Australia Is Coming Apart

Australia is coming apart. That’s not a scare tactic, it’s just an observation. Perhaps nothing shows this more than two recent photos from protest marches, the first from the Palestinian march across the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the second from the March For Australia.

Here’s the picture from the Palestinian march with plenty of the great and the good of Australia’s chattering class on the front line:

Notice behind them, the veneration of one of the butchers of the modern world, Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The lie that the chattering classes were oblivious to this was confirmed by the use of this very picture by former NSW Labor Premier, Bob Carr on his socials the very next week. The same Bob Carr, by the way, who is going to China to stand alongside the Chinese Premier, as well as Vladimir Putin and the leaders of North Korea and Myanmar.

Now I have no doubt there were some in the crowd who would be uncomfortable with this, but no one said anything at the time. I suspect they’re more comfortable with Khamenei than with the idea of a Jewish state. But I wouldn’t know, because it’s become a conversation I don’t care to have any longer.

Not to be outdone, we have the March For Australia from last weekend, with its platforming – whether approved of or not by the majority, of neo-Nazi Thomas Sewell:

Now before the event you could tell that this protest was going to be hijacked, and it was going to be hijacked in such a way that the ONLY message coming through in the mainstream media would be the ne-Nazi one. Once the noble ones have to caveat what a protest march is going to be about before the actual protest happens, you know that the march has been hijacked already. That’s the point to decide not to turn up.

Interesting too to note the use of flags. Flags are super important. They fly above buildings and over sporting events to say something about our allegiances. They say something about what we value, and what we would like to see as reality in our nation. Which is probably why there were no Aussie flags at the Palestinian march, and plenty of Aussie flags at the March for Australia event.

It’s probably also why the pride flag is one of the most flown flags in our country at the moment. There is more chance in the inner suburbs of our cities – and particularly so of the city I live in, Sydney -, of seeing pride flags rather than Australian flags. Sure, there are government buildings with Aussie flags, but often they are accompanied by other flags. Many other flags. And many other flags don’t negate the Aussie flag, they just reduce its impact. Many flags simply states “That other Aussie one is no biggie in the scheme of things. It sits alongside us not above us.”

Of course, right over the top of Sydney, flying aloft on the Sydney Harbour Bridge are two flags, The Australian flag and the Aboriginal flag, which I think is just about right. A good mix actually, and a symbol to all Australians and to visitors. Their height adds to their gravitas.

But back to the coming apart thing.  The two marches on two weekends show that there is an increasing chasm between values in Australia, and there is no longer a central narrative – or at least a strongly uncontested narrative – that holds Australia together  today. In fact the opposite is the case. There are competing narratives about Australia, its role in world affairs, its history, its values, and most importantly – its future.

And all of the signs are there that we are nation that is coming apart. Just today in The Australian, Paul Kelly wrote these words:

Western democracies are more fractured societies in the 2020s. The breakdown of shared values, domestic cultural polarisation and rising community frustration generate a profound atmospheric shift playing directly to immigration. Elites bring an astonishing arrogance to their outlook: they assume that tolerant liberal multicultural society is the natural destination point for human beings. That’s false – anybody with the slightest grasp of human history would know this.

Kelly is right. Just as Francis Fukuyama learnt the hard way, courtesy of the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, that the end of history (global capitalism laced with liberal democracy) was not actually the end of of history, so elites will learn that the natural destination point for human beings is not what they wish it to be. It already isn’t across the globe. Never mind what is happening in Gaza, check out Haiti, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Afghanistan, Syria, the list is endless. Oh and who can forget Ukraine?

But as Kelly points out, you have to have a slight grasp of history to realise this, and if there is one thing that the average Australian does not have, it is any grasp of history never mind a slight one. When Donald Horne labelled Australia “the lucky country” he did not mean it as a compliment. He meant that Australia had managed to duck and weave the dangers of the modern world almost without thinking.  He was right. Our luck is running out.

And so is our replacement rate. As Kelly points out, a primary reason that the migrant intake in Australia is so high (and compared with European nations we are picky with who we allow in, preferring skilled migration above any other form), is that our birth rate is so low:

Fertility in Australia is collapsing, down to 1.5 babies per women (the lowest fertility being in the excessively privileged ACT), a figure far below the 2.1 replacement rate that, combined with the demographic revolution of an ageing population, will drive the need for strong immigration for years. Our fertility rate was above three throughout the 1950s and into the early 1960s, pointing to a dramatic change across two generations, with vast consequences. Our population growth and labour force demands are even more dependent on migrants.

It is one thing for the March for Australia crew to complain about the immigration mix in Australia, but since across the West no nation is having babies at replacement rate, then do we seriously think we are going to populate Australia with white Westerners, since white Westerners are not even repopulating themselves?

But think about the social and culture change in the West that accompanies a fertility rate decline like that. There’s no going back to those days. Egalitarianism in the workplace; the desire for smaller families in general; the prohibitive price of housing; the often-unhealthy focus on hyper-achievement for the one or two children you have rather than a generalised sense of achievement for four or five children; the fact that people marry later and have children later (and often try to have children later before realising that having kids on demand is a young girl’s game).

