By Gladio

The Rise of Remigration

Remigration as a term in nationalist circles started to gain currency in the 2010s when European identitarians including Austrian activist Martin Sellner and French writer Renaud Camus starting using the word to describe a deliberate, policy-driven reversal of demographic change in Western nations, a different connotation to the more traditional ‘repatriation’. The idea was simple: if decades of mass immigration had fundamentally altered the ethnic composition of European societies, then a concerted political programme could begin to reverse that process.

For years, the concept remained confined to identitarian circles and the fringes of European nationalist politics. Then, beginning around 2024, it broke through. Austria’s Freedom Party campaigned openly on “remigration of uninvited strangers.” Germany’s AfD made it a centrepiece of its 2025 federal election campaign after concerted effort at regional level by identitarian activists. Parties in the Netherlands, Finland, and Belgium adopted the term or its close equivalents. Most strikingly, by late 2025 the Trump administration in America had embraced the language outright: The Department of Homeland Security posted “Remigration now” on social media, and the State Department’s proposed reorganisation included an Office of Remigration. While the American substance has not yet matched the style, for the first time since the 1930s, net migration to the United States has turned negative.

The question for Australian nationalists is what, if anything, ‘remigration’ means for us.

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Australia Compared to Europe: The Metapolitical vs The Legal-Bureaucratic

Here we encounter a paradox that anyone serious about immigration policy in Australia needs to understand.

In Western Europe, there is a large and growing public appetite for radical immigration reversal. The integration failures are, since Elon Musk bought Twitter, more visible than ever: parallel societies in French banlieues, Pakistani rape gang scandals in England, clan-based crime networks in Germany and Sweden, all alongside welfare dependency rates among third world migrant cohorts that dwarf those of native populations. These realities generate potent political energy. European voters are increasingly willing to support parties that promise not just to slow immigration, but to reverse it.

But Europe’s legal-bureaucratic environment is a thicket of impediments. The European Convention on Human Rights, EU asylum directives, the Charter of Fundamental Rights, deeply entrenched judicial review norms, and a vast ecosystem of NGOs with standing to litigate… all of these create procedural friction that makes large-scale removal extraordinarily slow and difficult. Even Austria, which achieved a record 14,156 deportations in 2025 and cut asylum applications by 36 percent, is operating well within these constraints rather than overcoming them.

Australia’s situation is almost exactly the inverse. Our legal-bureaucratic environment is, comparatively, far more permissive. We are not signatories to the ECHR. Our constitution contains few explicit individual rights protections applicable to non-citizens. The Migration Act grants the Minister extraordinary executive power, power that was expanded dramatically in 2024 when Parliament passed laws enabling third-country deportation arrangements, criminal penalties for non-cooperation with removal, and ministerial authority to reverse protection findings. A Senate inquiry estimated that 80,000 non-citizens could be susceptible to deportation under these provisions. Both major parties compete to appear tougher on border control. The institutional infrastructure is there and to a large extent we have the bipartisan consensus against boat people forged by the Howard and Abbott Governments to thank for it.

But metapolitically, things are tougher. Building a broad public constituency for demographic reversal is harder in Australia than in Europe, precisely because our immigration system has historically been more selective. We’ve filtered more strongly for English proficiency and employability. The result is that Australia’s immigrant population, on aggregate, is more economically productive and better integrated than Europe’s asylum-heavy intake. This makes the political argument for reversal less viscerally obvious to ordinary voters, even as the long-term demographic trajectory raises the same fundamental questions about national identity and social cohesion. It’s a lot easier to deport Mohamed the rapist drug dealer than it is the law-abiding Chinese-Malaysian doctor who’s been here for forty years and has many Australian friends. Compared to Europe, our migrant intake has proportionately had a lot more of the latter migrant. The more recent deluge of ‘skilled’ immigrants, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, only changes this problem at the margins. Any programme of ‘remigration’ that is based on wholesale deportation of fundamentally productive migrant groups will inherently face tougher political challenges as Australians confront how badly they really want to deport ‘the good ones’. Even the average One Nation voter (or leader!) seems to mostly want mere multi-ethnic assimilationism, a return to the Howard era.

Australian nationalists need to reckon honestly with both sides of this equation: the tools are better than we often realise, but the political case requires more sophistication than a European-style appeal to immediate crisis if we want to reverse our demographic direction while there’s still time to do so with a democratic majority.

Why Australian Nationalists Need Policy Detail

It’s not enough for Australian nationalists to simply declare “we need remigration” and leave it at that. The political landscape is shifting, and we need to be ready with actionable policy when the moment arrives, policy crafted to our specifically Australian conditions.

The next Federal Election will likely see the Liberal Party, already a hollowed-out and ideologically exhausted husk, obliterated. One Nation has definitively demonstrated that there is a substantial constituency for nationalist politics in Australia, and while they will have their best-ever election result in 2028, it seems likely they will not have the political talent or policy depth to provide a true alternative government on solid ideological grounding. The tumult of 2028 will create the conditions for reinvigorated right-wing political formation to contest what will be an era-defining set of elections in the 2030s. Whatever party takes the lead will need a policy programme to address the remigration question that is legally defensible, fiscally rational, administratively achievable, and politically palatable to the broader electorate.

Australia’s legal framework gives us more room to manoeuvre than European nationalists have but we need to be precise about what we’re proposing and how it will work.

Using the Tools at Our Disposal

A possible Australian remigration approach would centre on two tiers: Scaling up an existing government programme to become a proper voluntary remigration programme and increasing the flow of current immigrants out of the path to citizenship for eventual return to their homelands.

1. Incentivised Voluntary Departure for Citizens and Permanent Residents:

Australia already operates the Return and Reintegration Assistance Program, which provides support to non-citizens who choose to leave voluntarily. This programme could be substantially restructured and expanded. The key change would be offering significant financial packages to Australian citizens who hold dual citizenship or are eligible for citizenship in another country, in exchange for voluntary renunciation of their Australian citizenship and relocation.

The amount offered would be determined by an individual fiscal assessment prepared by Treasury but utilising data from Federal and State governments: a net present value calculation of the projected lifetime cost or benefit of that individual to the Australian taxpayer, incorporating variables such as welfare receipt history, criminal record, employment and tax history, qualifications, age, health indicators, and broader demographic data including country-of-origin fiscal profiles. The logic is straightforward: if an individual is projected to be a net fiscal cost over their lifetime, the government saves money by offering them a departure payment up to that amount. The receiving country’s cooperation could be secured through parallel government-to-government payments (as already allowed in the Migration Act 2024), sweetening the deal for nations that might otherwise be reluctant to accept returnees.

This approach is formally race-neutral as it targets fiscal cost, not ethnicity, but because fiscal outcomes correlate with the integration patterns of different migrant cohorts, the practical effect would be to disproportionately incentivise departure among those groups that are least economically integrated. The programme would be entirely voluntary: no one is compelled to accept. Those who are net contributors would receive negligible or no offers, regardless of background.

2. Accelerated Removal of Non-Citizens:

The 2024 Migration Act amendments already provide the framework for deporting non-citizens who have committed crimes, breached visa conditions, or otherwise failed their obligations as residents. Crucially, this can include deportation to third countries willing to accept them, with Australian government funding. Scaling this up is primarily a matter of appropriating funding, diplomatic effort, and political will. The 80,000-person pool identified by the Senate inquiry represents a good starting point for deportation but we can go further.

A key goal would be to enact supporting measures that are individually mainstream and politically palatable, but which collectively have the effect of reducing the flow of temp migrants into permanent residency and permanent residents into citizens. It’s a classic “self-deportation” approach (thanks Mitt).

A comprehensive programme would include drastically tightening student visa pathways to permanent residency, which have become one of the primary engines of demographic change; extending the qualifying period for citizenship from the current timeframe to ten or twelve years, with no access to welfare or other government benefits during the qualifying period; and imposing a substantial tax on outbound remittances, which currently represent a significant capital drain and whose taxation would both raise revenue and reduce the financial incentive for low-wage migrants to stick around.

None of these individual measures is radical or unpopular. All can be implemented as part of a general effort to ‘right the ship’. Student visa tightening is already government policy. Extended citizenship pathways exist in many comparable countries. Remittance taxation has been implemented or proposed in numerous jurisdictions. But taken together, and combined with the two-tier departure programme, they would begin to shift the demographic trajectory meaningfully, reducing inflows, accelerating outflows among the least integrated, and creating a migration system that once again selects overwhelmingly for people who will strengthen, rather than dilute, the national community.

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Conclusion

The remigration conversation has arrived in Australia, whether the political establishment likes it or not. The question is not whether it will be discussed but whether Australian nationalists will be ready with serious, defensible proposals when the political window opens.

The tools are already largely in our hands. The Migration Act is one of the most powerful pieces of executive immigration legislation in the Western world. The 2024 amendments expanded it further. The legal environment, while not unconstrained, is far more favourable than what European nationalists face. What we lack is not legal capacity but political organisation and policy specificity.

The programme outlined above (a fiscally-indexed voluntary remigration policy, accelerated non-citizen removal, and a suite of supporting intake-reduction measures) is not fantasy. Every component either already exists in some form or could be implemented through uncontroversial, ordinary legislative and budgetary processes. It would not reverse fifty years of demographic change overnight, but it would, for the first time, begin moving the needle in the right direction, and do so in a way that can be explained and defended to the broader Australian public in the language of fiscal responsibility and national interest.

You don’t need to agree with my policy proposals, and I imagine many will read this article and be thinking “this bloke is cucking” because of the lack of explicit focus on ethnicity. So be it. I’m not asking anyone to agree with every point raised here. What I’m asking is that we start thinking about Australia’s specific circumstances, and how we can start building towards a policy suite that actually has a chance of getting implemented in the next five to ten years. If you want something more radical, how are you going to do it?

The political moment is coming. Our policy needs to be ready.

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Gladio is an oldhead frequently confused by zoomer memes. He is still waiting for Elon Musk to reinstate his Twitter account.

By James Turner

Contrary to what is often taught in this modern era, Australian bushranger culture was not an aberration on the margins of colonial society; rather it was one of the first truly native expressions of it, forged amongst the trials and struggles of colonial efforts to tame a previously untamed land.

Long before Australia imagined itself as a nation, this land produced figures who rejected artificially imposed authority, contested distant power, and insisted, albeit often clumsily, and sometimes fatally, on the right to live by their own terms.

The bushranger emerged from a landscape and a social order that were equally unforgiving: a continent administered by a remote empire, governed through unforgiving penal discipline, rigid hierarchy, and laws designed for English fields rather than merciless eucalyptus scrub. In this new harsh environment, defiance in the face of such factors did not arise as philosophy first, but as action driven by instinct.

