A Politically Correct Christmas is Un-Australian

Stories about the de-Christing of Christmas regularly appear in the media at this time of year. The new rituals of Christmas are presided over by the politically correct class, who target familiar features of the festive season and declare them verboten.

Municipal bans on the playing of ‘Silent Night’ in public places are hard to take seriously. This is secularism taken to mad extremes. Yet there is a serious side to the crusade for a Politically Correct Christmas. If Christmas becomes a pale version of the traditional celebration, the egalitarian spirit and the process of assimilation that has underpinned the success of Australia’s immigration program will be undermined.

The politically correct argue that Australia is today a diverse country filled with many peoples who do not have even nominally Christian backgrounds. In the name of anti-‘racism’, we should not risk offending anyone by having the temerity to wish them a Merry Christmas.

It is ridiculous to think that offering season’s greetings to all comers will generate friction, or that those with different heritage will complain about the nativity scene in the local shopping centre. However, there are consequences when the politically correct take offence on other’s behalf. Unwarranted hostility towards migrants is generated by reviving the discredited and bigoted view that ‘they’ want to come here and change everything.

Ironically, hyper respect for diversity jeopardises the openness and tolerance the hallmark of modern Australia. I am not a member of the anti-PC brigade that says people are too sensitive because you can’t call anyone a Wog or a Chink like in the ‘good old days.’ This isn’t political correctness. It’s about complying with the social manners that are essential for the smooth functioning of a multi-racial society. That these names now sound ugly to our ears is one of our most important national achievements.

How this came about is an important story. The tone was set in the late 1940s prior to the post-war immigration boom. The federal government went to great lengths to inform the nation that refugee migrants from Southern and Eastern Europe were not to be denigrated as ‘reffos’. They were instead to be welcomed and called what we still want all migrants to become – ‘New Australians’. But official policy could only do so much.

What I think happened in the post-war period was that attitudes to migrants came to reflect the best qualities of our national character. Extended to New Australians were the egalitarian values, and the principle of respect for the individual, which had long characterised social relations between ‘old Australians’. No long was Jack only as good as his mate – so too was Giovanni and Georgios.

It is common place to admire how well migrants of all colours and creeds have fitted into the Australian way of life. But we really have very little idea of how the assimilation process worked so successfully. This is because assimilation was an informal process. It occurred in the workplaces, the schools, the churches, the sporting clubs, and over the fences of suburban Australia. The great agent of inclusion has been the millions of friendly, mutually educative, and trust-building, everyday social interactions between Australians, old and new. Within these encounters, Australia’s distinctive egalitarianism greased the wheels of acceptance and integration.

The push for a Politically Correct Christmas is significant because the politically correct believe in ‘hard’ multiculturalism. They reject the whole idea of assimilation and believe that migrants have a ‘right’ to keep intact the culture of their homelands. The politically correct also use mass immigration to impede assimilation and transform the national culture. In the UK, for example, the Blair Government’s open door immigration policy was deliberately designed to marginalise the traditional British identity and make the British one of many ethnic tribes in the mosaic of contemporary Britain.

Unchecked immigration was the policy employed because when the migration intake reaches a certain mass, migrants find that it is far easier to remain comfortably ensconced in their ethnic group. They have less need to integrate when they can live, work, and socialise with those from the same background. The mother tongue becomes the unofficial ‘official’ language in ghettoised communities isolated from the mainstream. The unhappy outcomes can be observed not only in Britain but in France and Germany too, where divisions between native and immigrant populations have frayed the social fabric.

These problems won’t worry us so long as migrants and their children think of themselves as Australians, rather than as Indians, or Chinese, or Moslems, who live here and are citizens of convenience. So far, we have kept ethnic divisions and capital-M Multiculturalism in check through a controlled immigration program and the official and informal focus on assimilation.

But the situation is evolving. The record immigration levels of the last decade have the potential to upset the harmonious balance between migration and cohesion. A recent survey by the University of Technology found that only one-third of young people from ethnic backgrounds in Western Sydney identified themselves as Australians, despite two-thirds being born here. The evidence of my own eyes also tells me our schools, suburbs, and social life is self-segregating along ethnic lines.

Given the moment we have reached in our immigration story, a Politically Correct Christmas is a very bad idea. Australians have overlaid the folk meaning of Christmas – Peace on Earth, Good Will to All Men – with their own rituals. Drinks with workmates, school carols, and neighbourhood parties are nothing special, but they are in keeping with our egalitarian culture that is welcoming towards migrants. In a ‘Big Australia’, we should not gum up these harmless but valuable traditions that can help integrate migrants with a load of politically correct B.S. about respecting diversity, which will only throw up barriers between different groups.

The PC bull sends the divisive message that ‘foreigners’ are not expected to join in and deters people from playing their part in the assimilation process. To put it in colloquial terms, the anti-Christmas crusade could well delude Australians into thinking it is wrong and somehow racist to dare ask a New Australian to share a beer at Christmas time. In my book, this makes a PC Christmas not just mad and bad – it makes it positively un-Australian.

Jeremy Sammut is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies. This is based on a talk he gave at the CIS Member’s Christmas Party at St Leonards in early December.