The March for Australia is a futile trudge for an Australia that no longer exists. Which is exactly what the progressive crowd wishes for. It wishes to write the future of The Australian narrative as a future of unity around a different set of values, located primarily in the individual, and expressed ultimately in deep autonomy around matters of sex and identity.

It is not that the progressive vision, hostile as it is to the Australian vision of the past, is eagerly awaiting a cultural break-up. No, on the contrary it is pitching a vision of the future that bends towards its own will. It wants a wide allegiance and it is willing to fight for it.  That is why legislation around sexual matters has been so vociferous in the past few years. That is why left-leaning parties have dumped their traditional voting block of working class whites (so gauche!) for every minority grouping under the sun.

Progressives have a vision for unity. In fact, just two years ago I, along with my son, attended a match in the the National Basketball League’s pride round. This is the sign that was blazoned across the wall of the stadium:

Stronger as one, eh? And just how do you think you will achieve that? And how does that work?  As I say in my book, Futureproof:

There’s an increasing fascination among progressive Western nations—an increasingly frantic one too—with trying to build a workable unity among their citizens going into the future. Trying to make us all relate well to each other in spite of our deepest differences. The aim is to create a unity that is no longer based on nationalism, ethnicity or religion. These three have been tried and found wanting. No one wants fascism, racism or a theocracy.

The ruling class in the West sees the problem, but it doesn’t have the solution. The great irony for the progressives of course is that the sexuality agenda – the Sexular Age -, is at odds with the values of the migrant communities such types supposedly align with, especially those from the Middle East and South East Asia. There is little time or love in those communities for a philosophy and practice of sex, gender and family that progressive Westerners cling to with almost religious fervour.

Mind you, in the time since I wrote those words in Futureproof, I am no longer sure that people do not want fascism, racism or a theocracy. History has proven that when we are going through major changes, when the tectonic plates are shifting, that security and certainty are far more valued commodities than democracy.

I will bet my house on it,  that if you offered the ahistorical, younger generation of Australia a cast-iron guarantee of their own house for life, but the catch was the loss of a democratically elected government, a surprising – and dismaying – amount would agree to that deal. And throw in certainty around employment and a clean environment, and it would be highly alluring.

It already is. The number of Westerners who come back from Beijing lavishing praise on the affordability, cleanliness and order of a city that in my living memory was happy to crush its young students under its military tanks, is depressingly high. But that’s the price you pay for a Western world in chaos and disorder.

In a fascinating, and disturbing Substack post, Ted Goia makes the point that we are well on our way in the West to a complete breakdown of social cohesion in which the key ingredient of trust will have disappeared. Goia points to AI and its ability to bend and twist reality that will see us destroy ourselves. In other words, the machines won’t rise up and do us in, they will merely be tools which we, in our emotional weaknesses and political and social insecurities, utilise to do ourselves in.  Goia says this:

Back in 2023, I asserted that trust is the most scarce thing in society. But that was before all these tech deceptions came online. Trust will soon get even more scarce—or perhaps disappear completely from the public sphere. This is not a small matter. Most discussions of this issue focus on the technology. I believe that’s a mistake. The real turmoil will take place in social cohesion and individual psychology. They will both fracture in a world where our shared benchmarks of truth and actuality disappear.

And he nails it when he says this:

We have always lived in a world of disputes, but never on this new level of total skepticism. Consider a football game: I think the ref made a bad call, and you disagree—but at least we both believe that a game is actually happening. Not anymore. We once disagreed on how we interpreted events. Now we can’t even agree on the existence of events.

Hello moon landing!  But also “Hello birth of a baby boy!”  Baby boy you say? That’s simply the gender assigned at birth!

While painting a devastating picture of the fracturing that is coming our way – or that is already here but it set to be exacerbated, Goia says we need some deep remedial work, a deep remedial work that will require truth custodians

I can even imagine new career paths. In the near future, people might work as custodians of reality—a kind of high-powered version of today’s notaries. Their job will be validating the actuality of events and media. I’m not joking. We will need personal validation of all the things we previously took for granted. That might actually be a big business opportunity in its own right. I also have some sense that humanists, artists, and others operating outside of the tech world may need to step forward now. Many of them still have some sense of how to operate outside the digital realm where most of the mayhem is taking place.

In other words, if Australia – and indeed the West – is to avoid the devastation of coming apart, we will need some priests of history, as Associate Professor at Australian Catholic University, Sarah Irving Stonebraker, puts it. If anyone has a remit to hand on the baton of the truth, to rightly divide the word of truth, and to speak truth to a fractured and fractious world in which competing visions of reality are tearing us apart, then the church certainly has that remit.

Custodians of reality. I like the sound of that. The only issue is that before we can become custodians of reality, we will have a battle on our hands defining what reality is. There will have to be winners and losers in that battle. There always are. That’s the battle we’re currently seeing in the West with the various marches and flags.

Australia is coming apart. I think it will get worse before it gets better. And outside of God’s grace, and a community willing to be the custodians of reality in the face of hostile criticism and ugly legislation, it may not get better at all.