**************************************************************************************

Rethinking the White Australia Policy



By Andrew Fraser*

[Not even scholars challenging the orthodox view that the White Australia Policy was a "racist" blot on the nation's honour support suggestions that its abolition was a catastrophic mistake. An unshakeable consensus among managerial, professional, political and academic elites in favour of racial egalitarianism has prevented a long overdue re-assessment of the policies permitting mass Third World immigration into Australia. Recent advances in genetics, paleo-anthropology, psychology and medical science have demonstrated the existence of significant racial differences in cognitive and athletic ability, temperament and behaviour. That newly-emergent racial realism confirms the wisdom of the nation's founders. They understood that the comparative ethnic homogeneity of the Anglo-Australian people was a source of strength and unity. The later shift toward a multiracial society has been the product of an ongoing, transnational, managerial revolution from above which can and should be resisted by all patriotic Australians.]

Introduction

Over the past thirty years, Australia, along with just about every other Western society, has been transformed by a revolution engineered from the top down by the leading echelons of the corporate welfare state [1]. New Class cadres of managers, professionals, politicians and academics have dismantled the foundations of Australian nationhood laid down at the time of Federation [2]. The arbitration system, the protective tariff and the White Australia Policy: all have gone in order to facilitate the free flow of capital, technology and labour in a globalist economy.

The most revolutionary, by far, of these radical changes has been the decision to open Australia to mass Third World immigration. In taking this step, the managerial regime has, in effect, followed the wry advice tendered by Bertolt Brecht to the East German government on the occasion of the worker's revolt in 1956: Rather than relying on crude repressive measures, Brecht suggested, the Communist regime should simply dissolve the people and elect a new one [3]. Indeed, since the end of the Second World War a strange alliance of Communists, Christian churches, ethnic lobbies and other pressure groups working through the corporate sector and within the centralised apparatus of state power set out deliberately to flood the Anglo-Australian homeland with a polyglot mass of Third World immigrants.

Chief among the ideological weapons deployed in that campaign have been the interwoven myths of equality and universal human rights [4]. The official ideology of the globalist regime has been enshrined in the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination [5]. According to that document, "any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous." There can therefore be "no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere." Those who subscribed to the doctrine of racial egalitarianism were bound to oppose a colour bar on immigration to Australia as being both immoral and pointless: it was axiomatic that "racial differences are not significant differences that need divide mankind."

Racial egalitarianism rather obviously flies in the face of the more realistic premises of the White Australia Policy. The founding fathers of the Australian nation regarded racial differences as a fact of life and racial conflict as the inevitable consequence of a multiracial society. In their view, ethnic homogeneity was one of the great strengths of the Australian nation, one that ought to be preserved and not squandered or thrown away in pursuit of utopian visions of universal harmony in which lions could be re-educated to lie down with lambs [7].

Forty years after Australian governments began to distance themselves from the White Australia Policy, advances in genetics, paleo-anthropology, psychology and medical science are placing the universalist doctrines of racial egalitarianism under serious pressure. A vast range of studies in a number of disciplines have revealed real and important differences between the races in cognitive and athletic ability, behaviour and temperament [8]. Faced with such intellectual challenges, defenders of the ruling orthodoxy are resorting to social ostracism, legal repression and even the sort of physical coercion deployed against members of the One Nation Party some years back [9]. The time is clearly ripe for a courageous and well-informed reappraisal of the White Australia Policy and the decision to dismantle it. Unfortunately, racial realists, concerned to bring common sense to contemporary Australian debates over race and immigration, will be disappointed with two recent books on the White Australia Policy. Both promise much but deliver little because of their authors' determined refusal to take race seriously.



Was the White Australia Policy "Racist"?

The first of these books to appear was written by Keith Windschuttle, a former Marxist academic turned independent neo-conservative writer. Hot on the heels of his controversial revision of the "black armband" view of Aboriginal history, Windschuttle has upset yet another academic applecart. In The White Australia Policy, he sets out to refute the orthodox leftist charge that the immigration legislation enacted shortly after Federation was "racist". On the formal level that is easily done since the Immigration Restriction Act, 1901 (Cth) did not explicitly prohibit non-white immigration. Instead, prospective immigrants were required to pass a dictation test by writing out 50 words in any European language selected by immigration officials.

But, because both the intent and the practical effect of the dictation test were to sharply limit coloured immigration, Australia was open to attack from progressives around the world and, especially during the Cold War, from newly assertive post-colonial regimes in Asia and Africa. Over the last 40 years, a home-grown generation of New Left historians routinely portrayed Australia as a racist pariah nation on a par with South Africa. Ever since the Sixties generation began its long march through the institutions, Australians have been taught to approach their past in a self-hating mood of enthusiastic shame. To his credit, Windschuttle has been one of the few historians to resist this form of intellectual self-flagellation.

Unfortunately, Windschuttle's rehabilitation of the White Australia Policy is premised on a familiar, if pernicious, tenet of neo-conservatism: Like those who claim that the United States is a "creedal nation," [12] Windschuttle maintains that the operating premise of Australian society is the proposition that all people are equal in principle and in potential. Supposedly, Australia's national identity is "based on a civic patriotism," thereby fostering "loyalty to Australia's liberal democratic political institutions rather than to race or ethnicity." He contends that the White Australia Policy, far from being the reactionary spawn of an irredeemably racist nation, grew out of a long-established, progressive program aiming "to extend both the freedom and the dignity of labour." [13]

Earlier movements to end slavery throughout the British Empire and the transportation of convicts to Australia culminated in a concerted campaign to prevent the importation of cheap coolie labour from Asia and the Pacific islands. He claims, therefore, that opposition to Asian immigration was not grounded in fears of "racial contamination." Rather, politicians were concerned both to protect the standard of living of Australian workers and to prevent the emergence of "a racially-based political underclass" that would undermine Australia's egalitarian democracy.

