Multiculturalism becomes poison for social capital

WE have heard little in this year’s political debate about immigration or multiculturalism, although immigration is running at record levels.

Yet a change of government has the potential to bring with it a marked change in both these policy areas, and one that most Australians may not like much.

Kevin Rudd has, as on other issues, kept a low profile and told his shadow immigration minister to do the same. It has been left to Paul Keating to remind us what things were like under the Hawke and Keating governments, with his attack on John Howard earlier this year.

Keating said then that when Howard disparaged elites over what he celebrated as the mainstream, he was in fact disparaging cosmopolitan attitudes vis-a-vis the certainties of the old monoculture. There was even a comparison drawn and then withdrawn between Howard’s populist appeal to ordinary Australians and Hitler’s to the German volk.

In the Labor years it was the role of cosmopolitan elites to keep ordinary, red-necked Australians and their inherent racism on the straight and narrow. It was an era of stifling political correctness, where critics were howled down with cries of racist by the cosmopolitan internationalist elites of the progressive Left.

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Multiculturalism becomes poison for social capital
The Australian