Winning conditions
for Australian nationalism
Graeme Campbell
There is nothing new in this paper in as much as everything contained herein is on the public record somewhere.
What I have attempted to do is to assemble the facts into a coherent sequence so that the debate that we must have can go forward from a relatively informed basis.
I see this paper as a starting point and I am well aware that there is much I have not fully addressed.
I thank all those who have made comments on the draft paper and in particular - Denis McCormack for his tireless and accurate research.
Graeme Campbell
Foreword
Graeme Campbell's unique position in Australian politics needs no introduction.
As a fellow Western Australian who has walked many the same outback tracks, it is with pride and respect for Graeme that I recommend all Australians to read this paper.
Graeme's political career, covering the last 20 years of Australian development, has been driven on many different roads. The respect held for Graeme is strengthened by the fact that underlying all those years has been his undeniable love for his country and his unstinting and tireless efforts for the betterment of his constituents and the huge region he represented.
Graeme makes no apology for being Nationalistic in his outlook. It is an essential ingredient of his character and strength that has made him such an admirable Australian.
A separate and distinct Australian culture has been identifiable from the mid 1800's. For the past 100 years, patriotic Australians have had to define the question of a Nationality emerging from the Colonial era.
In order for a nation or culture to exist, it must stand for collective ideals and its members must share a common identity, welded together in a common worldview and character that separate the nation from the rest of the world. You cannot have a nation where the only shared value is the fact that there are no shared beliefs.
The importance of a clear definition is now more urgent, due to the disastrous federal policies of Multiculturalism imposed on us by major political parties since the Whitlam era. Multiculturalism is the negation and rejection of a shared national identity.
Our country has sadly lacked politicians of the stature of Graeme Campbell to speak out against the ravages of diversity introduced by alien faiths and cultures under the banner of Multiculturalism.
Hon. John Fischer MLC
Member for Mining & Pastoral
Western Australian Parliament
1. Winning conditions for Australian nationalism
We on the moderate nationalist side of politics welcome the give-and-take of political debate. We believe that our position is the best reasoned and can only benefit from exposure, but our opponents demand a monopoly in the media and in our parliaments. They fear the voices who stand up for Australia's predominant ethnic interest - those of Anglo Celt and European background. We have seen this intolerance demonstrated incrementally by the chorus of denunciations of Professor Blainey in 1984 and John Howard in 1988. I then became a target for my support of Australians Against Further Immigration in the early 1990's, Australia First, and in more recent times of Pauline Hanson and One Nation. Bob Hawke had me censured by the Parliament for saying that we should slow down the rate of South East Asian immigration to a level that we could accommodate. It did not occur to me that this was racist as I considered it common sense. This crescendo of intolerance has been building, ironically but aptly, since 1984.
I believe the cause is that the multicultural elites who have been forcing radical change on this Country know that their aims, if clearly understood, would be rejected outright by the Australian people. That is also, why, with rare exceptions, immigration policy continued to be "bipartisan" even after the Australian people began to oppose mass immigration after the dismantling of the White Australia Policy from Whitlam onwards. When Malcolm Fraser committed the Liberal Party to multiculturalism in 1974, this eliminated choice for the Australian electorate because Whitlam and Grassby had adopted the same policy for the Labor Party. The Melbourne sociologist Katharine Betts has argued that high levels of immigration (and by extension high levels of non-European immigration) have been imposed on the Australian people by a bipartisan conspiracy of the political elite. Betts refers to the same view expressed, though proudly, by ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke, as a participant.
Hawke discussed the importance of keeping non-White immigration out of the hands of the electorate at a Government conference on immigration policy held in May 1993. He said it was "quite unique" in Australian politics that for most of the post-World War II period the major parties had maintained bipartisan support for immigration in the face of public opposition. "with the common cement of ACTU support to advance the national interest ahead of where they believed the electorate to be". "Unique" indeed! Australia is a democratic society, and from the early 1970s onwards, most Australians have opposed what was being done to them by their major political parties in the realm of immigration. Katharine Betts has tracked the extent of support and opposition for immigration from 1954 to 1996, and found a dramatic fall in support and rise in opposition from around 1967 to 1972, the period when the White Australia Policy was dismantled.
