Please Explain, Prime Minister

The World Cup is done. England parked the bus against a team that wanted it more (as usual). And Australia didn’t make it past the group stages (as usual). So normal service resumes. Here in Australia, we marked the tournament the way we now mark most things, by having a loud and slightly unhinged argument about what it all meant. Don’t you just love politicians?

So Pauline Hanson looked at the Socceroos - 26 players, 15 ‘cultural’ backgrounds (whatever that means) - and said, there, that’s exactly the monoculture I mean. One shirt. One anthem. One country. By a similar measure, Anthony Albanese looked at the identical squad and said, there, that’s precisely why Pauline is wrong. Behold our glorious ‘diversity’ (whatever THAT means!)

So… same men, same green and gold jersey. Yet we have two political leaders, each utterly convinced their points were being proved for all to see, and neither pausing to notice they were describing exactly the same thing! I say again - don’t you just love politicians?

Let’s deal with the obvious first, because I’m not going to pretend Pauline Hanson chose her words carefully - she didn’t. “Monoculture” is a dreadful word. It sounds like something growing in the back of your fridge in a discarded yoghurt pot. It sounds like something out of 1984 - everyone issued the same haircut, filed in the same direction, “so say we all”. If Pauline’s ambition was to be misheard, it was the perfect word. And she duly was. Because anyone with a modicum of common sense knows exactly what she meant.

If we take the word ‘monoculture’ by the scruff of its proverbial neck, it turns out to be almost aggressively ordinary. She meant one set of rules that everyone lives under. One law, applied the same to everyone, regardless of where they pray or what country their grandparents fled. It means a shared idea of what it is to be Australian, sitting on top of, not instead of, wherever you (or your ancestors) originally came from.

Here’s the version I’d put to Pauline Hanson, and to the Prime Minister, and to anyone else still shouting who might care to listen to some balanced non-partisan common sense. Be as multicultural as you like in your own house. Cook what you cook, speak what you speak, keep every festival, every song, and every scrap of the old country you can carry. And then step out of your front door into a street where all of us, whatever is simmering on our respective stoves, are simply Australian. Different at home. The same in public. That’s not the erasure of anybody. It’s the one thing that lets everybody live side by side without the place quietly coming apart.

That’s it. That’s the whole argument. It really is that simple. Yet Albo and Pauline (for whatever reason) seem incapable of saying it, because both sides have decided the other one is the enemy. Don’t you just love politicians?

Before I carry on, my readers will know I’m a pom, so I should declare my interest, because it’s a large one, and as Albo would say “it’s important.”

I chose Australia. On January 26th 2016 (after having lived here as a permanent resident for four years), I stood in a hall in Mosman, swore an oath, shook Tony Abbott’s hand, and became an Australian citizen. I didn’t do it casually. I left a career, a city, and my family and friends to be in that hall with my little flag, my wattle and my certificate. And I can tell you exactly what I understood myself to be agreeing to, because I turn it over in my mind all the time.

Firstly, I was not agreeing to stop being what or who I was. Nobody asked me to surrender my accent at the door or pretend the first four decades of my life had happened to someone else. I brought the lot with me. But from that morning on, in the street, at work, at the ballot box, and in the interminable airport queue, I was an Australian citizen. Full stop. No different from the man whose ancestors came on the First Fleet.

Oh, and this’ll make you giggle - to get here in the first place, for my initial visa, back in 2012, I had to sit an English language test. Me. An Englishman. From England. I found it faintly comic at the time, having to prove I could speak my mother tongue, but I did it without a word of complaint or a feeling of resentment, because those were the rules. And the rules are rather the point, are they not?

Which is why I confess to a certain bewildered expression on my face a couple of weeks ago, when I saw that the government is now advertising its 5% home deposit scheme (a scheme open not only to citizens but to non-citizen residents too) in Arabic and Mandarin. Wait, hang on, what? I had to prove my English to be let through the door, yet now, it would seem, others need not trouble themselves, because the state will now cater to them in whatever language they prefer, and help them into a house while it’s at it. You come here - you learn English. There used to be no asterisk on that sentence. Somebody has quietly added one. Did I miss a meeting? If that now sounds like resentment - well what do you expect?