This argument rests upon a false dichotomy. Australia's egalitarian democracy was conceived as a new and better Britannia. [15] Who could have doubted that antipodean Britons, too, were white Europeans? By the turn of the twentieth century, references to the "crimson thread of kinship" binding Australians to the mother country had become a staple of political rhetoric [16]. Most Australians hardly needed to be reminded that blood is thicker than water; nevertheless, Windschuttle portrays their leaders as proto-Boasian anthropologists [17], convinced that race is a nothing more than a social construct. Windschuttle maintains that most early twentieth century Australians were confident that Chinese and Indian labourers would become indistinguishable from white Australians of British stock, once they were detached from the environments fostering their historic cultures of servility [18].

Windschuttle concedes that the immigration restriction movement did attract support from "unequivocally racist" elements. Indeed, he savours the irony in the fact that in early twentieth century Australia, the most sympathetic audience for racial nationalism was found among the bohemian writers, artists and intellectuals of the leftist intelligentsia. That elite minority, then famously associated with the Bulletin magazine, bears an "uncanny resemblance" to the "chattering classes" now: "they agree on almost everything, with the conspicuous exception of immigration policy, where their positions are reversed." [19]



Racial Egalitarianism: Revolution from Above?

By contrast, Windschuttle insists, mainstream Australians have never subscribed to biological theories of race. Influenced instead by the universalistic principles of both evangelical Christianity and the Scottish Enlightenment, they have refused to treat white Europeans as superior and other races as innately and permanently inferior. This, then, is the crux of Windschuttle's argument: Because the White Australia Policy was never based on racial nationalism, it could be-and was-readily jettisoned once the original political, economic and cultural justifications for its adoption lost their potency. "The proof that Australia wore the policy lightly was the ease with which it discarded it." [20]

In other words, if the White Australia Policy really had been steeped in "racist paranoia," it would be difficult to explain the fact that dismantling it in the twenty years from the mid-1950s onward "required no major cultural upheaval and was accomplished with a minimum of fuss by liberal politicians with values similar to those held by the original sceptics and critics when immigration restrictions were introduced in 1901." [21]

Windschuttle is mainly concerned with the rise of the immigration restriction movement. His argument with the academic establishment is pitched as a simple matter of historical fact: Was the White Australia Policy "racist" or not? Another recent book, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia by Gwenda Tavan, deals with its demise. In her first chapter, Tavan differs from Windschuttle on the reasons for the ascendancy of White Australia, insisting that racism and xenophobia were driving forces in the campaign to restrict non-white immigration. But, like Windschuttle, she is struck by the ease with which opponents of the White Australia Policy were able to overturn it. Her brief is to rebut the most obvious explanation for the lack of massive popular resistance to such a fundamental change: namely, that the White Australia Policy was dismantled by an ,lite conspiracy operating in stealth, leaving the Australian people in the dark concerning the nature and magnitude of the mass Third World immigration soon to be inflicted upon them. [22]

Tavan is not especially convincing in her effort to demonstrate that the Australian public readily accepted higher non-European immigration as early as the 1970s. Her main evidence is the fact that the Whitlam government was re-elected in 1974, even after its Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, publicly proclaimed his determination to bury the White Australia Policy. Of course Whitlam's Labor government was soundly rejected by the electorate in 1975. The incoming Fraser government certainly had no mandate to promote a massive influx of non-white immigrants. Nevertheless, it joined with the Australian Labor Party to forge a bipartisan consensus in favour of Third World immigration.

For decades, there was no effective political opposition to the revolution from above in immigration law and policy. Among the managerial and professional classes, a complacently "cosmopolitan" consensus reigned supreme; the political equilibrium was not upset until the meteoric rise of the One Nation party in the late 1990s. Then, for a brief, shining moment, the patriotic instincts of the more "parochial," outer suburban, white Australians found a political voice. [23] However, much to the relief of the political class, that too often tongue-tied voice of populist protest was largely ineffectual and, in any case, was soon silenced.

Concerned to counter suggestions that the new regime lacked popular support from the beginning, Tavan cites opinion polls from the mid-1970s favouring the then-current rate of Asian migration. When weighing such evidence, one wonders how citizens then would have responded to pollsters had they been presented with an accurate picture of how Sydney and Melbourne, in particular, would look after thirty years of colonisation by Third World immigrants. Tavan acknowledges that, "debate still continues" over how many non-whites should be allowed to enter while insisting that "a majority of Australians since the 1960s have unequivocally rejected any policy that would completely bar non-Europeans from settling." White Australia, she maintains, is no longer a "dominant worldview;" at most, it persists as a "residual cultural form." Even so, she concedes that "the battle against White Australia is not completely won." From Pauline Hanson to the Tampa incident, recent events have revealed that "the (white, Anglo-Celtic) racial-cultural ideals" of Australian nationhood have never been completely extinguished. Tavan fears that, like the slow, silent combustion of an underground coal seam, the fiery force of white racial consciousness may burst, without warning, through the surface somnolence secured, so far, by the multiracialist mullahs of the media, the human rights industry and the educational establishment. [24]

Tavan is clearly ad idem with Windschuttle on the contemporary political issues relating to the nature and significance of race. As committed racial egalitarians, both writers desperately want to drive a stake through the heart of racial realism, once and for all. Tavan and Windschuttle still worry that, despite having been in a state of suspended animation for several decades, residual forms of racial identity might someday reawaken in the hearts of white Australians, perhaps even with renewed vigour and enhanced vitality. For that reason, Windschuttle happily joins the left in its attack upon race as "an unscientific category," as a thoroughly modern, bad idea "engendered by the new social sciences and brought to maturity by the evolutionary biology of the nineteenth century." [25] In the battle between racial realism and racial egalitarianism, former Professor Windschuttle joins his old revolutionary comrades on the barricades, resolutely denying that differences between "races" have a biological or genetic foundation.