This helps explain why the multicultural lobby wants to silence nationalist voices. They sense that their message is so unnatural, so counter-intuitive, so lacking in common sense, that, to have their message taken seriously, political and media monopoly was essential. Dissenting voices need to be silenced. Until the recent post-election reflections, we have seen this process almost every day as journalists and politicians are intimidated into toeing the party line, and for the vast majority this is still the case.
The multiculturalists are right to fear the Australian people's good judgment. That is why the nationalist winning condition is far more modest. We only need a fair say to have our ideas accepted; we don't need or want to silence other viewpoints.
2. More on multiculturalism's undemocratic nature
Dr. Mark Lopez has pointed out in his important book on multiculturalism, that the multicultural movement has always been secretive, has always mistrusted the Australian people, and has always relied on infiltrating committees and agencies to surreptitiously foist a destructive policy on Australia. Lopez writes:
The source of the shift towards multiculturalism in public policy was not parliamentarians, vulnerable at elections, but the influence exerted by multiculturalists from positions in the Immigration Advisory Council (IAC), the Migrant Task Force Committees, the Immigration Department's Integration Branch, non-government organisations like ACOSS, or through lobbying relevant Government ministers.... The multiculturalists could potentially maintain their degree of influence as long as they maintained their strategic presence in these committees and agencies."
Even Al Grassby was seen as expendable by the shadowy backroom operators, who treated our elected representatives as tools, not as honest spokesmen of sincerely held policies. The ethnic revolution that has taken place in Australia since the 1970s has never been the result of democratic process. In fact, it has been quite the opposite. Gough Whitlam destroyed the Old Department of Immigration for example, because he knew that people loyal to Australia as a nation in the European tradition manned this Department. It was a Department painstakingly built up over many decades by governments whose ethnic policies were publicly stated. The Department was charged with maintaining a homogeneous Australia, one free of the endemic ethnic conflicts experienced by multi-ethnic societies overseas. Whitlam dismantled it, partly because it contained the old guard of Australia's ethnic interests appointed by true Australian leaders like Labor's Calwell and the Liberal's Menzies.
Another reason for Whitlam's mistrust of the old Immigration Department was that the Australian people had rejected Al Grassby, the departmental minister from 1972 to 1974. In other words, the dismantling of the Department of Immigration was a tactic meant to circumvent Australian democracy. Instead of democratic choice being allowed to dismantle multiculturalism and the prospect of mass Asian immigration, elite multiculturalists had dismantled and circumvented expressions of democratic will.
The multicultural establishment emphasizes the rights of minorities against the "tyranny of the majority". But what is multiculturalism? What should we call a regime that has replaced relative ethnic harmony with polarization, conflict, and a campaign of vilification against the majority ethnic group? What should we call a situation where racial minorities are displacing our own people in the professions and therefore poised to play a disproportionate role in governing the Country? It should not be necessary to remind those who have led this Country to its present situation that the worst tyranny is when majority interests are subordinated to a minority. That is why aristocracy has been overthrown throughout the West. That is why we resent conquest by other countries, because this usually leads to the loss of liberty, not only individual liberty, but also the right of a people to govern their own affairs. Multiculturalism is tyrannical in its methods. Mass Asian immigration was foisted on the Australian people without their permission; no referendum or even an election campaign was ever fought on the issue. Yet survey after survey has indicated that a large majority preferred a European Australia. Australians, like all other peoples, prefer to live among their own people.
Compare the undemocratic, surreptitious methods and goals of Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, and Keating with the forthright, open declaration of then Prime Minister Alfred Deakin during the first session of Australia's Federal Parliament in 1901:
"However limited we may be for a time by self imposed restrictions upon settlement - however much we may sacrifice in the way of immediate monetary gain - however much we may retard the development of the remote and tropical portions of our territory - those sacrifices for the future of Australia are little, and are, indeed, nothing when compared with the compensating freedom from the trials, sufferings and losses that nearly wrecked the Great Republic of the West".
Restrictive immigration was a plank in the nation-building program of the early nationalists of Federation as they sought to build an egalitarian and cohesive community - but look in vain for any such common sense in the texts of the much promoted but misnamed Centenary of Federation Deakin Lectures of May 2001. They reek of the most perverse anti-Australian multicultural sentiment, with its characteristic irrationality and ignorance of human nature and history.
