Monoculturalism Is Not a Dirty Word

Make way Nigel Farage. Move over Donald Trump. There is a new politician-provocateur on the world stage, and the lady’s not for turning.

When the insurgent populist Pauline Hanson told Australia’s National Press Club that:

We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.

All Hell broke loose. One professor told the media that “monocultural” meant that “everyone followed a uniform set of norms and rules for behaviour [including] the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, and more”.

Another chimed in with comparisons to “Nazi Germany” and “North Korea”.

Hanson didn’t improve things by citing Japan as an example of a monoculture. She’s not wrong about Japan. But Japan certainly isn’t a cultural model for an immigrant society like Australia.

But Hanson was correct in her assertion that Australia “must be monocultural” in order to successfully absorb massive numbers of immigrants while maintaining social cohesion.