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Our earliest colonies were fundamentally founded on coercive force. Convicts, exiles, and the working poor were pressed into a system that often favoured compliance over dignity, and survival over justice. Land was claimed, labour extracted ruthlessly, and law enforced by men who rarely belonged in spirit to the new land they ruled, but rather the lands from which they came. The bush - vast, indifferent, and unknowable to newcomers - was the place where imperial order thinned, and a man could live and die by his own merit alone.

To step into the bush was to step outside the bounds of colonial control. The bushranger did exactly that. He fled not merely the gallows or the lash, but the presumption that authority was owed simply because it had arrived by ship.

Bushrangers were shaped as much by the land they fled into as by any sense of overt rebellion. The Australian bush fundamentally rewards self-reliance, bushcraft, and local knowledge; and it punishes dependency and hesitation without mercy. These men learned to navigate by stars and creeks rather than roads and milestones. They relied on community ties rather than official institutions. In doing so, they inverted the colonial hierarchy, inevitably threatening it by their very nature. The mounted trooper, uniformed and armed with the law behind him, was often outmatched by men who understood the country intimately and moved within it as natives, regardless of birth. That inversion resonated deeply with many of the colonial layfolk. It suggested that legitimacy arose from earned belonging and competence, rather than by simple decree of a distant statesman or monarch.

Figures like Ned Kelly endure to this day not because of their crimes, but because of what they symbolised. Kelly’s defiance was not abstract; it was directed at police harassment, judicial bias, and a system that treated often-downtrodden Irish settlers as permanent suspects. His Jerilderie Letter reads less like a criminal manifesto than a colonial indictment. They are a raw, unpolished assertion that authority without true justice is tyranny, no matter how legal it claims to be. In that sense, the bushranger tradition anticipated a distinctly Australian political instinct: scepticism toward power, hostility to unearned status, and an expectation that authority justify itself in practice, not merely in law. A tradition that unfortunately is still very relevant even today.

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From a modern Australian nativist perspective, our historical bushranger culture represents our forebear’s early refusal to accept foreign imported values as inherently superior. The colonies were administered as extensions of Britain, yet life here quickly diverged from British assumptions. Distance bred independence. Harshness bred pragmatism. Equality in hardship eroded reverence for rigid class structure, favouring instead meritocratic aptitude and community collective endeavour in the face of a harsh, unforgiving new land.

The historical bushranger, for all his flaws, embodied this divergence. He did not aspire to proper English respectability; he forged a rough, local identity often grounded in survival, mateship, and resistance to external control. That identity would later resurface in many new iterations according to historical time, place and circumstance. The same core, fundamental spirit can be found again in the digger, the shearer, and even in the early unionists—different expressions of the same insistence that Australians govern themselves according to their own realities.

Importantly, bushranger mythology was sustained not only by the men themselves, but by the communities that sheltered them. Farmers, settlers, and itinerant workers often provided food, information, and silence. This was not mere fear; it was sympathy born of shared grievance. Many saw the law as an instrument of distant interests - usurious banks, exploitative landlords, and uncaring administrators - rather than a neutral arbiter. Protecting a bushranger could feel less like criminal complicity than communal self-defence. In that quiet collaboration lies the cultural seed of Australian localism: loyalty to one’s own over blind obedience to imposed systems.

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To acknowledge the inspirational aspect of bushranger culture is not to romanticise the often brutal violence perpetuated by the most notable of historically recorded bushrangers, nor deny its costs. People were harmed; lives were cut short.

However, it is vital that we acknowledge that bushranging as a culture was far larger than just Ned Kelly, Captain Thunderbolt, or the vicious Mad Dog Morgan. For every notable name in history records, hundreds more went unremembered, yet whose quiet and hard-fought defiance went on to build a fundamental component of our national spirit. These men lived lives of their own choosing, in the face of demands to the contrary.

National myths are never to serve as moral accounting exercises. They endure because they articulate a truth about how a people see themselves. The bushranger mythos reflects the foundational Australian spirit that valued autonomy over compliance, fairness over formality, and lived justice over abstract legality. It insists that resistance is sometimes an ethical response to power that has lost legitimacy.

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Today, in an era of globalised governance and increasingly remote authority, the bushranger archetype remains relevant precisely because he was local. He belonged to the land he moved through and the people he relied upon. His rebellion was not ideological in the modern sense, but instinctive and grounded - a dogged, honest refusal to be managed from afar without consent. A sentiment any decent man can respect and empathise with. For modern Australian nativists, this resonates as a reminder that self-governance is not granted; it is practiced. It emerges from shared experience, mutual obligation, and a willingness to challenge systems that no longer serve the community they claim to rule.

Australian bushranger culture is not a relic to be apologised for, nor a fairy tale to be swallowed uncritically. It is an early articulation of a national temperament that still runs deep. In the shadow of gum trees and under open sky, a distinct voice first said no - to distant rule, to imposed order, to the idea that authority need not explain itself. That voice, rough and imperfect, helped shape a country that has never been entirely comfortable being told what to do, and is all the stronger for it.

Written by longtime Liberal Party member Daniel Jones, find more of his content on 𝕏 @veryfrenly

In my long membership of the NSW Liberal Party, I must have heard that quote repeated dozens and dozens of times, usually by some Party Leader who is appealing for a sense of unity among the squabbling (Left-wing) Moderate and Conservative factions.

It is well known that the Liberal Party has factions. John Howard himself characterised as mere preselection co-operatives, I too have seen the factions operate as nihilistic vehicles for the ambitions of talentless hacks, the ongoing battle over net-zero for example has played out on those Moderate and Conservative factional lines. Regardless, they do represent the broad strokes of the Liberalism of John Stuart Mill and the Conservatism of Edmund Burke.

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The Moderates have generally held sway in the largest states of New South Wales and Victoria; they have institutional advantages that their Conservative rivals have not been able to match. The Moderates dominated the Liberal Party, most clearly in NSW, because they were concentrated in the safest and wealthiest Liberal seats and, resultantly, the Moderates could get their people over the line in preselections. Before the coming of the Teals, a Moderate MP never had to worry about losing an election, so they could spend the bulk of their time and resources on factional activity.

In the safe seats, the typical Moderate party activist was a retired or semi-retired professional; their activists were the wealthiest people in the party with padded out Superannuation accounts and defined benefit pensions. They were people who had plenty of time and money to play, and frequently win, in the game of factional politics.

When I went out into Western Sydney where the Conservatives held sway, I would see middle-aged blokes coming in off a day on the tools, attending branch meetings and hitting the phones organising volunteers for campaigning. For these people, politics and factional activity was something that had to be done in the evening since they had to hold down a real job by day.

As well, Moderate ideology of squishy centrism meant that they were infinitely politically flexible. They could always get the donations from Business interests and big Corporates because they would never say or do anything that stepped on their toes, such as advocate for reduced immigration. Their fundraising vehicles were donation machines.

Although the Moderates have been dominant. I always wondered whether the Moderate or Conservative faction of the Liberal Party actually represented the larger cohort of voters. The membership of the NSW Liberal Party is somewhere between 5,000-10,000, approximately 0.1-0.2% of the 5.7 million voters enrolled in NSW, so it was always unlikely that the membership was representative of the broader electorate.

Now this is finally coming to the test, and I believe that it really shows how little support Small-L Liberalism really held amongst voters.

Pauline Hanson’s One Nation is polling at 28% of the vote federally. The Liberals are down to 13% (excluding the Queensland LNP). Watching the Liberal vote crash in the polls feels like watching Bear Stearns share price crash in March 2008, it feels like there is no bottom, and it is careening towards political bankruptcy.

This reveals the fundamental truth; The Liberal Party always depended on the much larger cohort of Big C-Conservative voters to actually vote for them on Election Day. My guess is that now the Moderate Liberals could win only 8-12% of the vote by themselves, the same polling numbers that the Australian Democrats would pull and the Greens can never break through.

After all these years, we finally know the truth: the Liberal Party was always a Moderate icing on a much larger Conservative cake.

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In 1996, when Pauline Hanson launched herself into Australian Politics with her dynamite maiden speech, she threatened to split the Conservative side of Australian politics.

John Howard was the X Factor that blunted the rise of One Nation the first time around.

Howard called himself the most Conservative leader the Liberal Party has ever had. He refused to engage in the nasty game of ‘Racist!’ name-calling that the Left and the Media directed at Hanson and her supporters; he knew that it would only drive them permanently into Hanson’s arms.

Howard could keep One Nation’s voters on the reservation by pinching Hanson’s best ideas, such as mandatory offshore detention of asylum seekers and wrapping himself in the Australian flag. As well, the economy was booming, and the budget was recovering; so there was enough Government largess to go around, affording him the ability to spend as much as was needed to keep her voters happy.

Once it was all over and Hanson was finished in 2004, he could ramp up immigration and unleash the Howardwave to satisfy the Business Lobby’s unquenchable thirst for cheap labour.

There is no John Howard to bail the Moderates out like the last time that Hanson got momentum behind her in the 1990s. One Nation has already blown past 10% that it polled at the beginning of the 1998 Federal Election. Conservative voters are deserting the Liberal Party reservation in droves.

Neither Hastie nor Taylor nor any other pretender to the Liberal Party throne can hold a candle to John Howard’s raw political talent and Machiavellianism. The reckoning has been delayed for 30 years, but the dam cannot hold back the flooding river anymore.

By all appearances, the Moderates aren’t going to change and are going to moderate themselves into Total Liberal Death.

The following is one chapter titled ‘What of the ACTU?’ from The National Observer’s recently published book Australia Forever, written by Australia’s most courageous MP, Graeme Campbell.

Pick up your copy of the book today on Amazon…

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As far as the high immigration intake generally goes and its specific effect on Australian workers, what of the ACTU [Australian Council of Trade Unions], the supposed guardian of working conditions? What was it doing while immigration numbers were being forced up? During the rise of multiculturalism and a strident brand of feminism the ACTU found itself under attack by middle class left leaning academics for not taking these concerns to heart. The ACTU resisted these criticisms initially, but gradually gave way.

People of the sort who made the criticisms, rejecting the aspirations of their own class, but not the comforts of the lifestyle, have systematically taken over the Labor Party. The agenda of these people reflect their own aspirations and desire for status. They may still support workers in specific efforts to secure better working conditions, but their support for a high immigration rate means that wages and working conditions will invariably be undermined anyway.

Also in other respects, such as lifestyle, they regard the Australian working class with derision, particularly the working class male. They realise that the working class is most resistant to their agenda, particularly the god of multiculturalism. Workers who regard themselves first and foremost as Australian have not only been denied a voice but also their lifestyle and their value as human beings are being attacked by the organisations which are supposed to represent them. Bob Hawke, when Prime Minister, and other Labor politicians, were never slow to join these Volvo socialists in their attacks. The old Australian working class will find more sympathy for them as people in the mainstream old Australian middle class than they will amongst the trendy lefties and social poseurs who have insinuated themselves into their organisations.