Multiculturalism is the legacy of Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, and Keating who, for a variety of reasons, put the interests of minorities ahead of those of the Australian people. What have they done to us? They have tried to change who we are, as a walk through any capital city attests.
3. Diversity, social cohesion, and welfare
The suppression of open debate on Australia's ethnic future has resulted in some remarkably self-defeating constellations of ideas. For example, the Left is proudly anti-discriminatory in its immigration policies, but simultaneously advocates an egalitarian social structure with generous welfare. In fact, ethnic and racial diversity produces inequality and depresses welfare. This was known by Australia's founding fathers, but has become politically incorrect, one suspects precisely because such knowledge would have impeded the multicultural industry.
The economic rationalist Right is also muddled. Many believe that Australia's economic future can only be secured with permanently high levels of immigration, from anywhere and everywhere that people can be found. In fact, economic data indicate that the most efficient, prosperous nations are the most homogeneous. Ethnic diversity creates pressures on government to conduct "pork-barrel" politics that result in suboptimal economic policies.
In keeping with John Stuart Mills' views on the advantages of ethnically homogeneous nation states, the global trend is towards ethnic groups seeking autonomy in their own nations by separating from multi-ethnic states. The resulting homogeneous states then become more prosperous once freed from the corruption and inequality endemic in multicultural societies.
It would seem that Australia's architects in the late 19th and early 20th century were right and the modern elites who imposed multiculturalism and ethnic diversity on the country were ignorant and short-sighted.
The extreme Left unions actually believe and promote borderless states. The paradox here is that there is nothing else that would more severely damage the very quality of life and general welfare of the people they purport to support. In many cases it is the people they are selling out who pay their wages as their union leaders.
Borderless states are the golden grail of communists, religious zealots and extreme capitalists alike. Their joint aim in this desire is not the welfare of the citizens but their own aggrandisement or the fulfilment of their own utopian ideology.
A survey of British Muslims carried out in Britain by "The Sunday Times" October 2001 found that when asked the question "Which is more important to you: (a) To be Muslim? (b) To be British? 68% of the respondents declared to be Muslim was more important. 14% said it was more important to be British, and 18% were undecided." The survey was the largest since the bombing of Afghanistan began and interviewed 1172 people.
The survey also exposed many other examples of the breakdown of social cohesion. There can be no reason to believe that a similar poll in Australia or the USA would be any different.
Some of Australia's intellectual elites would argue that the opposition of multiculturalism infers an opposition to the tenets of individual freedom, the freedom of speech, the freedom to succeed, the freedom of faith, and the freedom to expect a high standard of human rights for example. In fact, the exact opposite is true with the aim of those opposed to multiculturalism being to protect these freedoms before they are further eroded. What the multicultural debate has lacked is truth and honesty.
The official ideal of what the Australian multicultural state is simply defies the reality. On November 15, 2001, Mr Carr the Premier of NSW convened a meeting of religious leaders. They predictably pontificated that all Australians should live in harmony and be united by our differences and a greater love of humanity. If history has taught us anything, it is that differences within a nation divide and weaken it, making it vulnerable to exploitation. It is indeed difficult to imagine how Australian society could be united along side the "The political objectives of Islam," as promulgated by Dr. Kalim Siddiquie, which are as follows:
- To eliminate all authority other than Allah and his prophet.
- To eliminate nationalism in all its forms, in particular the Nation States.
- To reconstruct the world of Islamic movements into a single global Islamic movement to establish the Islamic state.
- To reconstruct the world of Islam....to express the unity of the worlds Islamic community.
- To eliminate all political, economic, social, cultural and philosophical influences of Western civilisation that have penetrated ...Islam.
- To re-establish a dominant and global Islamic civilisation based on...the unity of Allah.
- To create the necessary institutions for the pursuit of that which Allah approves and the forbidding of that which Allah disapproves.
- To establish justice [Sharia Law] in all human relationships at all levels throughout the world.
Time and again, we receive examples of what the desires of fundamentalist Islam are. Their objectives are clear, and yet we still invite them to share their way of life. The followers of fundamentalist Islam express contempt for the West especially in relation to the Western concept of multiculturalism. This contempt is mirrored by the disregard shown by our own leaders for the wishes of the majority of Australian people.
