era entry who had the benefit of all that rhetoric from Coalition governments.
Hanson might have done us a favour by making all this explicit. It’s one thing to speak broadly, to tell a story about people not accepting our ways. It’s another to make it concrete – to complain about people speaking Chinese and Arabic at home. Yes, it identifies the bad guys – and maybe that’s the point – but it reveals the impotence of the whole enterprise because it points to a problem the government can’t solve unless it wants to live in your kitchen.
It was impotent under the Coalition too, but that didn’t matter because the Coalition itself was undeniably potent. Its votes in parliament mattered and its economic vision ruled the country. That was an age when all tax reform had to walk through its fire. Now it finds itself going through the same motions but without the associated heft. The tax debate largely ignores it and the cultural debate outruns it. Having long ago released the hounds, it grasps in vain to find a leash.
Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist.
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Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.From our partners
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