Simon O'Connor: Muddled multiculturalism

After travelling through Morocco and Portugal, and attending conferences in London, I found myself asking a simple question: can a nation remain coherent if it no longer believes in its own culture?

Multiculturalism has failed. In fact, multiculturalism will – by definition – always fail. A society cannot indefinitely sustain competing cultural norms on fundamental questions of law, rights, and social order.

Dr James Allan: The Marvellous Miseries of Multiculturalism

I start this first column of the new year with the heavy heart that I am sure all our readers have for the families of the victims of the horrific mass-murders on Bondi Beach just before Christmas. And let us not deal in the usual Labour Party euphemisms, misdirecting abstractions and Kumbaya platitudes. This was the deliberate attempt to murder Jews, by Islamic extremists, done solely because they wanted to kill Jews. And they did, with the odd non-Jewish bystander thrown in. That makes Australia, outside of Israel itself, the country where the most Jews have been murdered in a single incident since the Second World War.

Peter Lynn: The Peasants are Revolting

Over the last 30 years, state sectors of Western democracies have expanded and senior level state employment, with its high pay, security and access to the levers of power became a magnet for the academically gifted, especially independence minded younger women. University educated they initially moved into ministries before spreading back into academia, and out to media, consultancies, mainstream political parties, the legal profession (including the judiciary), local government and lately, HR departments of larger corporates. During this period their political centre of gravity moved sharply left- at least partly driven by self-interest as they accrued advantages from an ever-larger government sector.

David Round: Thoughts for our Time - Article 7

I grew up in a different country ~ the New Zealand of more than half a century ago. It had its faults, of course, as all countries do, but in an imperfect world it was pretty good. It was a now-vanished golden era of optimism, prosperity and opportunity.

I was younger, and rather more naive than I am now, but as I recall I would, in my idealistic youthful innocence, have been prepared to fight and die for my country. My father had served in ‘the war’, as we still speak of it, as did uncles, some of whom did not return; I had a grandfather at Gallipoli, and a great uncle killed at Messines....

Michael Rainsborough: Britain’s Descent Towards Civil War is No Accident

Having lived in Australia for the past three years, I sense that this country is the least advanced down the road towards the multicultural dystopia confronting much of Europe. That is not to say there is room for complacency: Australia has its own canaries in the coal mine, echoing trends observable across the Western world. Yet relative prosperity, firm immigration policies, a distinct welfare regime (mandatory health insurance, means tested pensions), a robust federal system, and above all a unique electoral framework of three-year cycles and compulsory voting all help, willy-nilly, to keep politicians on a short leash and broadly tethered to the popular will.

David Lillis: A Just New Zealand - lessons for our Leaders?

Learning from Research

A most thought-provoking research paper has come to our attention (Leslie et al., 2020). Though the study described there originated in the US, it is a must-read for New Zealand political leaders and employers generally, but especially for our public service and University administrations – indeed, for anyone who wants a better society and an end to discrimination and bullying in this country. 

Lushington D. Brady: Where Am I From? Glad You Asked!

It’s not ‘racist’ — it’s friendly conversation

One of the funniest ratios I’ve seen on Twitter was when a race-baiting activist demanded to “Normalise asking white people where they’re REALLY from”. Whereupon white people flooded her timeline with replies detailing exactly where they and their ancestors for generations were really from.

Ancestry has in fact an $850m per year business out of people finding out exactly where they’re really from. As I responded on Twitter, I know perfectly well that my mob are from England, Ireland, Scotland, Scandinavia, Germany… My kids have a healthy dose of Mediterranean and Maghreb genes thrown in.

Karl du Fresne: The backlash against immigration

Internationally, the anti-immigration Right is on the rise, and the only surprise is that anyone should be surprised.

Donald Trump in the United States, Pauline Hanson in Australia, the Alternative fur Deutschland (AfD) Party in Germany, the triumph of the Brexiteers in Britain’s EU referendum … all point to a backlash against the liberal multicultural consensus that has dominated Western politics for decades.

Kevin Donnelly from Australia: How to teach what it means to be Australian

Celebrating diversity is only feasible when there is a willingness to commit to the values and beliefs that underpin and sustain tolerance. Now that Islamic State terrorism has arrived on our soil it's time to ask the question: what does it mean to be Australian?

There's no denying that during the 1950s and 1960s the prevailing mood was nationalistic and pro-British.  When I was at school, for example, every Monday morning at assembly we neatly lined up in rows, saluted the flag and sang God save the Queen. With our hands on our hearts children would then recite the oath of allegiance and promise to "cheerfully obey my parents, teachers and the law". The world map on the back of our workbooks was covered in red, proving that the sun never set on the British Commonwealth.

Reuben Chapple: "Rednecks" and their discontents

“Redneck” is an imported American term that has no place in New Zealand’s public discourse. 

It refers to “poor Southern white trash”, who before the American Civil War, were the overseer class on the estates owned by rich planters. They’d sat on horses toting whips and guns, overseeing black slaves as they went about their work in the cotton fields.

Reuben Chapple: Illegal Immigration

Socialists are not nationalists, they’re internationalists. And they know that the nation state operates as a prophylactic against the “world-mindedness” they mean to encourage. 

Their underlying agenda is to collapse the nation state into a global multi-culture, then argue that since we’re all one world now anyway, a one-world government is “for the best.”

