The history of this ancient continent has always been multicultural, and the Christian scriptures offer no support for the exclusionary monoculture now being promoted from the political right.

The strident calls for a “monoculture” issued recently by Pauline Hanson and Tony Abbott are but another variant of an increasing call from the right for Australia to return to being a Judeo-Christian state, the implied assumption being that Australia ever was. Such calls represent a yearning to return to an idealised Anglosphere (the Irish somehow oddly fitting in), marked by English-speaking people, the Christian religion (with a smattering of Jewishness), and of course, white. This ignores the fact that Australia was never a monoculture. 

I am sufficiently old to remember the strict tribal division between the Anglo-Protestant non-Labor voting establishment and the Irish-Catholic non-establishment, who voted Labor, before the intrusion of the DLP into that neat duopoly. The tribes were fierce and the territory of each stoutly defended, from sport (think of Bradman and O’Reilly) to departments in the Public Service (most clearly seen in the alternation of Mason, then Catholic, as NSW Police Commissioner). 

That battle between the tribes reached its height in the conscription battles........

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