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Empowerment Equalizer
SSaragian
Antony Sammeroff
Ann Sterzinger
Rodney
RJ
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Craig FitzGerald
David Heleniak
Caity & Dan Greene
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Keith Preston
Bill the Butcher
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MRDA
Jack Donovan
Rachel Haywire
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Michael
Vince
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Noonan
S E Pearson
Rachel Haywire
Nexus X HumectressReflections on the Land Down Under
For the last two weeks, I’ve had the great pleasure of travelling around Australia and speaking at various events in Perth, Sydney, Melbourne, Newcastle and Canberra. While a terrific honour for me, this is undoubtedly a bad sign for Australia: the tragedy of my career is that I say obvious things that everyone knows and am lavished with entirely unmerited praise in response. It pains me to point this out but if Konstantin Kisin has been invited to give a series of talks in your country, all is not well.
This is the bad news for Australia: it appears to have been infected with the same mind virus as the rest of the Anglosphere.
The symptoms are all too familiar. Identity politics fuelled by the false teaching of history. Political polarisation. Two-tier policing with anti-lockdown protests brutally suppressed, followed by the police standing by as crowds chant “Gas the Jews” outside Sydney Opera House due to fears of upsetting “social cohesion”. The number of children being treated for gender dysphoria at Victoria’s Royal Children’s Hospital’s gender clinic has increased by over 1,000% in less than a decade. Some journalists at the ABC, the country’s national broadcaster, avoid revealing their nuanced political views to colleagues for fear of appearing insufficiently woke. Corporations jump on every progressive cause with enthusiasm. Activists want to cancel Australia Day: instead of being a day of national unity, they want to turn it into one of shame and self-flagellation.
It is all happening for the same reasons too. In the words of pioneer investor Peter Thiel, courage is now in shorter supply than genius. This is, sadly, also true in the land down under. While the centre left appeases its extremist fringe, many on the centre right hesitate to challenge the cultural vandalism they observe for fear of being described as “culture warriors”. And with good reason: while symptoms of the mind virus are visible to outside observers and those in media and politics, in truth, for the moment, the infection remains comparatively asymptomatic.
This is the good news: as things stand, Australia’s biggest challenge is not extremism, it is apathy born of comfort. Life here is good and the differences to the rest of the Anglosphere are remarkable.
Unlike major American and increasingly British cities, the streets and parks here are not overrun with people suffering from the scourges of addiction, homelessness and crime. Sydney and Melbourne ranked among the top 10 safest cities in the world in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Safe Cities Index 2021 and as the third and fourth most liveable cities in the world according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Global Liveability Index 2023.
With mining, drilling and agriculture responsible for over 70% of the country’s exports, Australia has highly paid jobs for those outside the laptop class. A mine truck driver can earn over A$130,000 a year (over £69,000), while going down into the mine can bring as much as A$250,000 (£130,000). I know many lawyers, senior doctors and other professionals in London who can only dream of such earnings. Indeed, a doctor friend doubled her salary the day she moved here from the UK.
While many will tell you that political polarisation is the worst it’s ever been, they’ll often do so while sitting around a table with people of different political viewpoints. As a senior politician put it at one such gathering, “I don’t want the other party to be elected. But I know they eventually will be and I want them to be the best possible government for Australia when they are”. It is hard to put into words how much this is not the case in Britain and America.
On cultural issues too, while apathy is how woke activists are able to continue hollowing out the country’s institutions, when forced to step away from the barbie and vote in the Aboriginal Voice Referendum last year, ordinary Australians made their feelings clear. Fronted by the courageous Jacinta Price, the “No” campaign overturned a one-sided onslaught from the country’s media, corporate and political elite, with 60% voting against embedding identity politics in the Constitution.
On immigration, too, Australians engage in debates that many of us would give our right arms to have. While tens of thousands of people come to the UK on small boats illegally every year and millions stream in through the porous southern border of the United States, Australia has comprehensively solved this problem.
Far from being some sort of voodoo magic, which is what it would seemingly take to address the issue in our countries, all that was needed was for then-Prime Minister Tony Abbott to stare down a resistant civil service and legal challenges to deliver Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013. While Abbott still attracts criticism and protests, as I discovered when I had the honour of joining him on stage at a Sydney University event, the facts of the matter are simple: 74 people came to Australia illegally on boats in 2023, down from 17,202 in 2012. It can be done. It just takes balls and, miraculously, some Aussie politicians still have them.
In many ways, travelling to Australia from Britain feels like a journey 10 years into the past. In previous decades, this would have read like a hack joke meant to paint Aussies as provincial, unsophisticated people. But today it is both a compliment and a warning.
Australians talk proudly of having the “most successful multicultural country in the world” because they have yet to discover what both David Cameron and Angela Merkel were forced to confess many years ago: multiculturalism doesn’t work. Neither Cameron, nor Merkel were “hard right culture warriors” but the reality of what they saw in their respective countries forced them to acknowledge the truth: immigration, when carefully managed and highly selective, can offer tremendous benefits. But the higher the level of migration and the more divergent the cultural and religious backgrounds from which people come, the more punitive the diminishing returns.
When I came to Britain in the mid-1990s, the British public were entirely unconcerned about immigration, with just 3% describing it as a major issue in the year I came. Back in the early 1990s, net migration was running at about 54,000 people. This was followed almost immediately by the hugely popular election of Tony Blair who abandoned all caution with Britain welcoming more people during his premiership than had come between the Battle of Hastings in 1066 and 1950. The abovementioned David Cameron, his Conservative successor, and his innumerable replacements, failed to stem the tide. Despite the popular uprising that we call Brexit, the latest net migration figures up to June 2023 were 672,000.
The result? Sectarian clashes in major British cities. Parliament abandoning its own rules to appease Islamists and rising ethnic tensions. Concerns about “social cohesion” so widely shared by police chiefs and politicians across the Western world have actually contributed to its decline.
It seems to me that Australia is in danger of making many of the same mistakes. In the year ending 30 June 2023, legal migration contributed a net gain of 518,000 people to the country’s population. This is a record level and for a country of 26 million people, this is a higher level of immigration than even in the UK.
The creation of a two-tier conversation about race is also firmly underway. An Aussie football player pleaded not guilty in a London court last week and is fighting to have the charge of racially aggravated harassment of the officer thrown out after allegedly calling him a “stupid white bastard”. The officer is white and Sam Kerr, the player in question, is not. She not only refused to apologise but has in fact secured apologies from people like former Socceroo and prominent anti-racism advocate Craig Foster who initially criticised her comments. In his pathetic and grovelling apology to Kerr, Foster showed all the signs of having been properly “re-educated”. Citing the Diversity Council of Australia’s definition of racism – which references the perpetrator being in a position of “race-based societal power” – Foster said racism cannot be committed against a white person as they are not a member of a marginalised group.
This is the great paradox of the woke takeover of any society. “Why are you being a divisive culture warrior?” they’ll scream at you as they take the foundations of your society apart, brick by brick. It is difficult to oppose robustly until the majority of people notice the problem. By which point it may be too late. Getting ordinary Australians to recognise the threat before the dangerous threshold is reached is the big challenge for the country’s sensible elite. Whether they can succeed remains to be seen.