4. The damage done
(a) Separation of city and country; and the polarisation of the community
Driving from a country town into a large metropolis is a journey between two different countries. Rural Australia preserves the old Australia. Post 1960's immigrants, especially Asians, have stayed in the large cities, transforming them. The distance between city and country, an inevitable result of differences in economy and lifestyle, has grown into a yawning chasm of racial divides. Our large cities, especially the poorer suburbs where the residents are subject to the whims of the politicians, are now multicultural 'non-nations', while the hinterland remains true to the dream of our founding fathers. Australia's greatest poet, Les Murray, has expressed this in heartfelt words:
They are creating an Australia that is exclusive. Multicultural, they call it. But they are discriminatory; they exclude. They are the ruling elite of today's Australia: the cultural bureaucrats, the academics, the intellectuals... They are excluding people like me from their Australia - the country people, the rednecks, the Anglo-Celts, the farming people - they have turned their backs on us. They act as though they despise us... We Old Australians, not always Anglo but having no other country but this one, are now mostly caught and silenced between the indigenous and the multicultural".
(b) Crime
The inevitable has happened. The less assailable minorities hold White Australians in contempt. "Fraser's children" are raping our young women, feeding the drug plague, terrorizing ghetto suburbs, and murdering those that try to stand against them; remember John Newman, MP for Cabramatta.
(c) Stratification by race
Asianisation is proceeding apace in the Australian professional elite. Paul Sheehan reports that in 1996 Asian-Australians, mainly ethnic Chinese, won over 36% of the top 5,000 positions in the New South Wales Higher School Certificate, an overrepresentation of about 500%. Chinese representation approached dominance in several maths and science-based disciplines. Of the top ten places, Asians of mainly Chinese ancestry won 8 places in chemistry, 7 in 4 unit mathematics (the most difficult level), 7 in 3 unit music, 6 in 3 unit mathematics, 4 in 2 unit physics, 4 in 3 unit economics, and so on. The pattern was repeated in 1997, when 17 of the top 42 students were Asian-Australian, including the only two students to achieve a perfect overall score. Sheehan remarks, "This is a social revolution"
More accurately, it is an ethnic transition of the professional class. These outstanding performances will flow through to Asian-Australian overrepresentation in the university system and actual dominance in some maths-and-science based disciplines, and, as elsewhere, Chinese performance in business is exemplary. Even without further Asian immigration, the outcome will be a disproportionate Asian representation among Australia's professional and business elites. In fact, Asian immigration, though marginally slower in recent years, continues, and Asian-Australians, both immigrants and Australian born, are projected to grow from 8.2% of the population in 1996 to 19.5% by 2025, by which time "The Anglo Celtic share will fall to 62.2%."
Australians need feel no embarrassment at the relative success of ethnic Chinese immigrants. By and large, these immigrants are an elite group selected from a total population numbering well over one thousand million. The most enterprising and highly educated tend to present themselves as immigrants and be selected by our bureaucrats. These qualities are held to 'enrich' Australia, which is true to a point. It also makes them fierce competitors with our own people. Essentially, our young people are being pushed into competition with elements of an elite group selected from a quarter of the world's population.
It is not as if we were not getting along as a Nation. Our traditional immigration policy had helped maintain Australia as a Country of rare civic peacefulness, of relative equality, of prosperity and continued economic growth. Moreover, we were a self-governing society, whose elite was drawn from families across this great continent and who identified with the Australian people. The Australia of the 1950s, gratuitously mocked by Donald Horne in his misnamed book, The Lucky Country, was a work in progress. Our ancestors had carved a magnificent infrastructure out of a wilderness, and their grandchildren were poised to take their place in that new society. Horne and so many other multiculturalists have mocked us for not having reached Paris or London or New York standards by 1950. They recommended racial change as a way of breaking down the philistine Australian spirit, but what has become of these great centres of culture, which embraced racial change? They are in the process of displacing their own peoples! Official projections indicate that Britain will be minority white by the end of this century; America's ethnic revolution will come much earlier, by 2060.
Why is rapid ethnic change of Australia's elite bad for Australia? The next generation of Australians will have a minority race making up a disproportionate number of their elites. This puts White Australians in the position of the minorities who have complained so long about under-representation in leading positions. Well, now Fraser and Hawke have inflicted the same circumstance on their own people. Why? What did we do wrong that we deserved such punishment from our leaders? What is to become of our young people who are being pushed out of the careers that are legitimately theirs?
