In his Australia Day speech in 2006, Former Prime Minister John Howard spoke about Australian values which were based on 'a mix of Judeo-Christian ethics, the spirit of the Enlightenment and British political institutions and culture'.
It seems to have been a prevalent attitude at the federal level. Howard's words were echoed on numerous occasions by Tony Abbott, who in 2014 was happy to find $226 million for an expanded school chaplaincy program while slashing funds for education, aged and health care.
I can't help but wonder what this attempt to narrowly and exclusively define our democratic values means for many non-Christian, non-British migrants whose ancestral homelands never experienced a Western European style enlightenment.
That includes many Catholics, Orthodox Christians and fast-growing Hindu and Buddhist populations.
For my own parents, becoming Australian meant being eligible to apply for a passport and receiving a citizenship certificate. It was the early 1970s, and my mother had spent most of her life in India. British political institutions were already familiar to her. I arrived in Australia at the ripe old age of five months. My first passport has the words 'unable to sign' typed in the signature section.
I learned Australian values by a process of gentle osmosis. Many Indigenous Australians learned these values in a less gentle fashion. Many were forcibly removed from their families in the most un-Christian manner, separated from their parents and from a culture far more Australian than British.
The first piece of legislation passed by the Commonwealth Parliament was the Immigration Restriction Act, which restricted migration to people with European heritage and white skin. Many existing settlers were former Irish convicts whose loyalties were hardly to the British Empire. Irish Catholics fought at Gallipoli and in other battles. However, this wasn't enough for them to be regarded as 'real' Australians.
In his ANZAC Day address in April 2015, Abbott acknowledged: 'History records that the Gallipoli campaign was a failure from the start'. He spoke highly of Keith Murdoch, who boldly wrote of the failure of British military tactics that cost so many Australian lives. But this didn't stop the Gallipoli generation from feeling British.
In 2010 Frank O'Shea wrote for the Canberra Times about Irish Australian returned soldiers causing major controversy when they marched in 1920 under the Australian flag, not the Union Jack. In doing so, they effectively declared that 'they had fought for Australia rather than for Britain ... the Irish in Australia were Australians as well as Irish whereas the loyalists were British first and Australian second'.
Australian nationalism was co-opted by a marginalised group to assert their rejection of dominant loyalties. Catholics were accused of having a dangerous transnational loyalty to Rome by detractors who themselves had more loyalty to London than Australia.
Refugees were also subjected to prejudice, largely due to the perceived threat of terrorism. In a chapter for the 2009 book Lines in the Sand, Geoffrey Brahm Levey and Dirk Moses recalled how politicians and tabloid journalists succumbed to popular prejudice against European Jewish refugees in the 1940s and 50s, despite the fact that Jews had settled in Australia since 1788 and had achieved high office.
European Holocaust survivors were treated as queue-jumpers. Their loyalties to the British Empire were questioned. Many were regarded as having sympathies with Zionist militias in Palestine (then under British mandate) responsible for violent attacks and assassinations on senior British officials.
Jewish refugees were also regarded as unable to be assimilated. 'The Liberal Member for Henty in Victoria, H.B. Gullett, for instance, declared that "We are not compelled to be a dumping ground for people whom Europe has not been able to absorb for 2000 years".' These sentiments were repeated in parliament, on the opinion pages and in letters to the editor of mainstream newspapers.
And if you're wondering why this all resonates today, consider this statement by the authors:
'Jews then, were regarded in terms that were eerily similar to the attitudes towards Muslims in Australia today: as queue jumping refugees, economically parasitical, clannish, and associated with terrorism. "Frequently the [Jewish] terrorist violence in Palestine", one historian noted, "was linked, irrationally but potently, to the prospect of Jewish refugee migration to Australia."'
So much for our Judeo-Christian heritage.
Today, many Australian Jews show a strong loyalty to the world's only Jewish state. Others feel less inclined to do so. Still others combine loyalties with other ancestral homelands. Australian Muslims, Catholics, Buddhists and Hindus have similar broadened loyalties.
Exactly how such loyalties make them any less Australian beats me. Why should Australians subscribe to some ethnically restricted British set of values? How does a shared 'white' culture make a huge island just south of Asia more secure?
I'm not suggesting we wholesale abandon the Common Law, parliamentary democracy and all the other wonderful things that have made Australia so secure and prosperous. But in a globalised and globalising world, monocultural paranoia makes little economic sense and even less political sense.
Australia is open, multicultural and cosmopolitan. If you don't like it, leave the door open behind you.
Irfan Yusuf is a Sydney based lawyer and blogger.
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