You can listen to The Stutchbury Sessions on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM or listen on your browser.
Episode Transcript:
Welcome again to The Stutchbury Sessions, or maybe you could say the Stutch Sessions. Today, I’m focusing on a phenomenon at the heart of Australia’s current national mood, a sense of growing polarisation that’s bubbling to the surface in ways we haven’t seen in decades. It’s a complex, thorny issue that needs to be approached with a level headed, authoritative perspective, steering clear of the emotion that too often clouds our judgment.
My new editors at the Centre for Independent Studies recall the adage from a former great newspaper editor, don’t try to pile too many things into one column. Just make one clear point. Don’t try to cram in too much, because it can become confusing. Wise words, but as I used to tell the financial review newsroom, everything is connected to everything else. It’s complicated. So today I will try to connect the dots from the headlines of the past few weeks.
You may have seen the images from a couple of weekends ago of 10s of 1000s of Australians taking to the streets across the country under a banner with a simple yet potent Message, March for Australia. The organisers presented these as peaceful demonstrations driven by a legitimate concern over mass migration, and for many of the ordinary Australians who attended, this was indeed what it was about. They were there to voice frustrations that many of us here in our communities, from the local cafe to the barbecue in the backyard, the marchers stated concerns touched on salient issues, a shortage of affordable housing, congestion on our roads and public transport, the strain on our hospitals and pressure on wages.
But, as with many things in our increasingly divided world, the picture is far from simple. These marches were not just about infrastructure and economics. Organisers also aired complaints about the perceived replacement of traditional Anglo based culture, a phrase that immediately raises a flag for many. They singled out immigrants from India, and even more troublingly, these demonstrations were exploited by extremist groups. We saw far-right agitators and white nationalists using the platform to push their own pernicious agendas. It is this kind of co-opting that turns a legitimate protest into something darker and more dangerous.
Joining the dots, these protests seem to me to be a reaction, a polarising counter force to another set of mass marches that have been taking place only a month or so ago. The news was dominated by the sight of nearly 90,000 people walking across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to show their support for Palestinians in Gaza, with similar protests happening in cities all over the nation. It was an entirely understandable and compassionate response to human tragedy. Yet here too, we saw the hijacking of public sentiment alongside the legitimate concern for the Palestinian people. Some participants displayed banner waving support for Iran’s terror sponsoring theocratic rulers, including their supreme leader, Ali Khamenei.
And let’s not forget the deeply unsettling incident nearly two years ago when hundreds of Islamist protesters chanted hateful slogans against Jews on the steps of Sydney’s iconic Opera House straight after the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, this is the new reality we face. Public expression of heartfelt beliefs is being twisted and co-opted by extremists on all sides, and the ugly aftermath of last weekend’s anti immigration march in Melbourne, where a neo-nazi group attacked an indigenous protest camp, is a stark reminder of the real world danger this polarisation presents.
This isn’t an exclusively Australian problem, of course, and it doesn’t have just local ramifications. In England, large scale pro Palestinian demonstrations are now countered by a popular uproar over illegal immigration and an overt display of the St George flag, a symbol of national pride that, for some, has taken on a more confrontational meaning. Polls suggest that if an election was held today, Nigel Farage Nationalist Reform UK would secure the most seats of any party, a sign of just how potent the issues of identity and immigration have become.
My Japanese government contacts say that a backlash against immigration was even a factor in this week’s resignation of Japanese Prime Minister Ishii. Together, and naturally we see this phenomenon at its most visceral in Donald Trump’s America, where political and social divisions have been super charged. So the political landscape is shifting dramatically around the world, and this is highlighting linkages between domestic identity politics and geopolitical tension.
Less than a month after everyday Australians walked in a march that included banners supporting Iran’s supreme leader, the Albanese government expelled Tehran’s ambassador. Why? Because Australia’s chief security organisation, ASIO, had found that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard was behind at least two anti semitic attacks in Sydney and Melbourne.
We see similar dynamics unfold across the globe for a long time, immigration wasn’t a divisive issue for us in Australia, we largely settle it under John Howard’s government, with his firm declaration during the Tampa affair that Australia would decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they arrive, echoes of that legacy continue today.
Just last week, the Albanese government revealed its own version of a Pacific solution, paying Nauru to settle up to 354 immigrants who landed in Australia illegally. So on one level, there’s a bipartisan effort to manage our borders, but both sides of politics have, in my view, struggled to manage the legal immigration intake as it bounced back dramatically from the pandemic. And remember, Australia recorded immigration the net outflow of people during the deepest part of that crisis, and this is where the conversation becomes complex.
Australia is, for the most part, a spectacularly successful immigrant society. It’s a core part of our national story and our economic success. And to continue to prosper, we absolutely need to attract talent from around the world, with our jobless rate at near 50 year lows, it’s simply disingenuous to blame migrants for taking Australian jobs. Where would we get the workers to supply the extra 20,000 extra Home Care Packages for older Australians, a key government initiative announced just last week? We need skilled labor to support our aging population and our critical services.
However, governments have made a critical error in their handling of this issue by a deliberately restricting the supply of housing through archaic planning and zoning regulations. They have effectively created a crisis. This in turn, has allowed migrants to be unfairly blamed for the resulting housing shortage. It’s a classic case of misdirected anger. Again, to fix the housing crisis, we’ll need more construction workers, and many of them will likely come from overseas.
Our immigration program now is under done in terms of construction workers, some say, at the behest of the trade unions, connecting the dots to the world again, we’re in a period of unprecedented disruption, driven by technology, global population shifts and profound geopolitical realignments, the liberal rules based security order that we’ve all taken for granted, is under immense pressure, a fact underscored by last week’s gathering of Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and Kim Jong Un a trio The Daily Telegraph in Sydney rightly dubbed Vlad, Bad and Mad. It was a troubling image. Former Victorian premier Daniel Andrews unwisely joined a photo op with the dictators.
But critics also need to be reminded that our own prosperity is fundamentally tied to our trade with China, and now the global disruption is smashing together trade and security issues in way that Australia has tried to keep apart. It was troubling to see Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi getting on famously with Vladimir Putin, and when liberal front bencher Jacinta Nampijinpa Price unwisely turns Indian immigration into a political issue at home, she’s not helping Australia’s hopes to promote India’s involvement in the quadrilateral partnership, also involving the US and Japan as a hedge against China in this new global disorder.
Our greatest strength must be our cohesion at home to counter these new cultural divisions. Peter Kurti, our director of the Culture Prosperity and Civil Society program at the CIS rightly calls for a robust civic and political response to the extremist co option of public sentiment:
Perhaps the first step is to make explicit the terms under which value conflict is managed, rather than pretending value conflicts do not exist. Or persisting in attempting to resolve them through uniform standards, Australia must accept the need to develop transparent processes for negotiation compromise and mutual accommodation. This requires not only institutional reform, but is also bound to require a shift in public discourse from one that demands conformity to one that accepts and manages disagreement. – Peter Kurti.
What this means in practice is promoting respectful, honest and fact based policy debates, including immigration. We need to do this without giving any fuel to xenophobic or radical ideologies that would tear our society apart. The challenges are real, but so is our capacity to overcome them, provided we approach these issues with reason, honesty and a commitment to our shared future.
You can listen to The Stutchbury Sessions on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, iHeartRadio, PlayerFM or listen on your browser.