In his thoroughly orthodox view, nineteenth century anthropology and biology took a wrong turn when they denied "Enlightenment and Evangelical ideas about the unity of humanity." For him, the evident differences between the various races of mankind are the malleable product of their cultures and the particular stage each may have reached in the long ascent from savagery to civilization. No race is permanently incapable of change and development. Somewhat imprudently, Windschuttle suggests that to take any other view on this question "is to betray one's ignorance of the subject." [26] In fact, to anyone familiar with the rapidly expanding literature on the genetic character of racial differences, Windschuttle's dogmatism is a clear case of what American commentator Steve Sailer calls racial flat-earthism.



Racial Realism Redux?

There is still room for debate on the precise genetic contribution to any given racial difference in, for example, intelligence, temperament, criminality and athletic ability. But, that such racial differences do exist and that they have a biological basis is not any longer open to serious scientific question. As Vincent Sarich and Frank Miele put it, "the case for race hinges on recognition that genetic variation in traits that affect performance and ultimately survival is the fuel on which the evolutionary process runs." Without that "functional genetic variation, there can be no adaptive evolution." Variation "is the norm.and not.the exception in the case of humans." In fact, Sarich and Miele suggest that the range of genetic variation between different races of Homo sapiens is much greater than for any other species, including domesticated dogs. They observe that commonly used genetic tests can determine with great precision not just an individual's race but also "the percentage of racial background in people of mixed ancestry." But until very recently it was impossible to detect the genetic markers distinguishing a cocker spaniel from a wolf. [28]

Race exists and it matters across a wide range of public policy issues. It is of particular relevance to any analysis of immigration law and policy. Windschuttle, however, is determined to remain uncontaminated by the new sciences of racial difference. He does recognize the seemingly insuperable cultural barriers alienating mainstream Australians from other racial groups, particularly the Chinese. Nevertheless he asserts that it is a fundamental error "to slide from the concept of culture to that of race." [29] Cultural differences are not inbred and immutable.

But what if Windschuttle is wrong? What if racial differences are, in large part, biologically or genetically grounded? What if even culture is not simply a social construct but, rather, a phenomenon with a substantial biological component? Windschuttle does document the dominance of Enlightenment and Christian influences in middle Australia, demonstrating that explicitly racialist ideologies have had little appeal to opinion leaders in Australia. But that may mean only that Australians, like other ethnic groups tracing their ancestry to North-western Europe, are predisposed to individualism, exogamy and small nuclear families and, as a consequence, display a relative lack of ethnocentrism.

Thus what Windschuttle describes as a creedal commitment to racial egalitarianism may actually be a defining characteristic of a distinctive European racial identity not shared by other peoples. Kevin McDonald explains Western "cultural" traits as an evolutionary adaptation to the rigours of life in cold, ecologically adverse climates. Natural selection worked there to favour the reproductive success of those individuals capable of sustaining "non-kinship based forms of reciprocity." [30]

Over time, individualistic social structures encouraged the emergence in England of the common law of property and contract and, later still, the emergence of impersonal corporate forms of business enterprise, all requiring cooperation between strangers. The distinctive culture that emerged from the interaction between the genotype of the English people and their environment can be understood as what Richard Dawkins calls an extended phenotype. [31] Like the spider's web or the beaver's dam, the, extended phenotypes of Western civilization are part of a biocultural feedback loop linking our genes with our environment over countless generations. [32]

The extended phenotype produced by the English people founds its greatest political expression in the phenomenon of nationhood. Appearing first of all in England, the idea of the nation could be understood as what Richard Dawkins might call a "meme" [33] that has been only imperfectly or not at all replicated in the bioculture of other, particularly non-European, races. Some scholars, however, deny that English nationhood is the product of a primordial English ethnicity. It is often remarked that there are very few nations that seem to be ethnically homogeneous and England is not one of them. On this view, the English nation "emerged out of populations deposited by successive waves of alien conquest." It was "through the merging or assimilation of peoples who were originally distinct" that a single English nation arose. According to Margaret Canovan, English nationhood "was in no sense a reflection of primordial ties of blood." On the contrary, the English nation was remarkably inclusive, taking in, not only the scions of Danish, Norman, Saxon and some Welsh stock "but also (and, at the time, more significantly) nobles and commoners." Canovan's case would appear to be clinched by the "subsequent expansion of English into British identity," carrying "the nation even farther away from anything resembling primordial ethnicity." [34]

It seems, then, that civic rather than ethnic nationalism has been the defining feature of not just Australian and American but British identity as well. Roger Scruton lends support to that suggestion when he remarks that modern citizenship presupposes a society of strangers: "The good citizen recognizes obligations towards people who are not, and cannot be, known to him." Such a society of strangers cannot survive without "the kind of courage, discipline and self-sacrifice that stem from civic patriotism." [35] But neither Canovan nor Scruton embrace the bloodless vision of civic patriotism promoted by Keith Windschuttle and the American neo-conservatives. For her part, Canovan acknowledges that nations "are political communities that are experienced as if they were communities of kin." She adds, however, that "the `as if' is vital." [36] In doing so, she seeks to mark out a middle position between ethnic and civic nationalism.