David Round: Tragic Lessons from Norway

Norway’s recent terrible tragedy, I am sorry to say, marks a new and dreadful stage in the civil war which is slowly but surely beginning to break out in much of Europe and which threatens to finish off its enfeebled civilisation. It was a dreadful thing, and completely indefensible; but it was also inevitable, a natural consequence of the misguided, intolerant policies of a haughty elite contemptuous of the views of ordinary citizens; and it was predicted, by people rather more perceptive than those elites. But the elites, confident of their own superiority, were not listening, and I do not know how many of them are listening even now.

Until now I have known nothing at all of Norwegian politics, and little of modern Norway except for a vague picture of it as an enlightened, hard-working, high-minded, generally humane, enlightened and public-spirited society. The Scandinavians ~ this is the general impression at this distance ~ seem more or less to have made a success of socialism. P.J.O’Rourke, I remember, in a book on economic systems, chose four countries to illustrate ‘good socialism’, ‘bad socialism’, ‘good capitalism’ and ‘bad capitalism’. Sweden, Norway’s next-door neighbour, was good socialism. Helen Clark liked them….

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - conclusion

Multiculturalism cannot work. Human beings, like other living things, like to live among their own kind. Circumstances may often require them to live with different peoples, but no-one will like it. It is co-existence, but it is not a society. Post-modernism is multiculturalism’s philosophical justification. Post-modernism is really the philosophical equivalent of extreme free market capitalism. It says that there is no society, only individuals and smaller groups, all pursuing their own selfish ends, and that that is the way things should be.

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 7

Pansy Wong, New Zealand’s first Cabinet Minister of Asian descent, was not a Minister for long before she was obliged to resign, after revelations that her husband, travelling to China with her on a trip paid for by the taxpayer, had conducted private business at the taxpayer’s expense. I cannot remember now precisely what her excuses were; it would be hard to believe that an astute lady like her, a Member of Parliament for several terms, was actually ignorant of or had forgotten the rules; but no excuses are satisfactory. If stupidity is not the explanation, then the only other explanations are worse. Be that as it may, the Christchurch Press of the 20th of November 2010 contained an interesting letter to the editor from Ray Spring of Huntsbury Hill which made a very valid point. I observed several weeks ago that the understanding of most multiculturalists as to what culture actually is a shallow one. I am amazed at the number of times I have had offered to me, as a serious and major reason for the continuation of present policies, the utterly frivolous defence that immigration has given us an increasingly wide range of ethnic restaurants. ‘Culture’ seems to mean no more than exotic food and a few other splashes of colour for the jaded urban sophisticate; and as long as they can get really good fodder, who cares about anything else?

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 6

You may remember HART (Halt All Racist Tours), prominent when rugby tours to and from South Africa much exercised the nation. One of its later concerns, before it eventually faded away, was the immigration of white people to New Zealand from South Africa, trying to escape their native land before it became, as all too surely it is slowly becoming, another Zimbabwe. HART was deeply concerned that some South African immigrants might be ~ oh unspeakable horror ~ white supremacists, and proposed that before New Zealand accept any South African immigrants we should examine them on their racial attitudes, their knowledge of the Treaty of Waitangi, and so forth.

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 5

I finished last time by mentioning a tolerant civilised young person whose belief in tolerance prevented her even from criticising Hitler. In a couple of senses, anyway, this is not at all an uncommon position; it could even be argued that it is the common one among postmodernist defenders of diversity. I do not mean by this that it is common for post-modern intellectuals to defend Hitler. Quite the contrary ~ Hitler and the Nazis are very regularly, indeed prominently, the subject of condemnation. (Our student was not actually defending Hitler either, of course, merely saying that she did not feel entitled to condemn him.)

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 4

Philosophies ~ the sort of philosophies we read about in textbooks of philosophy and political science ~ express the feelings of their age. We tend to think of philosophical ideas as being very rarefied and other-worldly ~ that is the way they are often expressed, and certainly they may well so appear to later centuries, when we may well have lost sight of the big political and social issues of the day. But at the time, they express ~ often in elevated, complex and obscure language, to be sure ~ the ideas of their time.

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 3

As I explained last week, our belief that our society can be ‘multicultural’ while continuing to be run more or less as it is now reveals a very shallow understanding of what culture actually is. Culture is not just curries and caftans. Culture is the way we actually live. And how one lives arises out of the circumstances of ones time and place. It arises out of the land one inhabits ~ its climate, its plants and animals, the foods and clothing that one can grow there and that one needs there; it arises out of climate, and history, out of religion and race, economic and social organisation and everything. And that being so, it is hardly possible to transplant a culture.

David Round: Multiculturalism and Diversity - part 2

Part 1 of this series can be found on the NZCPR website here.

Let us begin by asking a couple of elementary questions.

First, what is so good about diversity? Is it something inherently good? The answer to that surely has to be that it is not. In an ideal world, after all, we would all surely enjoy perfect health, but that is the opposite of diversity. The reality, where some people are perfectly healthy, others are dying, and there is every shade of illness in between, is the diverse situation ~ but that is surely a bad thing. Students do not rejoice in diversity when some fail their exams and others receive low passing grades, while only a few get top marks. But that is diversity. In a (completely impossible) ideal world we would all be rich, handsome, intelligent and healthy ~ but that would mean there would be no diversity in wealth, good looks, intelligence or health.