So multiculturalism and feminism have become high on the Labor and ACTU agenda and distorted their more traditional working class concerns. The ACTU, in its support of multiculturalism and fear of being branded racist, did not feel as though it could publicly criticise the high immigration levels.

In fact, particularly through its ethnic liaison officer, Alan Matheson, the ACTU is extremely anxious to appease ethnic lobby groups and so very reluctant to confront family reunion. Mr Matheson has also gone so far as to suggest that there is little that can be done to prevent the worldwide movement of labour impacting upon Australia. This echoes the opinion of someone such as Michael Stutchbury of the Australian Financial Review who clearly believes in the “free” movement of labour, along with capital, between nations, as though labour were just a commodity and local governments had no obligations to their own people.

The free movement of labour would mean that the labour export schemes which already widely operate in Asia would be introduced into Australia, with devastating effects on local wages and working conditions. Local workers would essentially be faced with modern day indentured labourers as competitors, particularly if China entered the market in a big way.

China has yet to embrace labour export schemes to any great extent, but has made significant moves in that direction. The Far Eastern Economic Review, in a 2nd of April article on migrant labour schemes noted that China officially classifies 200 million of its workers as “surplus”. Were a portion of those to be released onto an open Australian labour market the effects can be imagined. The Chinese have already reportedly offered to send two million migrant workers to Japan, to the horror of the Japanese.

That Mr Matheson appears to be oblivious to such potential problems illustrates just how out of touch he is with the sentiments of the people he is supposed to represent: Australian workers. In fact he acts as though he is little more than a captive of the multiculturalist industry and echoes their tactics in trying to take the high moral ground. He has called for “a positive strategy to combat racism” in Australia which no doubt involves more multiculturalist bureaucrats. He and the ACTU in general, as apologists for the policy of multiculturalism, have badly failed Australian workers on immigration.

Big business, real estate operators, property developers and the like, realising multiculturalism’s effect on immigration had moved in behind it before the ACTU. They were free, with ethnic pressure groups, to push for ever higher immigration intakes without the traditional opposition of organised labour. As has been seen, big business favours immigration both because it has a downward effect on wages and working conditions, particularly where those people come from countries with no strong tradition of organised labour, and because, for developers and real estate operators, more people mean more development, regardless of the best interests of the country.

In April 1991 however, the ACTU made a submission to Cabinet for a cut in immigration, though it was very careful not to target the family reunion category. The ACTU called for a cut in skilled immigration of 20,000. This was a short term response to the recession, which had little impact upon the Hawke-led government, but was at least a start. The long term impact skilled immigration has on local training opportunities has to be considered. As long as employers know they can import skilled workers readily there is little incentive for them to train locals.

Apart from locals losing opportunities for training, our unthinking cargo cult commitment to skilled immigration has also meant an oversupply of skills in some areas. The 1990-91 Budget papers acknowledge that overservicing by GPs is caused by the oversupply of doctors. The AMA [Australian Medical Association] recognises that this oversupply is largely caused by the immigration of doctors and is rightly concerned about it. Like engineers—whom we continue to import—we have too many doctors, at least in city areas, where the overwhelming majority of immigrant doctors settle. This not only leads to overservicing pressures, it denies local residents places in medical schools, which because of the oversupply have cut back on student numbers.

Yet the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Health Mr Howe has been very slow to confront this problem. On the contrary he initially threatened to flood the country with foreign doctors in his battle with the AMA over his proposed Medicare patient charge of $3.50, which was eventually revised downwards to $2.50 in the face of opposition from the Labor Caucus and ultimately abandoned by Prime Minister Keating. This charge was proposed to offset the costs caused by overservicing.

Mr Howe’s threat to use immigration as a way of attempting to break the strength of local doctors was an echo of the tactic some employers down the years have advocated to break the strength of trade unions. The irony—and the dangerous precedent he would have set—seemed to have been completely lost on him. Mr Howe though subsequently acknowledged that some restrictions on foreign doctors may be necessary and since then has conceded that some form of entry restriction is necessary.

A paper drafted by the Director of the National Health Strategy, Ms Jenny Macklin, entitled The Future of General Practice and released on 15 March this year, took account of the problem of the immigration of doctors. This paper, among other things, called for the intake of overseas doctors to be restricted to 10 per cent of the output of Australian medical schools, which themselves would face a 10 per cent cut in student places. Mr Howe said he supported the thrust of the proposals.

The Macklin paper pointed out that over 400 foreign doctors per year were being allowed to settle permanently in Australia, which was more than five times the number of overseas doctors allowed to settle in Canada, a country with a much larger population. On 16 May this year Dr Howe announced that the number of overseas trained doctors allowed to settle in Australia would be reduced to 200 a year in 1992-93. This followed an announcement by Mr Hand that the qualification of medicine would be downgraded for immigration selection purposes. So there is some progress on that front.

But the problems do not exist only with doctors. Note should be taken of the problems Australian shearers have been experiencing. The Australian of 9 September 1991 stated:

In Victoria, Western Australia and Queensland, Australian shearers are gradually being outnumbered by their New Zealand counterparts to a point where more than 42 per cent of the country’s flock is shorn by foreign hands. Meanwhile at least 80 per cent of Australian shearers remain unemployed.

The Australian Workers Union NSW secretary, Mr Ernie Ecob remarked:

Over the last three and four months there has been a completely orchestrated, organised campaign by the National Farmers Federation to have these foreign teams come in and do the work which has been traditionally done every year, for 20 years, by the locals. The large graziers are bending to the wishes of the NFF to ensure they get the work.

The Australian reported that the itinerant NZ gangs were working for rates of about $90 per 100 sheep, compared with the award rate of $137. This is an example of the traditional attempts to undermine the wages and working conditions of locals by using cheap foreign labour. Further, much of the money earned by the itinerant workers is taken out of Australia. This trend has continued.

As the New Zealand gangs are predominantly Maori, the issue has become complicated by racial factors. It is interesting to note that the Office of Multicultural Affairs sponsored an episode of the ABC’s ‘A Big Country’ screened in 1991 in which the Maoris were portrayed as being better shearers than the locals. It is typical of OMA’s propaganda techniques that locals are portrayed as inferior to migrants or foreign workers. By such insidious means OMA, a publicly funded body established by a Labor Government, is justifying the undercutting of the wages and working conditions of locals.

The shearers set up a camp outside Parliament House in May/June this year and put their case to the ALP Caucus. Among other things the shearers called for work permits for New Zealanders.

The Closer Economic Relations agreement between Australia and New Zealand stipulates free movement of labour between the countries. Historically Australia and New Zealand have had a special relationship and free movement between the countries has been part of the legacy. With changing times though circumstances are different. A passport requirement was introduced for travel between the countries in 1982 and clearly the case for work permits exists.

CER is basically a trade agreement and it does not follow at all that the freeing up of trade automatically means that labour should be able to move “freely” between nations if this is clearly shown or is likely to disadvantage local workers. Yet in The Sydney Morning Herald of 30 May, a spokesman for the New Zealand Minister for External Affairs and Trade is reported as stating: “You can’t have free trade between countries without a free labour market.” This is apparently the New Zealand Government position.

This one example of the shearers being undercut by cheap New Zealand labour gives a small scale indication of what would occur were the present push for freer trade with Asia to be followed by free movement of labour. As already indicated the consequences for local workers would be disastrous. Yet this prospect is seriously proposed by members of the academic and bureaucratic elites. Is this to be the subtext to the “free” trade push—namely the deliberate undermining of local wages and working conditions by the “free” movement of labour in order to minimise production costs? It becomes clear why the bible of high finance in the USA, the Wall Street Journal, preaches open borders in its editorial pages.

The Caucus Immigration Committee backed the shearers. The support of committee chairman Andrew Theophanous may be largely due to the fact that the professional ethnic lobby has always been against preferential treatment for New Zealanders and this was a good opportunity to drive the point home. At any rate the caucus committee recommendation called on the Minister for Immigration to:

Cancel forthwith those aspects of these arrangements, which allow New Zealanders automatic access to the Australian job market, so that uniform standards apply to all non Australians and all eligible visitors seeking employment opportunities in Australia.

A watered-down resolution, which did not support work permits, was later accepted by caucus on 2 June. It called on the government to “cancel those aspects of the travel arrangements that allow New Zealanders to work without paying income tax and in breach of awards”. This however was considerable progress and the shearers dismantled their camp, though they intend to continue pushing hard on the issue, particularly in the lead up to its consideration by Cabinet.

One evocative part of the shearer’s general protests was a meeting on Sunday 31 May of a group of about 100 shearers under the Tree of Knowledge in Barcaldine, Queensland, to support their fellow shearers in Canberra and call on the government to support the resolution of the Caucus Immigration Committee. Under this tree in 1891 a group of shearers met following their disastrous defeat in strike action that year and their resolutions led to the formation of the Australian Labor Party. It is an understatement to say that in recent years they have become disillusioned with the party their predecessors founded.

Whether doctors, shearers or carpet layers, Australian governments and bureaucrats have an obligation to support locals first. If they don’t then nobody else will and if they don’t why should locals have any respect or regard for their government?

Mr Howe also has a grand, but imprecise, plan for the cities, yet nowhere does he acknowledge the impact of immigration on the cities. Cut immigration and a great deal of pressure on the cities would be eased. In fact Mr Howe is all for development of new growth corridors, which combined with urban consolidation, he seems to believe is the answer.

It is clear from the example of doctors and shearers that immigration and itinerant foreign workers have had a negative impact on local employment. In a more general sense, while it is true that there is no hard evidence that immigration increases overall unemployment in the long term, it can hardly be doubted that by increasing the labour pool it has a downward effect on wages and working conditions.

Wages in Australia are already among the lowest in the OECD, but select well paid economists continually stress that lower and middle income real wages must fall, while not suggesting that their own salaries or those of the bankers or executives many of them work for should be cut. In saying Australian real wages are too high they are not comparing us with OECD countries, but Asian countries. It is part of their grand vision of Asianisation that real wages should fall to those of Asian countries, so we can properly compete and “integrate” with Asia.

The call for Australia to integrate itself with Asia is essentially a call to the majority to deliver itself into the hands of the economic imperialists. These economists, bankers and big businesses would benefit individually, but Australia would merely become a colonial satellite, a quarry and construction dump, with the bulk of the locals a cheap labour pool without unity or a sense of national purpose.

People who support Asianisation, high immigration and the “free” movement of labour, should be very clear that in doing so, whatever noble motives they think they have, they are riding shotgun for those who would reverse all the gains in working conditions that the labour movement has fought for and which Australians in general take for granted. They are also acting as agents for the social disintegration of our country.

The was one chapter titled ‘What of the ACTU?’ from The National Observer’s recently published book Australia Forever, written by Australia’s most courageous MP, Graeme Campbell.

