Australia each month looks more like a country riven by two cultures – fooling itself that because it has no duplication of the Biden-Trump political clash and has compulsory voting that it has avoided the cultural schism that plagues America and other Western nations.
We are kidding ourselves. The nation is more divided than ever about fundamental values leading to a growing cultural chasm with two sure consequences: it is far more difficult to achieve national interest policies and once a society is split on values then mutual trust quickly evaporates. This is Australia’s plight.We cannot get things done because we disagree fundamentally. Every sign is the situation is getting worse. The cultural schism is not a straight binary split but more a series of intersecting splits. The best political summary, though simplified, is surging progressivism on the attack against the liberal and conservative tradition.
The diversity of the chasm reveals its complexity – it includes identity politics, the climate threat, minority rights, racism, environmentalism, educational instruction, Australia’s history, migrant policy, religious freedom and Indigenous justice.
Above all, it is a conflict over morality. That’s what makes it intractable. The driving force is the rejection of the existing moral order. Many of these political conflicts can be reduced to a moral severance as two competing cultures evolve. The voice referendum merely highlighted the nation’s wider fracture.
Education is at its epicentre. It is no accident that a week ago Peter Dutton warned that university education was being corrupted with students increasing taught “what to think”, not “how to think”; with places of higher education now becoming “places of indoctrination”.
The Opposition Leader called for a societal-wide effort to purge indoctrination in education, a sentiment widely shared on the conservative side of politics. He said anti-Semitism was tied to ideology and propaganda in education, a stance certain to inflame institutional resistance given the education sector and the universities are the originating cradle of progressive politics and its causes.
Greens leader Adam Bandt refused on the ABC Insiders program last weekend to endorse the idea of a Jewish state in the Middle East, accused Labor and Liberals of backing genocide and human-engineered famine, and mobilised the Greens against Labor as the banner-carriers of the Palestinian cause and spearhead of anti-Israeli sentiment across Australia. At the same time, Jewish Liberal MP Julian Leeser has declared racism is no longer seen as an objective and moral truth but is manipulated as a subjective tactic for political ends, with the Greens now a racist party worse than One Nation.
The most revealing feature of the Laura Tingle furore on racism was the astonishing article in The Sydney Morning Herald by the new Labor-appointed Australian Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giridharan Sivaraman, who announced that racism “is embedded in our society and culture” and that it operates as a function of “power and privilege”. He said our “settler colonial history is ongoing”, that systematic racism needs to be identified and that racism is in our schools, hospitals, dealings with police, getting a job and renting a property.
Sivaraman said the Australian Human Rights Commission is devising a new national anti-racism framework for governments to approve. His agenda means the nation under Labor can expect a far greater focus on our systemic racism in the cause of human rights.
Of course, there is racism in Australia but Sivaraman’s stance seems a virtual endorsement of the disastrous critical race theory (propounded in the US by academics Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic) that says “racism is present everywhere and always” – the more you look for racism the more racism you find because it was always there. Tackling racism is an important issue but treating Australia as a nation where racism is embedded and systematic – an article of faith for many progressives – will guarantee more social conflict and greater division in the nation. Progressives have learnt nothing from the referendum defeat.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/the-middle-east-war-has-exposed-the-sh...
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