Neither Canovan nor Scruton believe that a nation can be grounded in an abstract loyalty to a particular political regime or constitutional order. For Scruton, it is axiomatic that citizens belong to an inherited community inhabiting an ancestral homeland. Citizens are members of a pre-political community that includes the living, their ancestors and their unborn offspring. Absent generations are among the strangers to whom the good citizen is bound in "a common web of rights and duties." [37] Canovan, too, affirms both that, within any particular nation, "many fellow-nationals really will be blood relations" and that "nations depend upon the symbolism of kinship for much of their emotional appeal." But she rejects the claims of ethnic nationalism, pointing out that "much of that kinship is imagined kinship, and a good deal of it is always fictitious." [38]

The problem with Canovan's argument is that she does not give sufficient weight to the "peculiarities of the English." [39] As a consequence, like Windschuttle, in relation to the White Australia Policy, she sets up a false dichotomy between ethnic and civic nationalism. In the case of England and the old white dominions settled by people of British stock, including the United States, there is simply no contradiction between the two. That is part of the reason why, for two hundred years after the emergence of the English nation, it was the only nation. [40] Even those citizens of a modern nation who are blood relations or co-ethnics are expected to treat each other publicly "as if" they were strangers bound together by a willingness to recognize the fundamental constitutional norms associated with the rule of law, representative government and individual rights. [41] Only a people such as the English, characterized by the "non-kinship based forms of reciprocity" associated with Protestant Christianity, monogamy and companionate marriage, nuclear families, a marked de-emphasis on extended kinship relations, and a strong tendency towards individualism could possibly succeed in creating such a "society of strangers." [42]

It is true, of course, that the English nation was the hybrid product of many pre-existing ethnic groups. But the fact is that the ingredients in the ethnic stew that ultimately produced the English people and, later still, British nation, were not all that genetically remote from one another. Indeed, the Danes, the Saxons, and the Normans were closely related Germanic peoples and the genetic distance between the English, the Scots and the Irish was not much more significant. Precisely because all of the Germanic peoples were relatively individualistic and comparatively less ethnocentric than other Eurasian and African races, they were able to overcome their group differences when they encountered each other in England, merging into a new ethny possessed of its own distinctive language, religion and way of life.

The relative inclusiveness of English national identity was replicated in the settler dominions. In fact, the English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh and even continental European settlers in colonial America, English Canada, Australia and New Zealand fused together to become more British than the British in their new homelands. The creation of those colonial British cultures was an important first step on the road to creating new national identities as Americans, Australians, Canadians and New Zealanders. [43] Civic nationalism was, therefore, a meme replicated best and most easily through the vehicle provided by the Anglo-Saxon genotype. This exposes a fundamental paradox built into the free and open societies of the West: The only racial groups able to fit seamlessly into the society of strangers constituting a civic nation are those whose members can easily shed the deeply-ingrained ethnocentrism and xenophobia characterizing most non-European peoples. Receptivity to civic nationalism, in other words, is found only in a relatively few, mainly North-western European, ethnic or racial groups. In any case, over the past two centuries the nationhood meme has undergone a monstrous mutation. Originally, the English nation created the state as a medium for political self-expression. Since then, the transnational corporate welfare state has taken on a life of its own, asserting its power and right to recreate the nation and its people in whatever form it chooses.



The Downside of Diversity

Other races have produced their own distinctive extended phenotypes; these may not mesh easily with the biocultural interest that Anglo-American societies, in particular, have in the survival and enhanced vitality of their historically unique civic cultures. Black Africans, for example, have been present in large numbers in America, the pre-eminent civic nation, for almost four hundred years without ever having been successfully integrated into the common culture of white Americans. It remains an open question whether other races can be absorbed into the American or the Australian nations more easily than the militantly hyphenated African-Americans. Experience with the overseas Chinese diaspora throughout the Pacific Rim already gives cause for concern. [44] As the Chinese colonies in Australia grow in size, wealth and power, even their Australian-born members may be reluctant to dissolve their ancient collective identity into an individualistic society of strangers owing allegiance to nothing beyond a modern paper constitution, now divorced from its own ancestral roots. Thousands of years ago, the Chinese took an evolutionary path favouring the growth of centralized, authoritarian regimes; not surprisingly, the Chinese today place a premium on clannish behaviour and downplaying the worth of individual creativity. The result has been a people marked by higher average intelligence-but more conformity and hierarchy-than North-western European societies as well as rampant xenophobia and ethnocentrism.

Even when faced with competition from such highly cohesive ethnic groups, a great many individualistic Australians remain utterly oblivious to their own genetic interest in a racially homogeneous society. That interest is threatened, to varying degrees, by the arrival of immigrants genetically distant from the host population. Like any other ethno-nation, white Australians constitute a large, partly inbred, extended family. [45] Since an ethny is "analogous to a population of cousins," even distant kin "carry genetic interests for each other." But, because-at any given level of technology-the Australian landmass has a finite carrying capacity, mass immigration must replace future Australian children with those of other, more or less unrelated, ethnic extended families. If immigrants are genetically remote from the European gene pool, the damage to Australia's genetic interests will be especially pronounced. Frank Salter has calculated that if England, for example, received 12.5 million closely-related Danish immigrants, the genetic loss to the remaining English would be relatively low, amounting to the equivalent of 209,000 children (still a large family to lose.) But the same number of immigrants from India would cause a corresponding loss of 2.6 million children. Since black, sub-Saharan Africans are even more genetically distant from the English, an influx of 12.5 million Bantus would displace the equivalent of 13 million English children. The genetic losses to the English would be greater still if Indians or Bantus had fertility rates higher than the host population. [46]