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Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP

Is the homeland central to nationalism? Do we feel at home in Australia’s landscapes? How these two questions are answered will decide the direction of nationalism in this country and determine whether it will become true Australian Nationalism, or mere nationalism in Australia. So, what is the distinction between these two destinations and how is the Australian Natives’ Association working towards ensuring that it is Australian Nationalism that triumphs?

First the distinction. Many of us will already know that the word “nationalism” is derived from the Latin root “natio”, which refers to the biological relation of birth and is preserved in this meaning in the English words “natal” and “native”. To be a native, then, would simply mean to be born into a community of common blood. But if we end our analysis at this point, then we risk missing out on another key dimension of healthy nationalism - the importance of the homeland. True, it is possible for a nation to lack a homeland, like the Jewish diaspora did between the destruction of Israel by Rome and its resettlement under the Zionist project. This, however, is an abnormal situation that will twist the spirit of a people, rendering them rootless and parasitic in character. Having a homeland is vital.

On the other side, there is also the familiar risk of falling into some form of civic nationalism based on place alone. A familiar slogan criticising civic nationalism, summing up a very reasonable stance, is that civic nationalists believe in “magic dirt theory” - the idea that by virtue of simply stepping onto Australian soil a migrant becomes the same as a true Australian, born here to heritage white Australian parents. Clearly, the correct stance must chart a course between both extremes and accept the fundamental importance of both race and place.

Recently, a few people, some more prominent than others, have been stressing the idea that Australian identity, historically, is fundamentally British and that we should identify more with the old Empire than with any “parochial” or “kitsch” sense of uniquely Australian identity. I believe this reveals a deep sense of uprootedness that is typical of modern cosmopolitanism but certainly should not be typical of nationalism. There have been many declarations of the importance of “blood and honour” but let us not forget that all nationalists must respect blood and soil as well.

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Every nation needs a homeland, and any nation that lacks a homeland must perish or degenerate into something unnatural. Our dirt may not be magic, but we still find ourselves standing on it, and we do not wish to stand anywhere else. The soil, the earth, forces us to be particular. The mind may think in universals and abstract terms, but our body must stand in a concrete place. Yes, without our blood we could not belong to our people, but it is the Australian soil that truly forces us to be Australian Nationalists and will accept nothing else. To deny this and speak of terraforming the Bush after the pattern of European forests or other such absurdities betrays a subtle sense that we of Europe’s old blood do not truly belong here. In a way, this attitude reinforces the propaganda of the “welcome to countries” that say that this continent will always be the land of the Aborigines, no matter what European landscapes may come to cover parts of its surface.

But perhaps these fellows would say that to love the Bush is treason to our European origins? To this, I’ll let Ian Mudie respond through his poem If This be Treason:

This is powerful stuff, and unfortunately it is now easier to forget than ever before as we have all been transitioned to some extent from the physical world to the virtual world of the internet and the screen. How can we approach our relationship to our land in real concrete terms? In the Australian Natives’ Association, we believe that remembering this centrality of the land to nationalism must be the purpose of Wattle Day, the start of the Australian Spring on the 1st of September. But it is not enough to simply think the “right” thoughts about nation and homeland. You must be comfortable ranging across the Bush and feel at home camping among the waratah and the wattle.

For this reason, among others, we in the ANA have been working on getting our outdoorsmanship and bushcraft wing, the Rangers, more formalised so that it can one day stand as a proud Australian institution in which future generations of men can develop traditional Australian virtues such as resource, independence, comradeship, and endurance. We must lean into and accept the heritage handed down to us from the Australian bushmen of the past, right from the first convicts who, on arriving in Van Diemen’s Land, felt they were entering a paradise in comparison to the squalid and cramped conditions of urban and industrial England.

Let us stand by the two pillar proposition of true Australian Nationalism and see no contradiction between them. An Australian is born into a European-descent, predominantly Anglo-Celtic, national community. An Australian truly loves and belongs to this land.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP

Hegel. The name might strike fear into the professional philosopher who knows the mountains of secondary literature on him, or raise an unsettling memory in an unsuspecting victim who thought they’d have a go at reading one of his books - after all, how hard could it be?

But although Hegel’s philosophy is complex, it is fair to say that at its core is the relatively straightforward desire to reconcile the organic national culture and language expressed in Romanticism with the universal ideals of reason that were championed in the Enlightenment. According to the Hegel scholar, Charles Taylor, the Romantic side of Hegel’s thinking is concerned with “unity with nature, other men, and himself” while the rationalist side seeks to preserve “radical moral autonomy”. These are the two sides of a dialectic of opposites that Hegel wanted to sublate - to overcome the contradiction between the two while preserving their best aspects in a higher unity.

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Australian Nativists have much to learn from this Hegelian project. Like the Romantics, we are interested in the organic development of the Australian people and culture, and we identify with Australia on a deeply emotional level. We love our Banjo Paterson Day when we enjoy poetry that reflects our folk spirit. We love our Wattle Day when we deeply appreciate and feel a sense of unity with the Bush and the broader natural world that expresses the goodness of being, the beauty of God’s creation. This organic rootedness that we have in our Australian homeland was best expressed by Ian Mudie in his poem Earth:

But even though we understand and feel comfortable in this Australian particularity, like Hegel we must also learn to appreciate its dialectical opposite: universality and rational ideology. Let me expand on this briefly. The nature of rational thought and conceptualisation is universal. When we think of a concept, like “tree”, we think it generally and when we predicate in a sentence we bring the particular that we see under the umbrella of the universal that we think: “This thing is a tree.” As in Plato, both sides of the sentence, the thing and the concept, are based on the Idea. The world of matter is ideas embodied in patterns, and these are mirrored in the world of thought. The difference from Plato is that Hegel believes that these patterns develop dynamically through a dialectical process.

All of Hegel’s philosophy is basically a development of these actions of speech and dialectical development. For Hegel, the Subjective Spirit, or God in Himself, embodies Himself in nature as the Objective Spirit in order to express and discover His possibilities through a providential, rational, and dialectical movement through history that culminates in His understanding of Himself as the Absolute Spirit. This is a complicated combination of Platonist, Christian, and Gnostic ideas on God’s creation and providential guidance of the world that we do not need to delve into too deeply or follow too closely. To be absolutely clear, I do not think we should adopt Hegel’s metaphysical apparatus, particularly his process theology. However, what we should understand is that this picture of creation that Hegel paints forms the paradigm for his understanding of human society and politics, where the subjective consciousness of individual human beings is embodied in collective social and political institutions and is worked out through these institutions towards the goal of achieving the good and just society.

So, let’s look at this political paradigm in a little more detail. We can see the organic expression of society in the family, based on natural reproduction between a man and a woman, with the man forming a patriarchal household. As Robert Filmer taught, this patriarchal household formed the basis for the development of absolute monarchies with fictive “sons” for their subject aristocracies and “brother” kings in the realm of international relations. Similarly, for Hegel the basis of an organic communitarian society is the family, and not the abstract liberal individual. On the other hand, as societies became larger and more complex, they required rationalising bureaucracies and processes of deliberation in order to develop good, efficient, and effective government. Furthermore, the growing desire for individual freedom in politics leads to political assemblies and representative democracies.

Similarly to Plato before him, Hegel suggested that the ideal political form should sublate these two aspects of politics, and proposed the Constitutional Monarchy as the form that could preserve both the organic national expression of the people in the familial relation to the king, and the requirements of rationality and free expression in the deliberation of the representative assemblies.

When it comes to this political project, Australia is not starting in a bad place. We are already a constitutional monarchy, and while we may not have the best king or a system of representation that actually represents the interests of the Australian people, we are at least accustomed to the general idea and have a constitution with a lot more potential for creating what Australian Nationalists desire than our current politics may lead you to believe.

It’s a common catch cry that “conservatism hasn’t conserved anything”, but the fundamental point of conservatism is that it aims to preserve the organic development of the spirit of the people rather than engage in a rationalist project to build a utopia. The strength of conservatism can be seen in things like the English common law, which has continued to develop here along Australian lines. When it comes to our constitution, we Nativists should embrace this strength and be conservatives who aim to preserve the tradition of our founding fathers. The weakness of conservatism is that it lacks the philosophical tools to critique missteps in the tradition or effectively counter any rationalist projects that seek to tear its traditions apart.

To some extent, Nativists share this weakness. We look to our history for inspiration and stick closely to what our forefathers did so that we can conserve our Australian culture and environment. These are good things, but we also need to work on developing the rational and ideological side of our politics. We need to envision an Australian political utopia that we can measure the current system against and critique it when and where it is found lacking. Hegel has given us the outlines of a political project. It is on us to continue to work on an Australian sublation of the political dialectic.

Article by Jo Gullett, find more of his content @ColonistSettler on 𝕏

If you’re reading this there’s a good chance you’ve listened to the latest National Observer podcast which featured an interview with ex-Senator Gerard Rennick, founder and leader of the People First Party.

For many of us, Rennick was a breath of fresh air. Entering Parliament initially as a Queensland LNP Senator, he soon had himself on the outer with senior Party leaders for his uncompromising stance on issues like the safety and efficacy of the rushed COVID vaccines and the politicised efforts of the BOM to hype up climate change hysteria.

Now while the fervour and rigour with which he went after these issues separated him from many of his Liberal Party colleagues in Parliament, there were other things of particular interest to nationalists beyond these more ‘standard’ enthusiasms of the Liberal Party right, primarily those emanating from his old-school protectionist economic standpoints.

Whether criticising ex-PM Paul Keating for introducing neoliberalism into Australia, advocating for a public banking option, or expressing his fondness for the Queensland Caudillo Joh Bjelke-Petersen, there was a vibe from Gerard that was quite different from, say, an Alex Antic.

Here was a man that seemingly had a vision that centred the nation as such, recognising that its welfare was threatened not just by overweening government, but also a rootless and cartelised private sector.

Having through his outspokenness made himself untouchable with Liberal Party powerbrokers, he was, in murky circumstances, denied pre-selection for a winnable spot on the 2025 Queensland Senate ticket. Realising the futility of continuing to ‘play the game’ within the LNP, Gerard burnt his ships and launched the People First Party.

Encouragingly, the new party went into the election with the strongest platform on immigration reduction of any party with a realistic shot of winning office, and, for a party with effectively no media support and no big donors, did admirably well, with Rennick himself winning over 5% of the Queensland first preference vote and for a time seeming to threaten the spot of One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts.

Alas, preference flows meant it was not to be, but Rennick didn’t give up. He promised to struggle on with People First, building it into a party with the genuine internal democratic input missing from both the Liberals and One Nation.

