Australia Has Never Been A Monoculture

Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club that Australia ‘cannot be a multicultural society’ and ‘must be mono-cultural’, with Australians living under ‘the one cultural umbrella’. The line reassures people who feel the country is changing too fast. It is also false. Australia has never been one culture. Not before the British invasion. Not during the colony. Not now.

What Hanson calls monoculture is not a return to anything real. It is a demand for one version of Australia, Anglo and culturally conservative, to be treated as the norm, while everyone else fits in quietly. A shared commitment to democracy, equal citizenship and the rule of law is one thing. A monoculture is something else: one dominant group defines the language, symbols and acceptable way of life for everybody else. Her formula is more extreme than it first sounds. It is an argument for cultural hierarchy.

Many Nations, before the Boats

Before 1788, hundreds of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander nations lived here, each with their own languages, laws, kinship and spiritual traditions. Diversity did not arrive by boat in the twentieth century. It was already here, across the whole continent.

So the idea of an original Australian monoculture fails at the first step. What existed was many peoples, many territories, and constant exchange through trade, ceremony, negotiation and conflict. Hanson’s argument depends on historical amnesia. Take First Nations history seriously, and the monoculture story looks less like patriotism and more like selective forgetting.

The Colony Was Never One Culture

The British did not create unity either. They brought their own divisions: convicts against free settlers, rich against poor, Protestant against Catholic, English against Irish. Irish Catholics sat inside the British imperial world without being treated as equals within it. Sectarianism shaped Australian schooling, politics and public life for generations. Scottish and Welsh migrants added their own communities and labour histories. Ignore every non-European arrival and colonial Australia was still never one smooth Anglo block.

By the nineteenth century, the claim weakens further. Chinese miners built communities and businesses during the gold rushes while facing organised racism. South Sea Islander labourers were brought to Queensland under coercion and built industries that enriched the colonies. Afghan and Indian cameleers opened inland transport routes and established a Muslim presence in regional Australia long before Islam became a target of political panic. The Australian story has always included migrants from Asia and the Middle East. It has always included a fight over who belongs.

Judeo-Christian is Not Anglo

Hanson gives her case moral weight by calling Australia ‘predominantly a Judeo-Christian society’. The phrase sounds stable and Western. It does not survive scrutiny.

‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ is a modern political construction, used to draw a line between a supposedly civilised West and a supposedly alien Islam. Judaism and Christianity did not emerge from Anglo-Saxon England. Their roots lie among Semitic peoples of the Middle East, far from the racial picture Hanson invites her audience to imagine. The same Abrahamic family includes Islam. Using ‘Judeo-Christian’ as a weapon against Muslims is dishonest on its own terms.

So if Hanson wants to defend Judeo-Christian values, she defends traditions which are not white, not Anglo, and not native to Britain. The civilisation she places at the centre of the nation is itself a product of migration, translation and centuries of adaptation. Her own foundation undercuts her conclusion.

The Tradition She Claims Commands Welcome

Hanson wants Australia to be centred on a ‘Judeo-Christian society’. Set the history aside for a moment and read the texts. They run against her, not with her.

The Hebrew scriptures return to one command again and again: protect the stranger. ‘When an alien resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the native-born among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.’ (Leviticus 19:33-34, NRSVue). The reason is memory. Israel knew displacement from the inside. Abraham leaves his country. The people flee slavery in Egypt. They are carried into exile in Babylon. The duty to welcome the outsider rests on the experience of having been the outsider.

The New Testament sharpens it. In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus says God will judge the nations on a single test: ‘I was a stranger and you welcomed me’ (Matthew 25:35, NRSVue). The Greek word for ‘stranger’ there, xenos, is the root of the word we now spell as ‘xenophobia’. Jesus began life as a refugee. Warned of Herod’s violence, his family fled to Egypt and stayed until the danger passed (Matthew 2:13-15). The central family of the Christian story were asylum seekers.

Then comes the parable. Her framing does not survive. A man is beaten and left for dead on the road. A priest sees him and crosses to the other side. A Levite, another insider, does the same. The one who stops, treats the wounds and pays for his care is a Samaritan, a member of the outside group respectable Judeans avoided (Luke 10:25-37). Asked who proved to be the neighbour, the questioner avoids the word Samaritan and says only, ‘the one who showed mercy’. Jesus answers, ‘Go and do likewise’. The neighbour is not the person who shares your culture. The neighbour is the outsider who acts with compassion.

