Can multiculturalism survive the new Cold War?

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The answer is yes but it needs to toughen up.

At heart, Australian multiculturalism is a post-modern phenomenon. It is the ultimate manifestation of global psychology and the death of God. Only in a world in which secularism dominates can such a society exist.

That is, AM is a figment of enlightenment thinking. It is a pure social expression of hundreds of years of rationalist doctrine culminating in a liberal state in which all faiths and identities can co-exist peacefully.

The problem is, it now faces a pre-enlightenment system launching a sustained assault to control it. The Chinese Communist Party is pre-modern and fascist, preaching a rubric of total social control, obedience to a god-like emperor, equipped with cults of personality, technology surveillance and terror.

It is unabashedly pre-enlightenment.

Victoria is the test case today for this clash of post- and pre-modern. It is the most progressive, read post-modern, state in Australia. It has a leader steeped in this value-system such that he is happy to court all comers, via The Australian:

Meet Jean Dong. She is the 33-year-old Chinese-Australian ­businesswoman who by her own description is on a global “journey of influence”.

A professionally filmed and ­edited YouTube biography provides an extraordinary insight into the life of the young woman who is emerging as a key player in the unfolding political row over Victorian Premier Daniel ­Andrews’s controversial decision to sign up to China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

In the short promotional film, Ms Dong claims to have played key roles in bringing about the China-Australia free-trade agreement, and Victoria’s Belt and Road Initiative deal, telling the story of her journey from student journalist in Beijing, to rubbing shoulders with Australian prime ministers and premiers and Chinese President Xi Jinping.

Even his own party can’t hold a candle to the embrace, also at The Australian:

Anthony Albanese says Australia will not join China’s Belt and Road Initiative if he wins the next election, after Victorian Premier Daniel ­Andrews was criticised for his government’s agreement with the Asian superpower.

It was the first time the Opposition Leader has confirmed a ­future Labor government under his leadership would not support China’s controversial global infrastructure and trade strategy.

When pressed several times if he supported Mr Andrews’s BRI deal, Mr Albanese said he never backed it and would not support a similar agreement with China if he became prime minister by 2022.

There is nothing intrinsically pre-modern about Australian Chinese. They have taken to, and contributed to, the Australian multicultural phenomenon as well as, if not better, than many ethnicities.

But the community is also claimed by the pre-modern state from which they come. And they are vulnerable to its manipulations and intimidation, if for no other reason than many still have family trapped within the clutches of the fascist state.

This opens up a difficult and perhaps irreconcilable question for AM. Dan Andrews does not mind exploiting the Australian Chinese community, indeed as a pollie, that’s his job, via The Age:

The Victorian Labor Party used the politics of the state’s controversial Belt and Road agreement with China as an electoral weapon to help the Andrews government win votes in three seats with a high number of Chinese-Australians in its 2018 election victory.

As the Labor government continues to shrug off pressure to walk away from its memorandum of understanding with China, a prominent Australian China-watcher has highlighted how Premier Daniel Andrews and his colleagues used the relationship with China to win votes.

A senior manager with Labor’s election campaign told The Age on Monday that the agreement, and the controversy it sparked, helped Labor gain the winning edge in three eastern suburbs seats with high numbers of voters of Chinese descent.

Mr Andrews signed the first Belt and Road MOU in October 2018, just a month before the first-term Labor government faced voters at the election.

In doing so, Victoria became part of the Chinese government’s $1 trillion global infrastructure investment program that its critics say is an attempt by the Communist nation to exert economic and strategic influence around the world.

News of the deal sparked a storm of criticism from the Coalition at state and federal levels, with Victorian Liberals demanding to see what was in the text signed by the Premier. Mr Andrews eventually bowed to pressure and published the document.

A senior Labor operative said the signing of the agreement itself was not a “vote driver” in the Chinese community but that the the opposition’s “vitriolic” response handed Labor the material for a negative campaign against the Liberals in the seats of Box Hill, Burwood and Mount Waverly.

Deputy campaign director Kosmos Samaras said the ALP’s “culturally and linguistically diverse campaign unit” swung into action, deploying Chinese-language media adverts, videos posted on Facebook and the popular messaging app WeChat, all painting the Liberals as hostile to the Chinese community.

Chinese language phone banks were also used to speak directly to voters, spruiking Labor’s messages.

And so we find ourselves at a paradox and impasse. Post-modern AM welcomes all. But the pre-modern CCP abuses that very liberalism to undermine itself with the long term result that freedom itself dies. Yet, if we cut off the flow of Chinese immigrants, the principle upon which AM is based is debased.

Moreover, the Chinese Australian community itself requires protection from this menace.

The obvious and brute answer is to import no more ethnic Chinese. But that is a hypocritical outcome that fundamentally alters the compact of AM: that if you come to Australia then you will be an Australian welcomed to practice whatever notion of divinity or truth that you choose to believe in.

A better solution is to cut all immigration. There’s no need to go to zero. Halving it will take it back to a pace that bulwarks our society against CCP encroachments.

We are not helpless in this fight. We can and are pushing back to protect our marvelous post-modern system. But it needs to be protected from a pre-modern state that would impose its will upon the entirety of our little Nirvana.

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David Llewellyn-Smith
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.

He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.

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