The opportunity this offered to the nationalist right to get involved with a vehicle that posited a strong immigration reduction platform, a holistic nationalist economic program AND a seemingly genuine goal to build a party that through its vitality and intelligence could unite not just the minor party right but even threaten the stranglehold of the LNP was enticing. No longer would our membership fees go to funding the inclinations and lifestyles of a Christopher Pyne or a James Ashby!

But then it all came crashing down with Tuesday’s Backbench Drivers podcast. Rennick said People First was a pro-immigration party. He said we can’t be seen to be “bashing migrants”. He blamed misbehaviour from Muslims in Australia on neocon foreign policy decisions. He even said he didn’t like some of our banter on Twitter… say it ain’t so Gerard! IT’S OVER.

But is it?

Despite these comments I think that Australian nationalists should not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Politics is more than surface-level rhetoric, and People First may still have a structural utility for nationalist ends that cannot be replicated in any other party.

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Surveying the Landscape:

The Libs

If we go back as little as twelve months ago, I am somewhat ashamed to say I thought the Liberal Party held some promise. In a previous article I wrote about how the Voice referendum showed the way to an enduring anti-globalist majority for the Liberal-National Coalition – if they wanted it. Even into the start of 2024 things looked promising. Dutton as Opposition Leader had promised reductions in net overseas immigration, breaking a taboo not breached since Tony Abbott did so (very briefly) in the leadup to the 2013 election. The polls were rewarding Dutton accordingly.

The history is well-known from there: The backdown from the immigration promise, the cargo-culted lifting of the chintziest MAGA policies, the botched election campaign and, most of all, the inability of Dutton as Party leader to stand up for right-wing members of the Coalition such as Ben Britton (after he failed to help Rennick in his pre-selection) put paid to that thesis. Mea culpa. Unsurprisingly, lacking both spine and vision, the Liberals were pummelled at the election by a more disciplined Labor outfit.

The election loss has left the Liberal Party Right in a precarious position. The disappointment of the campaign (including the huge effort put into winning back Teal seats for minimal gain) has caused many members of the Party to resign. The factional Left is on top in Victoria, Queensland and, likely, New South Wales. Tassie and NT are largely inconsequential (sorry guys) and the WA party is a rump, unlikely to recover. The only state division of any significance which is firmly controlled by the Right is South Australia, but even there, Senator Antic’s reign is of a more Pentecostal Christian flavour, unsatisfying to many nationalists.

New Opposition Leader Susssssssan Ley now enacts her pantsuit regime, moving the Party leftwards in search of (^◦^)aspirational(^◦^) voters, under the watchful gaze of Alex Hawke, a man who would make a literal hollow suit seem substantial.

But there is a reaction. Old warhorses Tony Abbott and John Anderson are engaged in an effort to rehabilitate the Liberal Right, scouting out talent over lunches at various private clubs and conservative societies, trying to recast classical liberalism for a new age of sub-altern ethnic conflict – Tony has even been heard testing out the term ‘Anglo-Celtic’. Can we expect Frank Salter to get a tap on the shoulder to run for the Libs at the next federal election? Don’t count on it.

The Liberals will increasingly make use of sounds of a ‘based’ nature to try and contain the growing energy of the youth right, but there will be no policy follow-through. The path to a nationalist Liberal Party has been tried, and it has failed and no amount of Danube Institute conferences will change that.

The great danger of the Liberal Party is that they are structurally incapable of being a nationalist party due to their ties to anti-national funding sources, but they still have the reach to stymie the development of any genuinely nationalist forces to their right.

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One Nation

Despite their own lethargy and ineptitude, One Nation improved their results in the election, winning back Malcolm Roberts’ Senate seat and just squeaking in two more Senators in NSW and WA, bringing their total to four members of the upper house, once you include the off-cycle party leader, Pauline Hanson. This was One Nation’s best result since the double dissolution election in 2016.

In the circumstance though, this can’t be seen as anything other than a disappointment. With a historically unpopular Labor government crushing Australia with a tidal wave of foreigners and a spasmodic Liberal Party that couldn’t seem to get anything right, to have only gained 6.4% of the national vote is an indictment.

The reasons for this failure would be familiar to any seasoned observer of right wing politics in Australia: lack of campaigning, lack of on-the-ground support and, in many cases, lack of a credible local candidate. In short, the same pitfalls of any party focused only on winning a sinecure Senate seat for a dictatorial party leader while running paper candidates to hoover up the votes of disaffected but low-information voters and milk public funding, all to be sent back up to Queensland HQ for who-knows-what.

Post-election, One Nation have promised to establish a branch network (clearly in response to the threat of People First). There are now two ‘pilot’ branches! We’ve seen this movie before… this party ‘democracy’ will only continue as long as it keeps the party under tight reins and the coffers controlled by Hanson and Ashby full.

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Where to now?

So to come full circle, it is clear that in order to open space for a genuine nationalist right option, the Liberal Right can not be allowed to regather and recuperate identitarian energy, and One Nation must be destroyed entirely. The question remains: Is People First the right vehicle to do this, even with the recent comments of party leader Gerard Rennick?

I must answer in the affirmative. The kind of person who votes or volunteers for the Liberal Party Right is not ideologically well-formed, and all sorts of submerged liberal ideas will cause them to be spooked by an appeal of any kind of strongly identitarian nature. This is changing, and the metapolitical winds are blowing in an identitarian direction, but the time is not now for that kind of party.

The most important thing is to threaten the Liberal Right and One Nation with a professional and friendly appeal that speaks for the nation in the way most Australians still understand it: a civic identity with an understated but non-exclusive ethnic homogeneity underpinning it, and a focus on bread-and-butter economic issue to which mass immigration is the key detriment.

This is all very obviously based upon the ‘optics-cucking’ side of that perennial nationalist debate, but this is necessary to achieve the structural realignment proposed above – we must break the Liberal-National-PHON cartel to allow new perspectives in, and to do that requires a degree of pragmatism that will not satisfy purists. To take enough power, and disrupt our ideological enemies enough to reframe the debate around the good of the nation even if the composition of that nation is overly-broadly construed is necessary AND achievable.

People First’s immigration policies leave plenty of room for the working out of details by young, dedicated activists with a long term view. The only real line-in-the-sand that Rennick continually mentions is the “100,000 visas”. This by itself amounts to net negative migration… better than promised by any other party. Remove the pathway to citizenship, perhaps some kind of bureaucratic overlay for ‘cultural compatibility’ in the selection phase… all of a sudden you’re looking at a program that is far, far more rigorous than anything taken to an Australian electorate in a long time, all still wrapped up in nice-guy packaging.

We often look overseas and ask “when will WE get our based populist party?” but people forget that the most successful European populist parties are, in the main, civic nationalist parties: The Sweden Democrats, French National Front, and Germany’s AfD are all based around a civic conception of nationhood. The latter has a lesbian leader with a Sri Lankan ‘wife’!

It’s good to take stock, to reassess our options in a time of flux, but don’t get spooked by rhetoric that doesn’t entirely line up with your own preferences. Think about the structural requirements of the next political moment and I hope you’ll see that People First and Gerard Rennick are not to be written off just yet.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏@Aussie_EliasP

Two things occurred recently that have prompted me to write an article on one of Australia’s great native-born composers - Percy Grainger. Firstly, I happened to start really getting into listening to his music again; and secondly, a prominent Australian National Socialist, Thomas Sewell, announced his interest in establishing a nationalist art movement which he calls the “Ingvaeonic.” There is a fortuitous coincidence to these two occurrences, because I believe that Grainger’s ideals for Australian music and Sewell’s conception of the Ingvaeonic share many points in common. In this article I first lay out my understanding of the Ingvaeonic and then explain why I believe that Grainger’s work could be seen as an early Australian contribution to this concept.

In a recent stream, Sewell described the need to create an art movement that would balance traditionalism and futurism while expressing the unique racial characteristics of the Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian branches of the white race. This new movement would then act as the aesthetic embodiment of the political ideals of nationalists in Australia and form the style for the branding of a nationalist political party. The name chosen for this movement is “Ingvaeonic,” which is a name for the subgroup of West German languages that includes Old Frisian, Old Saxon, Old English, and their descendant language forms. By naming the movement “Ingvaeonic,” the idea seems to be to understand language in the broad sense as the totality of the cultural expression of a particular racial type, one that Sewell believes to include Australians as a descendent Anglo-Saxon population. While I have personally expressed my disagreement with elements of the politics that Sewell embraces and the specific nuances of his interpretation of Australians as a people, the idea of the Ingvaeonic is still very interesting and worth pursuing as one possibility for the expression of Australian art. In fact, I believe that this idea was already touched upon in the musical compositions and philosophy of Percy Grainger.

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Percy Grainger was born on the 8th of July 1882 in Brighton, Melbourne. As his father was a drunk and womaniser, and Percy was bullied in the few years he attended school, he ended up being mostly raised and educated by his mother, Rose, whom he later would characterise as a thoroughly Nietzschean woman. Importantly, Rose taught him music and also exposed him to Nordic culture by teaching him from texts such as the Saga of Grettir the Strong, an ancient Icelandic text. Retrospectively, Percy would characterise that saga as “the strongest single artistic influence on my life.” Grainger was in Australia until the age of thirteen, and being already incredibly talented as a pianist, he was then sent overseas to further his study of music at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, although he later claimed he learned little there compared to his formative experiences in Australia. Nonetheless, he did come to a realisation at the Hoch Conservatory that he has recorded in his introduction to the Aims of his autobiographical museum:

While studying music at the Hoch Conservatorium in Frankfurt from 1895 to 1899 I was struck by the fact that the most gifted composition students were all from the English-speaking and Scandinavian countries. I foresaw that a period of English-speaking and Scandinavian leadership in musical originality and experimentation lay just ahead - a florescence comparable to the iconoclastic innovations of the Worcester composers of the 13th century, of Dunstable of the 15th century, of the pre-Bach English string fancies of the 17th century.

Grainger’s belief in an Anglo-Nordic renaissance, a seed planted by his mother’s teachings, had already taken root and begun to develop. It would be fertilised by a deeper exposure to the English folk tradition.

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Today, Grainger is best remembered for his role in the first English Folk Song Revival at the turn of the 20th century and his compositional work in arranging folk songs into intricate band settings. One such work, often considered to be one of his masterpieces, is “Lincolnshire Posy,” which displays his desire to be faithful to the authentic style of the folk performances which he spent much time collecting, studying, and recording. Nonetheless, while this piece is certainly wonderful to listen to and establishes Grainger in the tradition of those nationalist composers who drew inspiration for their art music from the material provided by their folk, I would not say that “Lincolnshire Posy” is an example of Ingvaeonic art. It expresses the English folk tradition in a sophisticated form, but it does not have enough of the pan-Germanic character and hard edge required by a truly Ingvaeonic piece.