The Beatitudes point the same way. They bless the poor, the mourning, the meek, the merciful, the peacemakers and those who hunger for justice (Matthew 5:3-11, NRSVue). They do not bless dominance, purity or force. A politics built on ranking cultures and policing who belongs has the Beatitudes running against it, line by line.

So when Hanson raises the Judeo-Christian banner, she raises a tradition whose oldest laws protect the stranger, whose founder was a refugee, and whose best-known parable makes the despised outsider the moral hero. You do not get to claim the tradition and preach exclusion in its name.

From Foreign to Ordinary

Post-war migration shows the same pattern at speed. Italian and Greek migrants reshaped Australian suburbs and built clubs, churches, businesses and family networks. They changed how the country ate and drank. The coffee culture now treated as quintessentially Australian owes a debt to Italian migrants. What was once foreign became ordinary, then beloved.

The Snowy Mountains Scheme, a symbol of post-war nation-building, was built in large part by migrant labour from across Europe. The nation was not built by a settled Anglo core. It was built by newcomers who brought skill, labour and ambition to a country still learning what it was.

Later waves continued the story. Vietnamese refugees arrived carrying trauma and hope, and built lives in business, education and the arts. Anh Do came as a refugee child and became one of the country’s best-known authors and artists. Families from Lebanon, South Asia, China and African nations, including Sudan, followed. Communities once labelled as problems now staff hospitals, courts, universities, farms, small businesses and parliaments.

Look at the Socceroos on the world stage and the monoculture fantasy falls apart in an instant. Croatian, Greek, African, Middle Eastern and Pacific backgrounds, many from refugee families, all wearing the same national colours. One team, many histories, shared purpose.

Why Communities Cluster

Hanson and others read ethnic clustering as a failure of integration. The opposite is true. New arrivals settle near relatives, affordable housing, a shared language, a church or mosque, a shop with the right food, a neighbour who explains the school system, and a network for finding work. Clustering is how settlement works.

Over time, second and third generations move for study, work and family, and communities spread. Clustering first and dispersing later is one way cohesion is built, not evidence against it.

What Monoculture Really Demands

A real monoculture would require some cultures to dominate and others to shrink. It would treat English as the only respectable language of the home, Christian symbolism as normal and other faiths as suspect, and visible difference as something to erase quickly enough not to offend the majority.

Given Hanson’s own speech, it would also treat Muslims and transgender Australians as threats to be contained. When she speaks of people bringing ‘the troubles they have left behind’, of ‘hate preachers in some Sydney mosques’, and of a transgender ‘insurgency’, she is naming minorities to discipline. Monoculture in that frame is not unity. It is a hierarchy enforced in the name of unity.

Named and Resisted before

This politics has been named and resisted before, and not only from the left. Two days after Hanson’s maiden speech, on 12 September 1996, Peter Nugent, the Liberal member for Aston, rose in the House and answered her point by point. He was a small-l liberal, a human rights advocate and a former shadow minister for Aboriginal affairs. He met her line on Indigenous disadvantage with evidence on life expectancy, housing and youth detention. He rejected her warning about Asian Australians by pointing to the established, well-integrated migrant families in his own electorate. He did this from the government benches, while members of both major parties chose to remain silent. Thirty years on, the arguments against her have not changed, and neither has the cost of staying quiet.

One Nation, Many Cultures

Australia deserves a better story, and not a fairy tale where diversity solves everything. Cultural differences produce tension and misunderstanding. So does monocultural nationalism, usually with uglier results. The work of a democracy is not to make everyone the same. It is to build civic rules strong enough to hold together people who differ: democracy, equal citizenship, the rule of law, and freedom of religion.

A mature nation accepts that people will speak different languages at home, worship in different ways, marry across cultural lines, and carry different family histories. It governs differences fairly rather than fearing them.

Australia has never been one culture under one umbrella. It has always been many cultures, unevenly respected, sometimes in conflict, often in exchange, and always changing. This is not a weakness to correct. It is the country.

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Sources

Hanson, P. (2026, June 17). Address to the National Press Club [Speech]. National Press Club of Australia, Canberra.

Almond, P. (2019, February). Is there really such a thing as the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’? ABC Religion & Ethics. https://www.abc.net.au/religion/is-there-really-a-judeo-christian-tradition/10810554

Anh Do. Official site. https://www.anhdo.com

Biblical quotations from the New Revised Standard Version Updated Edition (NRSVue), National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America.