And then I thought to myself - surely nobody travels thousands of miles in order to lovingly reconstruct the exact place they just left! That’d be a spectacularly expensive way to be homesick wouldn’t it? But given how much Australia has changed in the last few years, I’ve come to accept that might not be entirely true.

There is still, sadly, a portion of those come here who choose not to shelter under the shared roof, but to refuse it outright, to live by a different set of rules, under different laws, inside a community sealed off from the one that took them in. Most people who arrive here want precisely what I wanted - but a minority, disappointingly, want no part of the social contract that has taken generations to create. And to make matters worse, there’s a strand within that minority that arrives carrying an open hostility that the rest of us were, until very recently, fearful of even acknowledging.

Let’s not pretend we don’t know what I’m talking about, because last December it stopped being theoretical. A father and son walked into a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach and gunned down fifteen Australians for the crime of being Jewish. That wasn’t a failure of housing policy or the welfare system, or even a symptom of the algorithm. It was the sharp end of a despicable ideology allowed to fester precisely because the people whose job it is to name threats had decided certain words were too impolite to say out loud. And every peaceful Muslim in this country, which is to say the overwhelming majority of them, was betrayed by that silence as surely as anyone, tarred by the acts of a fringe the authorities lacked the nerve to confront.

If you are fortunate enough to become an Australian citizen, the contract has terms - whether you like them or not. You may hold any faith you like, but you may not use it to demand the death of people who hold another faith. That is not a controversial proposition. It used to be the very floor of the arrangement. Somewhere along the way it became the sort of thing you can now be reported to the authorities for thinking, let alone saying!

Which brings me, inevitably, to Anthony Albanese, our Prime Minister, who has lately spent a great deal of public breath (and public money) wondering aloud who could possibly have broken our “social cohesion.”

It’s a marvellous performance, isn’t it? The man surveys a fracture, arranges his features into an expression of wounded bewilderment, and demands an inquiry into the mystery of who did it, while the empty petrol tin sits in plain view just behind him. Do you really think we are that stupid?

Because the division he laments isn’t weather. It didn’t simply descend on us, naturally. In very large part it’s the downstream product of choices his own mob have made and defended for years. His refusal to name the ideology behind Bondi was (and remains) utterly dumbfounding. Public money has poured into communities to keep them ‘distinct’ rather than bringing them together, so that we now have whole suburbs of Sydney operating as parallel worlds, in alternate universes, living cheek by jowl as single creatures barely touching. Sydney is now made up of the very ‘monocultures’ the defenders of multiculturalism claim to dread.

If you spend the best part of a decade telling Australians that our differences matter more than what we have in common, don’t be so surprised when we duly stop feeling like one people.

So please explain, Prime Minister. You commissioned the nation to discover who dismantled our unity. Here’s the big tip - look in the mirror!

In conclusion, a country is not its coastline or its credit rating. It is a shared story that enough people agree on to keep telling. That’s all it’s ever been. And a shared identity is not the cage one side fears, nor the embarrassment the other side keeps apologising for. It’s the container. It’s the thing that lets a genuinely ‘diverse’ society hold its shape rather than separating out into its parts.

If you take the container away, the contents don’t blend into something richer - they separate. They always separate. When a sovereign nation loses its shared identity, a breakdown in its society isn’t a ‘risk’ to be ‘managed’ - it’s the inevitable result, and it’s written plainly into every example history has ever handed us.

Diversity with nothing shared beneath it, and nothing holding it together, isn’t a strength. It’s a collection of disparate tribes sharing a postcode, and waiting for a reason to stop pretending otherwise. The common thread is the thing that makes the diversity interesting, invigorating, and survivable. Pull it, and you don’t get a more colourful country. You get a thinner one, and then, eventually, you get no country at all.

So here we are, arguing about a word, while the answer was running around on a football pitch. Fifteen origin stories. One green and gold jersey. Albo and Pauline were both right about the Socceroos, which is the whole tragedy of it, because had they noticed they were right, together, as Australians, they might have stopped fighting long enough to get on with the actual work of holding the nation together. Don’t you just love politicians?

So the argument’s over as far as I’m concerned. Somebody really ought to tell the Prime Minister. Though I have a strong suspicion he already knows, and that he’d simply prefer, for reasons of his own, that the rest of us carried on pulling the thread of the green and gold jersey until we have nothing left.

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