Percy Grainger - Lincolnshire Posy

In order to understand the qualities that should prevail in a particularly Australian Ingvaeonic music, at least if one agrees with Grainger’s assessments of a future Anglo-Nordic musical culture, it is time at last to turn to Grainger’s “Hill Song No.1” and his own commentary on it in the essay Percy Aldridge Grainger’s Remarks About His Hill Song No.1.

Percy Grainger - Hill Song No. 1 (1902/1921)

“Hill Song No.1” is a complex polyphonic and harmonically dense piece of music in a grand style. Here, the hard edge that “Lincolnshire Posy” lacks is consciously present. As Grainger writes in his Remarks:

I consider Hill-song No. 1 by far the best of my compositions. But the difficulties of conducting its highly irregular rhythms are almost prohibitive. At the time of composing Hill Song No. 1 (1901-02, aged 19-20) wildness and fierceness were the qualities in life and nature that I prized most and wished to express in music. These elements were paramount in my favourite literature – The Icelandic Sagas.

However, the composition is not merely Scandinavian in temper, but is thoroughly Australian with Grainger stating that its musical idiom was developed out of “certain nationalistic attitudes that were natural to me as an Australian.” Grainger believed that Australia was fundamentally based on an “island” geography and mentality that was close to the Nordic mentality in its focus on seafaring, exploration, and overseas settlement. We may recall here that Australia’s first industry was sealing and whaling, with the rough pioneer sailors sleeping on the small islands of the stormy Bass Strait. While Australians often turn to the land-mentality of the Outback and the Bush for our understanding of our character, Grainger provides us with an interesting counterpoint in his view of Australian character in its relationship to the ancient Nordic type.

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Returning to his remarks on the Hill Song, Grainger states that along with wide tone scales and irregular rhythms, which he saw as characteristic of Nordic folk music, he thought that the extreme polyphony of the piece was essential to its Australian character. As he writes,

“My Australian ideal [was] of a many voiced texture in which all, or most of the tone-strands (voices, parts) enjoy an equality of prominence and importance…”.

This equality of many voices expresses the egalitarian character of the Australian that many would think of when they consider our national character. Finally, a reasonable amount of discord in the dense harmonic writing helps to give his piece its sense of strength, power, and seriousness without devolving into the worst excesses of the modern and postmodern movements in art music.

Turning to one last key example of his music, Grainger also wrote a “Jungle Book Cycle” based on his love for Kipling’s work and particularly his character of Mowgli in the Jungle Book. While this is not one of my favourites from Grainger’s body of work, it is a good example of his interest in the primal strength of barbarism as opposed to the decadent modern form of civilisation. Kipling’s famous “wild boy” character exemplified this theme of man at his strongest when raised in the brutal world of the jungle. This combined his with his conscious racialism to form the idea of a Nordic revolt in art against the modern “civilised” world. The same concept finds excellent expression in a passage from the first section of the second half of Labour writer William Lane’s great Australian novel, The Workingman’s Paradise:

Oh, for the days when our race was young, when its women slew themselves rather than be shamed rid, when its men, trampling a rotten empire down, feared neither God nor man and held each other brothers and hated, each one, the tyrant as the common foe of all! Better the days when from the forests and the steppes our forefathers burst, half-naked and free, communists and conquerors, a fierce avalanche of daring men and lusty women who beat and battered Rome down like Odin’s hammer that they were! Alas for the heathen virtues and wild pagan fury for freedom and for the passion and purity that Frega taught to the daughters of the barbarian! And alas, for the sword that swung then, unscabbarded, by each man’s side and for the knee that never bent to any and for the fearless eyes that watched unblenched while the gods lamed each other with their lightnings in the thunder-shaken storm!

While I am a Christian man and am not particularly enamoured by pagan doctrines and gods, I can, like Tolkien, appreciate the unique character of Northern Courage that still forms part of the spirit of our branch of the Anglo-Nordic race in Australia and clearly manifested itself in the actions of the ANZACs at Gallipoli and in the charge of the 4th Light Horse Brigade at Beersheba.

Lastly, lest I seem to overstate Grainger’s racialism and Nordicism, it is worth noting that he felt that music was a universal language and that each racial type had its own contribution to make to music. He was happy to let the African express himself as an African and the Asian to express himself as an Asian. Once more, to quote him from his Aims:

It would seem only natural for Australia to become a centre for the study of musics of the islands adjacent to Australia - Indonesia no less than the South Seas. Some of the world's most exquisite music is found in this area.

Yet none of these exotic musics, however charmful, should draw Australian musicians away from intense participation in the all-important developments of experimental music in the white man's world. The vistas opened up by the innovations of Beethoven, Wagner, Grieg, Alois Haba, Cyril Scott, Scriabin, Arnold Schoenberg, Arthur Fickenscher and others, should be explored. It would be a wonderful thing if Australia should be the first country to live to the axiom: "Music is a universal language".

Percy Grainger, like many artists, was a flawed man with complicated relationships and strange personal proclivities. Nonetheless, one relationship that is to be much admired is his lifelong loyalty to his native country - our own beautiful land of Australia with its still hidden depths and secrets that await expression in the full power of a future art latent in the soul of our folk. I will leave the reader with one final example of what I see as Grainger’s contribution to the Australian Ingvaeonic - “Colonial Song.” May it inspire artists to consider the native Australian character when creating their own nationalist Ingvaeonic art.

Percy Grainger - Colonial Song (1912/1918)

Written by Mark Richardson, convener of the Melbourne Traditionalists. Article originally published in the ‘Oz Conservative’ on 3rd of October, 2010.

Liberalism is the ruling ideology of our age. It is the dominant political belief which is radically transforming our society. As Professor John Schwarzmantel puts it:

Contemporary liberal-democracy is an ideological society, where a particular version of liberalism prevails

There is a destructive side to liberalism. The key liberal belief is that we are made human through autonomy: through our ability to self-determine or to self-define. Professor John Kekes writes:

the true core of liberalism, the inner citadel for whose protection all the liberal battles are waged [is] autonomy

How are people made autonomous? They must be “liberated” from whatever is predetermined rather than self-determined. This includes their sex (being masculine or feminine), their ethny (inherited forms of communal identity), traditional forms of family life (since these are given to us rather than self-defined), and objective forms of morality (since under the logic of liberalism the good must also be self-defined).

What liberalism replaces these with is a vision of a society made up of blank slate, atomised individuals, in pursuit of their own subjective, self-generated good.

This is destructive because it means having to make things which matter a great deal not matter. Most people, for instance, do identify in important ways with a distinct, inherited national tradition; they do not look forward to its replacement by a more radically individualistic existence within an international system.

Similarly, most people identify positively with being a man or a woman and do not wish to suppress this identity within an androgynous society which is hostile to sex distinctions.

The effects of liberalism are felt by many people to be symptoms of social breakdown or decline. But this then raises the question of how liberalism has been able to maintain its dominance. How has liberalism been able to limit effective opposition to its grip on Western societies?

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Second tier arguments

One part of the answer is that liberalism has been able to limit political debate to second tier arguments. The underlying assumptions of liberalism are rarely brought to the surface and argued about. Instead, debate is limited to a secondary question, namely how do you best regulate a liberal society made up of millions of atomised, individual wills?

How you answer this question determines where you are placed on the political spectrum. Those on the right tend to believe that society is best regulated by the free market. It is typical for right-liberals to believe that individuals can compete in the market for their own profit and that the hidden hand of the market will regulate the outcome for the overall prosperity and progress of society.

Right-liberals therefore tend to focus on Economic Man: man in his role as a rational economic agent. Originally, right-liberals tended to be anti-statist, as they saw state intervention as distorting the mechanism of the market. These days it is the more radical right-liberals, the libertarians, who maintain this anti-statist position.

Those on the left are more skeptical that a liberal society can be regulated by the market. They see the market as generating inequalities, which then makes it harder for some to pursue a self-defining lifestyle. They think it more egalitarian and more rational for society to be regulated by the neutral expertise of a state bureaucracy. The focus of the left is not so much on Economic Man but on Social Man.

The further left you go on the political spectrum, the more anti-capitalist you become (so that Marxism is correctly thought of as being far left).

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The case of the UK

Let’s take the UK as an example. A newspaper columnist like Theo Hobson is not shy when it comes to declaring his support for the state ideology:

All we seek is a reassertion of liberalism as the nation's common ideology.

He can assert this confidently because both major parties in the UK are committed to liberalism. The so-called Conservative Party, for instance, is currently led by David Cameron. He looks on his party as a “champion of liberal values”:

today we have a Conservative Party … which wants Britain to be a positive participant in the EU, as a champion of liberal values.

So the Conservatives are liberals. More specifically they are right-liberals, as they prefer to have society regulated by a free market rather than by a centralised state. That’s why Cameron has declared that his party “supports open markets,” is “committed to decentralisation and localism," and aims to strengthen “our economy by freeing the creators of wealth, especially small businesses, to create the jobs and prosperity we need.”

And what of the left? Beatrice Webb defined the project of the left back in 1928. Rather than relying on the market to regulate society, the left was motivated by,

our common faith in a deliberately organised society – our belief in the application of science to human relations … the common people, served by an elite of unassuming experts

This is the technocratic solution to regulating liberal society. Ed Miliband is the current leader of the Labour Party in the UK. In setting out his political agenda he warned,

Our society is at risk of being reshaped in ways that will devastate the proud legacy of liberalism. We see a free market philosophy being applied to our schools …

Miliband is defining his politics exactly as you would expect a left-liberal to do: he commits himself to liberalism, but is not so keen on free market solutions.

Those who support the two main parties can be passionate in their allegiances. That can make it seem as if we have more choice than we really do. We really only get a choice as to how best to regulate liberalism, not whether we want to continue to run society along liberal lines. And yet it is the liberalism itself that is doing the damage.

We need to open up politics, so that the important first tier issues are more widely understood and discussed.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏@Aussie_EliasP

Recently, there has been an interesting debate emerging between Keith Woods and Joel Davis on whether or not it is necessary for nationalists to adopt the ideology of national socialism. Keith opened by critiquing NS for its German Chauvinism and suggesting it could simply be stepped over as a historical curiosity, and Joel has replied with an extensive defence of its ideological necessity.

Since the issue has been raised, I feel that this is a good time to weigh in from an Australian Nativist perspective, not in a spirit of anger or hostility, but simply because National Socialists are undeniably a serious and popular presence within dissident politics in Australia and Joel’s arguments are worth responding to. Further to that, the criticism has often been made of Nativists that they lack a coherent or at least well thought through ideology, and I feel that on the whole there is greater work to be done to expound upon our political idealism from a more academic perspective. This response is my personal contribution to the start of that ideological task based upon my own ideological journey towards what I see as a consistent and coherent nationalist position, and I don’t claim to speak for all Nativists.