Apart from the objective genetic interests at stake, a multiracial society forces white Australians to bear other, more subjectively painful social, economic and political costs. At the high end of Australia's immigrant intake, a growing cognitive elite of East Asians threatens to become similar to "market-dominant minorities" such as the overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia, Jews in Russia or Indians in East Africa. [47] Faced with competition from a growing East Asian population, white Australians will find themselves outgunned: Western-style "old boy" preference networks are only weakly ethnic in character, and, thus, permeable, making them no match for the institutionally-directed, in-group solidarity or "ethnic nepotism" practised by other groups. Endowed with an edge in IQ and a temperament conducive to rigorous regimes of coaching, rote learning and stricter parental discipline, young East Asians already dominate the competition for places in universities and professional schools. Within two to three decades, it is not unreasonable to expect that Australia will have a heavily Asian managerial-professional, ruling class that will not hesitate to promote the interests of co-ethnics at the expense of white Australians. [48]

At the low end of the market for Third World immigrants, tensions are already appearing between white Australians and the growing numbers of black, sub-Saharan Africans settled here by the transnational refugee industry. [49] One can safely predict that, no matter how large this particular Third World colony becomes, black Africans will never become a "market-dominant minority" in Australia. On the contrary, experience "practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems." [50] Unfortunately, experience also demonstrates that any such suggestion will produce nothing short of a hysterical reaction among Australian journalists and academics.

For Australian intellectual and cultural elites, it does not seem to matter that support for such observations can be found in countless academic and official sources. After all, it is hardly news that violent criminals of any race are likely to be people with low IQs who display poor impulse control. [52] Nor is it difficult to establish that, on average, black sub-Saharan Africans score around 70-75 on IQ tests while white Europeans have a mean score of 100 and East Asians about 105. [53] It is equally well-known that young black men have higher levels of serum testosterone-often associated with impulsive behaviour and poor judgement-than whites or East Asians. Now, this does not mean that black Africans carry a "crime gene." Nor can one say that "blacks are genetically more crime-prone than whites." But, as Michael Levin points out, "it does make sense to say that blacks are more prone to behaviour that is in fact criminalized in virtually all societies." [54]

Australians will ignore these racial realities at their peril. Windschuttle, confident that immigrant groups will lose their distinctive racial identities as they become assimilated into the individualistic norms of Western culture, sees no cause for concern in the ethnic replacement of white, Christian Europeans by Chinese or Muslim newcomers. He has "accepted this with equanimity," perhaps even "with a sense of self-congratulation." [55] Like his former academic colleagues, Windschuttle looks upon both "racial prejudice" and "religious intolerance" not as essential ingredients in collective identity but as embarrassing social diseases. [56]



Managerial Multiculturalism

Like the managerial class generally, Windschuttle does not experience his membership of the Australian nation "as if" he belongs to a community of kin. Unlike the bourgeois pioneers of Anglo-American capitalism, managerial-professional elites are no longer rooted in particular communities; they are "at best indifferent and actually hostile to ...specific identities ...derived from class, ethnicity and race, religion, region and gender." Because the power of the managerial class is heightened by the eradication of such identities, its preferred brand of civic nationalism is based upon a "colour-blind" universalism and egalitarianism that is "open to the world." [57] Openness to the world requires the repudiation not just of ethnic nationalism but also of any civic nationalism grounded in "pre-political loyalties of a territorial kind-loyalties rooted in a sense of the common home and of the transgenerational society that resides there." [58] The flip side of the universalism and egalitarianism sponsored by the managerial regime is, therefore, the multicultural politics of identity. Doctrines of racial egalitarianism and official multiculturalism may appear to contradict one another but the social and political function of both is to undermine the white, Christian, masculine and bourgeois values and institutions "that remain the principal constraints on managerial reach and power." [59]

Under the aegis of the globalist regime, the shared civic culture that is the greatest achievement of Anglo-American constitutionalism is being displaced by a neo-feudal system of group representation. Promoting this program, James Tully attacks modern Western constitutionalism because it threatens "the extinction or assimilation of different cultures." Not only did modern constitutionalism authorize "imperial rule of former colonies over Indigenous peoples," it still underwrites "cultural imperialism over the diverse citizens of contemporary societies." [60] Tully's vision of "intercultural" constitutionalism aims to replace the individualistic society of strangers with the politics of cultural recognition. Unfortunately there is one culture that cannot be accommodated within what Tully calls the convention of mutual recognition. To embrace Tully's concept of the constitution as an endless process of intercultural negotiation is to reject the common civic culture of Anglo-American constitutionalism.

Faced with the reality of cultural diversity, the Anglo-American civic culture has been expansive in nature. In other words, it has been "geared toward the assimilation of difference." Tully's multicultural constitutionalism, by contrast, is separatist or exclusive in that it is "geared toward the magnification and encouragement of difference." These two very different constitutional cultures cannot co-exist; a choice between them must be made. Anglo-American civic cultures developed "a strong momentum towards political connectedness" in order to "overcome the separatist pull of diversity and disagreement." Building on long experience with non-kinship based forms of reciprocity, the civic cultures of British-derived societies stimulated the "development of imaginative empathy" among citizens. Everyone was required to imagine himself "in the position of a person whose starting point is radically different" from his own.

Multicultural constitutionalism, by contrast, is already causing our shared civic culture to fragment; the momentum towards separatism is growing. [61] Managerial elites have an obvious interest in dividing subject populations, the better to dominate them. In line with that strategy, multicultural constitutionalism "encourages the citizenry to divide itself into groups in order to win politically controlled benefits." Not surprisingly, once interest groups succeed in "winning special benefits, the separatist pull grows stronger." Group representation spawns new elites with a vested interest in thickening the boundaries between citizens. One corollary of the perennial process of intercultural negotiation is that there can be no possibility of general agreement on public goods. Multicultural constitutionalism assumes "that diversity can be acknowledged and empowered only through constant political battle pitting the races and genders against each other in a never-ending contest for recognition and public benefits." [62]