Why is the infrastructure of schools and universities and the professions they supply with graduates, an infrastructure built up over generations of hard work by White Australians, being handed from their own children and grandchildren to the children of different peoples?
It is never healthy when a minority rules a majority. This is especially the case when the racial minority is inward looking, endogamous, and has a long history of ethnic chauvinism.
The contempt felt by many Chinese-Australians for Australians of European descent is well documented in such books as The Year the Dragon Came (1996). This new elite will come to power just as China makes it presence felt in Australia's region with our pro-Asia policy settings, acting as a magnet to its 50 million overseas Chinese, let alone the overcrowded mainland Chinese cities.
Multiculturalism and the ethnic change it promotes are an Hobbesian disaster for the Australian people of today, and is leading our children and grandchildren towards loss of resources, dignity, and independence.
5. Some ideas on Australian ethnic interests
So, what of the rights of the Australian people? We may be a majority, for the time being, within Australia's borders, but remember that we are a tiny minority in the region of South East Asia and, further afield, East and Southern Asia. The combined population of India, China, and Indonesia alone is about 3,000 million. In that sense, we share an interest with countries of similar size, with Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, and Burma. It is certainly not in their interests to allow large-scale immigration of other nationalities, including White Australians. Would we be terribly offended if another country refused to allow hundreds of thousands of Australians to enter as immigrants, and gave as one of their reasons a love of their identity and homogeneity? How insensitive that would be of us! How rude! How aggressive! We have our own Country, isn't that good enough?
Every ethnic group has an interest in maintaining itself; in retaining a territory whose borders it controls and which it calls home. In a just world, every ethnic group would have the right to its own country. This is the cry of Zionism, of Jews who long for the dignity and freedom to live among their own people, to be a secure majority in at least one place in the world. Australia is our Israel, in more ways than one. We have come to appreciate the lot of the Aboriginal people. How can any honest person feel sympathy for one people alienated from their land and not understand the wish of White Australians not to lose their country? Why are the Australian people held in such contempt by the multiculturalists?
6. On the Jewish assault on One Nation
I have long been criticised by Jewish commentators for my low immigration and anti-multiculturalism stance. What is noteworthy is that these critics refer to their ethnicity as a reason for rejecting our policies of national interest, in particular our identification with Australia as a predominantly European nation and the policies on immigration and multiculturalism that flow logically from that sentiment. The self-proclaimed Jewish identification of some of our most vociferous critics is puzzling. For one thing, I am not convinced that these critics represent the average Jewish Australian. Yet they say that because they are Jewish they oppose us, and say so in the most unambiguous terms. This is not a passing fashion. Mark Lopez concludes that the late Walter Lippmann, the leader of the Melbourne Jewish community was the most important lobbyist for multiculturalism during the nineteen sixties and seventies.
What is puzzling about this?
These critics are, in effect, criticizing themselves, or rather a broader and more tolerant version of their own frame of mind. For those who love Australia, for those whose only homeland is Australia, this continent is our Promised Land. It escapes me how anyone who loves his or her people cannot feel sympathy for others who feel likewise about their people. It's like someone who loves his or her children and who puts them first, failing to accord other parents the right to treat their children with special affection. Some of our Jewish critics have very different feelings about Israel. Isi Leibler, Chairman of the World Jewish Congress, has explicitly stated that while Israel is for the Jews, Australians must have multiculturalism. What sort of insensitivity - what sort of hypocrisy - is this?
Is the charge of hypocrisy too strong? Consider the facts. These critics are Jewish activists who belong to organized Jewish groups. They are similar to One Nation in the strength of their commitment to their people. They are Jewish patriots, just as we are Australian patriots. The main difference is the object of loyalty. They care passionately about Jewish interests and much of their politics is predicated on that understandable ethnic loyalty. We make no bones about our ethnic identification. We say that Australia is populated mainly by people of European descent, but that identity encompasses Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Old and New Australians. While we extend equal respect to Australians of non-European descent, the fact is that Australia is predominantly European and since Australia is a democratic country, our ethnic interest is a European one. This is accepted and indeed welcomed by many minority groups who accept that the status quo is more tolerant than any of the conceivable options.
December 2001
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