Before responding to Joel’s points, however, I want to emphasise that despite underlying ideological disagreements, there is a complete agreement on the need for principled racialism, mass deportations of non-whites from white nation-states, and demographic restoration of our nations. Australia needs that to survive. Agreeing to all that as well as the need to reject liberalism and its anthropology, National Socialism, as a unified philosophy, is still open to a critique from the right as has been made in the past by representatives of the Traditionalist School. I would not argue that pushing National Socialism is necessarily counter-productive, but I think National Socialism has flaws and limitations that mean that it is not as productive to push it as it is other nationalist alternatives, though I mean that in an ultimate rather than a tactical sense. For me, the key problem is that National Socialism is often presented as an all-encompassing worldview, and its quasi-Nietzschean philosophical foundation is asserted without much serious exposition. In this response, I first highlight what I see as some of the fundamental flaws of the National Socialism expressed by Joel and then propose an ideological solution combining Political Platonism and Nativism.

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The Need for Ideology

Joel states that his key contention is that the idea of nationalism requires its own ideology which centres that idea. While this sounds appealing prima facie, it's worth asking whether the idea of nationalism actually belongs at the core of a comprehensive worldview. Is Joel suggesting that this should be our first principle, or is it the case that nationalisms follow from other principles that are more fundamental? It seems to me that nationalism is too concrete and particular to form the basis for a truly universal ideology in that it is necessarily operating in a relativistic sphere of different and irreducible national ideas, rather than being a true absolute.

Joel appeals to a Nietzschean idea of life as an existential struggle to philosophically justify his view of the primacy of nationalism, but I believe that appeals to these quasi-Nietzschean views that were based in what was in the first place the National Socialist distortion of Nietzsche’s philosophy are not especially helpful. They are simply window dressing applied to what is ultimately an appeal to the brute fact of biological struggle on an ontic level. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is a serious thinker and one with some helpful ideas. I follow Fr Pavel Florensky and the other Silver Age Russian philosophers in reading Nietzsche as a representative of the primacy of the cult rebelling against the “Socratism” of the rational and abstract worldview of modern science and the rational individual of liberalism, for example, in its Kantian mode. While Nietzsche sought to invert Platonism, in focusing on the sensuousness and meaning creation of cultic activity in the form of Greek tragedy, he actually leads us back to what Florensky called “concrete idealism.” This concrete idealism or sacral materialism sees both human tools and conceptual thinking as derivative from primordial cultic activity. Despite these helpful pointers, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and the relativism of his project of value creation speaks against him being a viable option for a standalone worldview due to all the classical objections raised by Plato such as the transcendental necessity of Forms for the possibility of thought and speech or the transcendental necessity of the Good for ethical choice. Furthermore, in bringing the voluntarist project to its ultimate logical conclusion he fails to cut off what is actually one of the key foundations of nihilism.

Due to all of the above, I believe that we cannot base the nationalist idea on some sort of “life principle” and instead should turn to the primary aspects of Political Platonism, including the metaphysical apparatus of Platonism which I personally accept in its specifically Orthodox Christian form. Other principles, such as the ideal of the “mean constitution” in political theory will also be prior to key ideas of nationalism that Joel raises in relation to the struggle between democracy and liberalism. Ultimately, the primacy of the Good is undeniable, first of all in accounting for the very existence of nations. Nationalism follows only in relation to the determination of the unique “personality” of ethnic groups in relation to Mind as the principle of essence. Furthermore, eugenics should be grounded here in relation to the stable Good as Plato had it, and not in relation to Nietzschean struggle and value creation. Joel’s statement that “the essence of National Socialism is the good of the nation being elevated above any individual interest” sounds more like the essence of the classical Platonic political project of the guidance of the state by philosopher kings. All this is to say that nationalism as National Socialism does not reach the necessary level of metaphysical thinking to provide the first principles for a complete worldview, but nationalism does work as a secondary result of Platonist political principles.

But if nationalism as an ideology is too particular to form the fundamental basis of a comprehensive worldview, it is also too universal to be suitable as something that is true to nations themselves. This might seem bizarre and counter-intuitive, but a one-fits-all National Socialism implies a uniformity of national ideas that eliminates the possibility of a true pluralism of ethnic consciousnesses and political predispositions. To steal from a famous quote, I’ve met Australians, Americans, Chinese, and Indians, but I’ve never met Man or a nationalism suitable for him.

Instead, I want to propose that we reserve the word “Nativism” to identify the particularity and specificity of nations and their absolute cultural and historical concreteness that make them irreducible to universalising projects. The non-ideological nature of Nativism need not be its weakness, but rather its essence as comprehensively grasping the historical course of the folk as a whole, including in its contingent historical contradictions and the varying ideological expressions of its Great Men. Like the German völkisch movement, then, Nativism would be pre-ideological in its focus on the organic expression of the nation. To use an analogy, Nativism is the organic folk song that the national composer of ideology uses to shape his style.

To sum up this section of my response, Australian Nationalists should reject National Socialism as a philosophy or worldview for its limitations relative to Political Platonism, and they should reject it as a “pure” nationalism because it is not an organic expression of our own concrete history and culture as a nation but rather a foreign German expression.

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Life as Struggle, Biological Racialism, and a Philosophical Foundation for a Non-Reductionist Nativist Specificity

Joel states that the foundations of the nationalist idea, which he takes to be National Socialism, include biological racialism, folkishness, and social organicism. Accepting social organicism as a good on Plato’s principle of the relationship between unity and the good, I would still like to examine the entanglement of biological racialism and folkishness as I believe that much of what has been said frames biological racialism in the wrong way by making it a foundational principle. To be clear, I do not want to reject race realism but rather put it into what I see as the correct perspective. Biological racialism, on its own and as a primary idea, is problematic in that it is bringing us into the modern worldview of limiting reality to the material and quantitative realm and then aiming to re-erect spirit or mind as an emergent phenomenon. I believe Joel does this several times in referring to the basis of the spirit of the folk as the “blood” or in suggesting that what makes Germans German is primarily their belonging to the “Aryan race.”

In contrast to this, I propose a different project which could be identified with Political Platonism but could also be characterised as a critical and constructive project that starts from the standpoint of Sacred Tradition. In other words, it is a critique of the modern ideologies described by Guénon as the “reign of quantity,” and it replaces the subjects of those ideologies through the restoration of quality (mind, form, telos) to quantity (mechanistic matter). The Liberal “individual” becomes the “person,” Marxist “class” becomes “caste,” and, pertinently, the “race” (a material biological category) of National Socialism becomes the “folk” or “Dasein.” Race, although an inseparable ingredient of the folk, should not be held to be its only basis.

This view also forms the core of a suitable alternative to liberalism. Replacing the “individual” as subject of politics with the “person” or “Dasein” implies the necessity of the community for the existence of the human being, as opposed to the atomistic conception of humanity found in liberal anthropology. The human being is always already “thrown” - to use Heidegger's term - into an ethnic social context with a specific history. If we accept this, we have already moved past not just the liberal individual but also purely biological concepts of race, not necessarily by rejecting race, but by enhancing an “objective” racialism with its “subjective” counterpart of history, culture, and temperament.

Of course, for those who are familiar with Heidegger, the talk of subject and object may have raised alarm bells (for those who don’t care for philosophy, you may wish to skip this paragraph and the next). Heidegger's project in his first and best-known work, Being and Time, was to refute the Cartesian philosophical picture that interpreted the human in terms of a subject that then finds itself in an objective world. Once this philosophical starting point of subject and object is accepted, the classical “problem of the external world” must be raised. How can I prove that there is an “external world” that transcends the "representations” immanent to the subjective experiences in my mind? This problem is developed in Descartes’ philosophical work, comes up again in Kant, and is raised once more by Husserl, Heidegger's teacher. The full explanation of how Husserl's work in the sixth investigation of the Logical Investigations on the categorial intuition of states of affairs raised Heidegger's "question of being” will have to wait another time, but the important point to make now is that Heidegger sought to go beyond Husserl's Cartesian style phenomenology where the investigation of the immanent structure of the subjective mind follows the casting into doubt, the “suspension,” of the transcendent external world. Instead, Heidegger proposed that the human being, Dasein, is always already being-in-the-world. To question one’s world is to presuppose that one always already “has” it. I do not think Heidegger was entirely successful in this project, and neither did Heidegger. His later work departed from what he saw as the limitations and failures of his project of analysing Dasein and reducing it to modes of temporalisation.

The failure of Being and Time is also the point where the contemporary Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin departs, by suggesting that Dasein isn't one universal transcendental structure of human experience, but rather that there is a plurality of Daseins. Dugin bases this on Heidegger's statement that “Dasein existiert völkisch” (Dasein exists through the folk). In Dugin's view, if there is more than one folk, then it follows that there should be more than one Dasein. This is where Dugin begins with his elaborate work on ethnosociology, most of which I agree with and will not rehash here and now. Where I disagree is with Dugin's suggestion that it is necessary to do away with biological conceptions of race in order to develop a Heideggerian and Traditionalist understanding of the folk. I take my starting point from Lilian Alweiss’ critique of Husserl and Heidegger in her book, The World Unclaimed. Alweiss makes the point that despite his effort to regain the world “leapt over” by Husserl, Heidegger still “leaps over” the material world of embodiment to reach his ideal of a transcendence dependent on Dasein and its complete finitude. A correct understanding of the human person must take into account not just their thrownness into a community of language and culture that always already contaminates any “individuality,” it also requires us to understand the embodiment of the person in a material world, and that embodiment is equally conditioned by the physical (including neurophysiological) characteristics of the folk.

An objection might be raised at this point that this turn to materialism is contrary to the point of the project of returning to Sacred Tradition and is just another turn back to the pseudo-Darwinian ideas of National Socialism, but I am not suggesting anything like an emergentist perspective on mind where it is generated by matter (blood). Rather, once again we are dealing with Florensky’s sacral materialism. As David Bentley Hart has pointed out in his recent tome on the philosophy of mind, All Things Are Full of Gods, biology with its study of life is the hardest of the scientific disciplines to reduce to the materialist mechanism of the modern world picture. Life always involves complex intentional and relational systems that are purposive and imply a fundamental teleology to the cosmos. In relation to the human being, the focus on embodiment simply brings us back to the fundamental Platonist point that as embodied we dwell in the world of matter and opinion (doxa), opposed to the immaterial world of the Forms where the intellect can access true knowledge (episteme). We could just as well describe the neurophysiology of a human being as a physical expression developing teleologically towards the form of the folk. It is a dialectical play between matter and spirit, but ultimately in an encompassing picture it is matter that is reducible to Spirit and not the other way around.