Tully maintains the pious hope that every group will be able to stand on an equal footing in the contest over recognition and the political rewards that flow from it. However, it has long been an axiom of corporatist interest intermediation that not all groups possess equal procedural status. Groups lacking functional relevance to the globalist system (or which are actually dysfunctional) will be shunted aside unless they possess some other resource that enables them to generate destabilizing conflict. [63] The basic premise that interest groups are not all created equal is particularly true of racial and ethnic groups. Tully is careful to cite William McNeill to make the point that polyethnicity has been the rule rather than the exception in the life of all advanced civilizations. He does not dwell on McNeill's companion observation that ethnic intermingling has produced a "complex ethnic hierarchy" whenever it has occurred. [64]

Any constitutional order that sets out deliberately to grant special privileges to particular ethnic groups inevitably will produce a still more complex ethnic hierarchy. The relative standing of any given group probably will depend to a significant degree on its performance within the global system of needs. There can be no automatic right to consent or cultural continuity or even recognition of group rights within the context of that dynamic system. A group that is functionally relevant or possesses a significant conflict potential today may find itself in the dustbin of history tomorrow. While it may be difficult to predict permanent winners in the incessant competition for increasingly scarce resources in a multiracial Australia, we can be sure that the civic culture created and nurtured by generations of white Anglo-Australians will be the sure loser. As continued Third World immigration provides further impetus to the multiracialist politics of identity, the individualistic society of strangers will be extraordinarily vulnerable to competition from other, tightly-knit, racial groups. In retreat from "the rising tide of colour," [65] white Australians may be forced to reinvent themselves as a people comme les autres, shedding their customary civic universalism in favour of a less natural but more powerfully particularistic racial consciousness. Windschuttle would be among the first to deplore any such development, even as his deracinated model of civic patriotism becomes an ever-more maladaptive threat to the survival of the historic Australian nation.

Racial realists who read Windschuttle's book will discover ample evidence that, if his tender-minded attitudes prevail, white Australians are destined to be displaced by immigrant groups much less sensitive to charges of racism and xenophobia. One example: Windschuttle informs us that the most violent race riots in Australian history were led, not by murderous white racists, but by Japanese pearl divers determined to eliminate competition from Timorese rivals. There were three such riots in Broome, Western Australia, in 1907, 1914, and 1920. The last continued for a week and involved more than half the town's population of 5,000. Seven people were killed and more than 60 seriously injured, dwarfing the casualty figures for the worst of the anti-Chinese goldfield riots of the mid-nineteenth century. [66]

Almost every immigrant group encountered in Windschuttle's narrative, not to mention the Aboriginal population, displays a strong sense of racial solidarity and an aggressive determination to advance its particular ethnic genetic interests. Much the same can be said for the post-war governments in Japan and the Third World leading the diplomatic offensive against the White Australia Policy. Tavan is, of course, sympathetic to their relentless attacks upon Australia's immigration policies; she remains strangely uninterested in the simultaneous determination of those governments to retain tight control over their own borders. Unfortunately this is par for the academic course; "educated" white Australians, leftist "idealists" and right-wing "ratbags" alike, remain, at best, resolutely indifferent and, at worst, actively hostile to the survival of their own ethno-nation. Should "the long, slow death of white Australia" finally come to pass, it will have been due, in no small measure, to the brazen "treason of the intellectuals" marching under the banner of managerial multiculturalism. [67]



Conclusion

Given the relentless and revolutionary assault on their historic national identity, white Australians now face a life-or-death struggle to preserve their homeland. Whether effective resistance to their displacement and dispossession can be mounted is another question. Unlike other racial, ethnic or religious groups well-equipped to practice the politics of identity, white Australians lack a strong, cohesive sense of ethnic solidarity. As a consequence, ordinary Australians favouring a moratorium on non-white immigration cannot count on effective leadership or support from their co-ethnics among political, intellectual and corporate elites. On the contrary, our still predominantly Anglo-Australian rulers are indifferent; some profit from, and others actually take pride in their active collaboration with the Third World colonisation of Australia. None of the major parties, indeed, not one member of the Commonwealth Parliament, offers citizens the option of voting to defend and nurture Australia's Anglo-European identity. The problem, in short, is clear: The Australian nation is bereft of a responsible ruling class. The solution is, in principle, no less obvious: namely, the restoration of a ruling class rooted in the reinvigorated folkways of an authentically Anglo-American civic patriotism, a ruling class re-attached to the history and destiny of its own people. Only time will tell whether and how any such constitutional reformation could take place. [68]

But the problem of an irresponsible ruling class wedded to open borders is not confined to Australia; it threatens the survival of European civilisation as a whole. The growing Islamic presence throughout the West is perhaps the most visible sign of our spiritual decline. [69] As the secular crisis of European modernity deepens, the soul of our society cries out, unheeded, for salvation. Like the Soviet empire before it, the managerial regime in the West rests upon a shaky foundation of deception and fraud. Charles Murray puts the point bluntly. Western elites, he charges, "are living a lie, basing the future of their societies on the assumption that all groups of people are equal in all respects." [70] A great many politicians and scholars know or suspect, privately, that there are real differences between racial groups; still they support immigration policies demanding public prevarication about the putative evils of racial discrimination (even though any immigration policy-short of completely open or completely closed borders-inevitably favours some groups over others.) Such mendacious elites pose a greater threat to Western civilization than the Islamic militants they choose to harbour in the heart of the citadel.

Unfortunately, so long as the postmodernist boundary between fact and fiction remains in the eye of the beholder, the truth about that threat becomes a mere matter of opinion. The directorate of the globalist regime draws its deepest inspiration from Hollywood dream factories where manufactured images become the new reality. Organized social and political life in the Western world is largely driven by the psychic power of carefully crafted illusions. One fears, therefore, that it may take a serious and prolonged systemic breakdown to free us from the self-destructive taboo against discussion of innate group differences.

The orthodox doctrine that race is only skin deep is only one of the official fictions underpinning the transnational system; more fundamental to the regime's legitimacy is the cornucopian myth of endless economic growth. Seen through the eyes of the managerial class, Australia is an economy, not a country. Nevertheless, a folk memory still survives of a time when Australia was "the lucky country," the homeland of a particular people of British stock with their own particular way of life. Should the globalist economy first falter and finally fail, regime change may yet become possible for this and other Western countries. It may well be that only a miracle can save us now; all the more reason, then, to recall that God helps only those who help themselves. The capacity to act remains the key to our political salvation. [71]



*Associate Professor, Department of Public Law, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia 2109. Thanks to Kathe Boehringer, Frank Salter and the anonymous referees for the Deakin Law Review for their helpful comments on various drafts of this article.



Footnotes:

1. On the first stage of the managerial revolution see, James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World (1941). But the use of mass immigration and multiculturalism as weapons in that revolutionary movement assumed primary importance from the 1960s onward see, Paul Edward Gottfried, After Liberalism: Mass Democracy in the Managerial State (1999) and id., Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt: Towards a Secular Theocracy (2002); see also, Samuel Francis, Power Trip 3(2) Occidental Q. 69 (2003) (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005); and Andrew Fraser, A Marx for the Managerial Revolution: Habermas on Law and Democracy, 28 J. L. & Soc. 361 (2001).
2. On the New Class, see Alvin w Gouldner, The Future of Intellectuals and the Rise of the New Class (1979).
3. Bertolt Brecht, The Solution quoted in Peter Brimelow, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster 58 (1996).
4. See, generally, Samuel Francis, Equality as a Political Weapon in Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism (1993).
5. Included as the Schedule to the Racial Discrimination Act, 1975 (Cth).
6. Immigration Reform Group, Immigration Control or Colour Bar? The Background to `White Australia' and a Proposal for Change 92-3 (Kenneth Rivett, ed, 1962).
7. Douglas Cole, `The Crimson Thread of Kinship': Ethnic Ideas in Australia, 1870-1914, 14 Historical Studies 511 (1971).
8. For an introduction to this literature, see, eg, Vincent Sarich & Frank Miele, Race: The Reality of Human Differences (2004); Michael Levin, Why Race Matters: Race Differences and What They Mean (1997); and J Phillipe Rushton, Race, Evolution and Behaviour: A Life History Perspective (1997). The entire June, 2005 issue of Psychology, Public Policy and Law is devoted to the issue of racial differences in cognitive ability. See, in particular, the lead article by J Phillipe Rushton & Arthur Jensen, Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability 11 Psychol. Pub. Pol'y & L. 235 (2005). See also, Charles Murray, The Inequality Taboo Commentary (September 2005), a fully annotated version is available online at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
9. See, eg, Tim Dick, Uni suspends outspoken academic, Sydney Morning Herald, July 30-31, 2005, at 9; Bernard Lane, African groups take aim at uni lecturer, The Weekend Australian, August 6-7, 2005, at 3; Andrew Fraser, The Trials and Tribulations of Populism in Australia, Telos 127 (Spring 2004) 119-148.
10.Keith Windschuttle, The Fabrication of Aboriginal History (2002).
11. Keith Windschuttle, The White Australia Policy (2005).
12.See, eg, Walter Berns, Making Patriots (2001).
13. Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 5-6. The suggestion that the White Australia Policy was based upon a civic rather than ethnic nationalism had already been made earlier in Robert Birrell, A Nation of Our Own: Citizenship and Nation-building in Federation Australia (1995).
14. Id, at 6, 8.
15. Humphrey McQueen, A New Britannia (1970).
16. Cole, supra note 7.
17. Franz Boas was a Jewish anthropologist who played a key role in the anti-Darwinian remaking of American social science. According to Carl Degler, "Boas' influence upon American social scientists in matters of race can hardly be exaggerated." He engaged in "a life-long assault on the idea that race was a primary source of the differences to be found in the mental or social capabilities of human groups." It was "through his ceaseless, almost relentless articulation of the concept of culture" that he effectively expunged race from American social science. See, Carl Degler, In Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social Thought 61, 71 (1991). Boas did not approach his work in the neutral spirit of objective scientific inquiry. On the contrary, his pronounced "out-group sensibility" led him to transform anthropology into a formidable ideological weapon, thereby promoting Jewish ethnic interests in what he conceived as a struggle against anti-Semitism. See, Sarich & Miele, supra note 8, at 86-91; and Kevin McDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements 21-30 (1998).
18. Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 174-181.
19. Id, at 5, 82.
20. Id, at 67-74, 326.
21. Id, at 9.
22.Gwenda Tavan, The Long, Slow Death of White Australia 227-9 (2005). Tavan, supra note 22, at 210, 225.
23. On the conflict between "cosmopolitans" and "parochials" in contemporary Australia, see Katharine Betts, The Great Divide (1999).
24.Tavan, supra note 22, at 210, 225.
25. Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 28-35.
26.Id, at 34, 27.
27. Steve Sailer, Race Flat-Earthers Dangerous to Everyone's Health, available at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
28. Sarich & Miele, supra note 8, at 8, 21, 184-7.
29. Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 285.
30. Kevin McDonald, What Makes Western Culture Unique?, 2(2) Occidental Q. (2002) (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
31. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (2d ed. 1999).
32. Louis R Browning, Bioculture: A New Paradigm for the Evolution of Western Populations 4(1) Occidental Q. 31 (2004) (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
33. Dawkins defines a meme as follows: "A unit of cultural inheritance, hypothesized as analogous to the particulate gene, and as naturally selected by virtue of its `phenotypic' consequences on its own survival and replication in the cultural environment," dawkins supra note 31, at 290.
34. Margaret Canovan, Nationhood and Political Theory 58, 75-7 (1996).
35. Roger Scruton, The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat 52, 56 (2002).
36.Canovan, supra note 34, at 87-92, 59.
37. Scruton, supra note 35, at 51-60.
38. Canovan, supra note 34, at 59.
39. On which, see, Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: The Family, Property and Social Transition (1978). The phrase itself was coined in 1965 by EP Thompson, see, The Peculiarities of the English, in The Poverty of Theory (1978).
40. Canovan, supra note 34, at 63.
41. Scruton, supra note 35, at 51.
42. McDonald, supra note 30.
43. Donald Harman Akenson, The Historiography of English-speaking Canada and the Concept of Diaspora: A Skeptical Appreciation, 76 Canadian Historical Rev. 377 (1995).
44. See, generally, Sterling Seagrave, Lords of the Rim (1995); Joel Kotkin, Tribes: How Race, Religion and Ethnicity Determine Success in the Global Economy (1992); Thomas Sowell, Migrations and Cultures: A World View (1996).
45.See, eg, Steve Sailer, It's All Relative: Putting Race in its Proper Perspective, available at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005). Note that Sailer's definition of "race" as an inbred extended family, means that some such descent groups are closely related, such as Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland while others, such as the classic continental races (Africans, Europeans and East Asians), that evolved separately for 40,000 years or so were relatively remote from each other, both genetically and geographically. Race is a fuzzy category precisely because any genetically distinct descent group could be classified as a race. Remember, however, that the concept of a species is no less fuzzy: Are dogs, wolves and coyotes separate or members of the same species?
46. Frank Salter, On Genetic Interests: Family, Ethny and Humanity in an Age of Mass Migration 47, 42, 59-75 (2003).
47.On "market-dominant minorities," see, Amy Chua, World on Fire: How Exporting Free-Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003). An excellent review of Chua's book is available online at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005). On Jews as the classic "market-dominant minority:" see, Kevin McDonald, A People That Shall Dwell Alone: Judaism as a Group Evolutionary Strategy (1994); and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (2004).
48. Welfare, Ethnicity and Altruism: New Findings and Evolutionary Theory (Frank Salter ed., 2004).
49. Greg Roberts, Refugees from Africa focus of hate campaign, The Weekend Australian, July 23-24, 2005, at 6.
50. Andrew Fraser, Refugees and "Anglo-Australians", Parramatta Sun, July 6, 2005, at 6.
51.Greg Roberts, Top academic accused of neo-Nazi links, The Australian, July 20, 2005, at 6.
52. Levin, supra note 8, at 291-332.
53. Rushton & Jensen, supra note 8.
54. Levin, supra note 8, at 148, 105-6; Rushton, supra note 8, at 169-170, 267-8. Authorities in many Western countries, including Australia, do not collect or publish comprehensive and reliable statistics showing the relationship between ethnicity and crime. Where statistics on black crime rates, in particular, are available, clear patterns emerge. See, eg the data sets available online at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
One analysis of US government crime statistics concluded that blacks were responsible for 90% of the incidents of violent interracial crime involving blacks and whites. Blacks in the USA "are as much more violent than whites (four to eight times) as men are more violent than women." See, New Century Foundation, The Color of Crime: Race, Crime and Violence in America (1997) available at: (last visited on Sept. 7, 2005).
British experience with black crime can be examined at: < http://www.homeoffice.gov.uk/rds/pdfs05/s95race04.pdf> (last visited on Aug. 14, 2005). 55. Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 25.
56. Immigration Reform Group, supra note 6, at 123.
57. Francis, supra note 1, at 76.
58. Scruton, supra note 35, at 60.
59. Francis, supra note 1, at 76-7.
60. James Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity 70, 96 (1995).
61. Cynthia V Ward, The Limits of `Liberal Republicanism': Why Group-Based Remedies and Republican Citizenship Don't Mix 91 Colum. L. Rev. 581, 585-6 (1991).
62.Id, at 593, 606.
63.Julian Triado, Corporatism, Democracy and Modernity 9 Thesis Eleven 33 (1994).
64. William H McNeill, Polyethnicity and National Identity in World History 76 (1986).
65. See, the prescient work by lothrop Stoddard, The rising tide of color (1920).
66.Windschuttle, supra note 11, at 201.
67. Cf. julien benda, la trahison des Clercs (1927).
68. For one possible strategy, see Andrew Fraser, Reinventing Aristocracy: The Constitutional Reformation of Corporate Governance (1998).
69. Oriana Fallaci, The Rage and the Pride (2002); Scruton, above n 35; Serge Trifkovic, The Sword of the Prophet: History, Theology, Impact on the World (2002).
70. Murray, supra note 8, at 8 [online version].
71. Andrew Fraser, Monarchs and Miracles: Australia's Need for a Patriot King, 5(1) The Occidental Quarterly 35 (2005).




This rendering of the article into html has been placed online by John Ray




Go to Index page for this site

Go to John Ray's "Tongue Tied" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Dissecting Leftism" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Australian Politics" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Gun Watch" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Education Watch" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Socialized Medicine" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Political Correctness Watch" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Greenie Watch" blog (Backup here)
Go to John Ray's "Leftists as Elitists" blog (Not now regularly updated)
Go to John Ray's "Marx & Engels in their own words" blog (Not now regularly updated)
Go to John Ray's "A scripture blog" (Not now regularly updated)
Go to John Ray's recipe blog (Not now regularly updated -- Backup here)

Go to John Ray's Main academic menu
Go to Menu of recent writings
Go to John Ray's basic home page
Go to John Ray's pictorial Home Page (Backup here)
Go to Selected pictures from John Ray's blogs (Backup here)
Go to Another picture page (Best with broadband)