The practical point of trawling through all this philosophical material is to bring us back to the serious conception of Nativism that I stated above as the focus on the utmost specificity of the nation, one which can stand against affirmations of a crudely materialist “life principle” that belongs with the rest of the trash of modernity. The whole point of being a Nativist is to take seriously our thrownness as Australian people into a concrete Australian community. That is what should be the subject of our political theory as Australian Nationalists. We are a unique folk and that is our existential starting point, including our cultural expressions in art and our existing political institutions. We don't just read Banjo Paterson or Percy Stephensen or Alfred Deakin out of some quaint nostalgia, we read them to understand who we already are. None of this can be reduced to simply the logical outflow of having a certain blood. It is the form of our folk that determines who we are, and we accept that subset of the human species that is compatible to this form, namely white people. That this is our existential starting point, however, does not mean that it is our absolute starting point as I explained above in the distinction between the ideological task and the need to remain true to the nation. With the ideological task we turn to Sacred Tradition and the work of Plato, Guénon, Eliade, Sherrard, etc.

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Bridging Nativism and Political Platonism

I mentioned at the start of the previous section that when we take our standpoint on Tradition, class analysis is replaced by caste analysis. This is the bridge from the folk, or Nativism, to Tradition, or Platonism. I adopt much of Dugin's understanding of folk, which is structuralist. His view of the diachronic development of peoples is that each successive stage of development is retained in a synchronic structure. The first stage is the primitive ethnos, whose central personality is the shaman. Here we are quite dependent on certain theories of Eliade regarding shamanism, the worldview of the shaman, and how the enchanted reality of a tribe of people is constituted. These theories are built on ethnographic work by Sergei Shirokogoroff, hence the close affinity Dugin has to Eliade here. In this view, the shaman regulates the life of the primitive community, exorcising evil spirits, providing advice through the mediation of good spirits, and healing members of the community through his spiritual powers. I would again connect this back to Fr Pavel Florensky’s view that it is the cult that is the primordial principle of any human society (Eden as Temple). The ethnic group clearly already exists and has an orientation towards the transcendent Good, but vitally all this is in the pre-ideological form of the completely enchanted archaic world.

In the development to the next stage of human community, the folk, the shaman becomes the figure of the priest. This movement from the ethnos to the folk occurs through the subjugation of one tribe by another, or through the internal development of a hierarchical caste structure, which amounts to roughly the same thing in the end. Thus, we move from a tribe with a shaman to a more clearly defined tripartite structure of priest caste, warrior aristocracy caste, and peasant/artisan caste. This is all familiar from Guénon and Dumézil. At this point, we have the development of civilisations and cities, and the creation of elaborate theologies and philosophies. It is in the retention of the contemplative principle embodied in the shaman in the caste of the priest that we maintain the organic relationship between the folk in its existential concreteness and the Absolute. Of course, the most relevant theology and philosophy for Australians today would be Christianity and Platonism. These are the foundational aspects of the Tradition that permeated through the different folk groups of the West and came down to us. Since I have written about both of these things in relation to Australia before (here and here), I don’t feel the need to repeat myself on all the subtleties that belong to the discussion of those topics right now. The point once again is that our existential starting point is not the same as our absolute starting point.

The absolute starting point is God, His natural and special revelations, and His idea of and providential care for our people. The bridge between these two things is the priesthood that preserves a regular tradition of initiation. The only such source of initiation in Australia is the Orthodox Christian Church. Go to Church, find a priest, and that man is your connection to Tradition. Books and internet posts cannot initiate you. To bring this back to the topic of National Socialism, however, it is obvious that National Socialism as a movement or an ideology never achieved this clear relationship to God. Perhaps if one considers certain movements such as Legionarism to be NS, then there is a conversation to be had, but the German National Socialism that is most widely fetishised clearly had only an ambiguous position in relation to Tradition, and then only in the more marginal positions of a Hermann Wirth or Heinrich Himmler. Joel mentioned Himmler’s aim to recreate some sort of knightly order in the SS - thus only realising the active principle and not the superior contemplative principle - but he doesn’t have an actual continuity even to that. Modern National Socialists have to turn to bizarre figures like Savitri Devi in order to turn their political idol into a religious idol. From a Traditionalist standpoint, this is an obvious instance of counter-initiation with no divinely ordained lineage and thus is to be completely rejected. Once again, major elements of both original National Socialism and its contemporary adaptations must be rejected.

I think this response has gone on long enough, but I would like to respond in the future to Joel’s points on Hegel, Romanticism, and the Problem of Parliamentarianism with reference to Carl, as with Hegel and Schmitt I believe that we do have interesting contributions to our ideological task - but only if contextualised in the above worldview. I will reserve this for another article, because I think these things should be dealt with in relation to the history of Australia and our own institutional forms which were derived from the British Empire. This would be to go into too many different directions in what is already a long response, so perhaps that will form a part II to this or a standalone focused article. The point of what I have covered here is merely to question the fundamental bases of National Socialism as a comprehensive worldview or ideology, and to propose a superior alternative.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏@Aussie_EliasP

It is often the case that the most mysterious things are those that are seemingly the most mundane. Let us take words as an example. We use words every day to communicate with other people, and yet few stop to consider the nature of words themselves. What is a word? What may immediately come to mind is the sound of a word or the pattern of letters that spells it on a page; however, these are only the outer body of the word. In its interiority, a word is a pure meaning, an entirely mental, spiritual, and transcendental phenomenon, completely irreducible to crude matter. In its function of essaying a message, a word is angelic. Today, I want to communicate a vision of a future Australia in the word Asgard, drawing from the inspired words of our ancestors to see what we could yet become.

The greatest philosopher of the 20^th century, Martin Heidegger, believed that the deepest connection between man and being could be found in primordial thinking. Because of this, he sought to trace the etymologies of words to uncover profound yet concealed meanings that had been covered by the everyday usage of a word by the average everyman who is always completely lost in inauthentic existence. Even these most lost souls, however, may still feel the true power of words in the fascination of myth. For many men of the right, they will have found this fascination, perhaps for the first time, in Tolkien’s story, The Lord of the Rings. To go further and deeper into the mystery his myth, we can turn to a seed of Tolkien’s thought which he found in the Old English poem Crist I:

éala éarendel engla beorhtast / ofer middangeard monnum sended
Hail Earendel, brightest of angels, over Middle-Earth to men sent

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For the ancient Anglo-Saxons, Earendel was the morning star, and with the coming of Christianity this was interpreted within the matrix of Scripture. Etymologically, the name means “the dawn wanderer,” but in its usage it always had a theological meaning as the Anglo-Saxons, like most peoples, lived in the “enchanted world” of pre-modernity and associated the visible heavenly bodies with spiritual beings. In Revelation 22:16, though, it is Christ takes the title of Morning Star:

“I Jesus have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches. I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright and morning star.” (KJV)

Thus, it seems to me that the line from the Crist I poem refers to the coming of Christ, the Old Testament Angel of the Lord, born into the world to save mankind and redeem creation. What is important in both this and other Old English poetry such as The Dream of the Rood or Beowulf, is that Anglo-Saxon culture is not Judaised or cut from its roots with the incorporation of the Christian message but is sanctified so as to be expressed in its fullest and most authentic sense. Christ is sent into Midgard so that it may become Asgard. Both the words Midgard and Asgard contain our modern word “yard” meaning place, while the “As” of Asgard refers to the gods. Thus, Christ’s mission is for men to become gods in a heavenly city.

As I have written about before, this is the mission of civilisational deification, or the full realisation of the Church as the City of God. What is important about this is that the spreading of the Church should not result in the destruction of the nations but in their redemption and transfiguration by the divine light of God, the light given to men by the Morning Star. There is no need for me to express myself in the words of the Hebrews or the Greeks for my own language is a rich treasury of meaning leading up to the Word who contains all meanings. Heidegger is completely right in suggesting that men dwell upon the Earth poetically within the relational matrix of the four crossing interconnections of sky – earth and gods – mortals.

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Much of this, however, may seem completely foreign and unrelated to Australia. After all, the First Fleet landed in 1788, only one year before the French Revolution began and sounded the death knell for the Traditional order in European civilisation, an order that was already at that time ailing from the counter-initiatory assaults made against during the Reformation and the Enlightenment. In a sense, Australia was born old. No wonder, then, that even when the Christian religion was relatively strong in this country it was often derided by the cultured as the nonsense of the “wowser.” For those not so familiar with somewhat antiquated slang, the famous bush poet C.J. Dennis has a telling definition: “Wowser: an ineffably pious person who mistakes this world for a penitentiary and himself for a warder”.

Nonetheless, no society can remain completely cut off from God and Holy Tradition. What is lacking in an authentic initiatory form can still appear in confused intimations of true religion or some diluted forms of Christianity. Desire for the transcendent has always appeared. For instance, in the cases of the 2GB (Giordano Bruno) radio station, or in the religion of Alfred Deakin, it took the form of Theosophy. Deakin always felt that Australia’s Federation was something guided by divine purpose. As he wrote in the retrospect to his work The Federal Story:

Regarded as whole, it is safe to say that if ever anything ought to be styled providential it is the extraordinary combination of circumstances, persons and their most intricate interrelations of which the Commonwealth is about to become the crown. Any one of a thousand minor incidents might have deferred it for years or generations. To those who watched its inner workings, followed its fortunes as if their own, and lived a life of devotion to it day by day, its actual accomplishment must always appear to have been secured by a series of miracles.

Even putting aside these more unorthodox expressions of religion in Australia though, we must never forget that what makes this country Australia is the Australian people. We are a great union of Anglo-Celts represented on our flag by the crosses of our patron saints St Andrew, St George, and St Patrick. We may have been born in the profane age of the modern world, but we come from the same Anglo-Saxon and Celtic stock that created the golden age of art and religion that we see in the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon period of Christian art. Our whole task will be to navigate the complex relationship between the Orthodox Christian Platonism of Saint Dionysios the Areopagite and the radical metaphysical suggestions of Heidegger’s “interconnecting four” to establish a New Beginning flowing from both the heights and abyssal depths where God is hidden yet revealed.

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It is because the Anglo-Celtic blood of our ancestors flows through our veins and our language is grown from many of the same roots that we Australians should look to the Insular period and the later periods of Beowulf and Crist I for a vision of our own civilisational deification and a hint of the directions we must travel in search of a new cultural synthesis. We must carefully read the words of our ancestors in order to understand how it was that they dwelt upon the earth, and hear their call, especially that of the saints who act as angels. Theirs is a call from the past that beckons us into a glorious future where men and gods once more may walk together in the temple of paradise before the face of God. A call to enter into an Australian Asgard.

Article originally submitted to The Spectator but turned down, written by Bob Stone

In 1998, the newly formed One Nation Party won 22% of the vote in the Queensland state election, surpassing the Liberal Party to gain 11 seats. The 2024 Queensland state election is over, and One Nation’s staggering zero seats finish will hopefully send that party into the dustbin of Australian political history. It beggars belief how, at a time when first-preference votes for the major parties are collapsing and nationalists are achieving power in Europe and New Zealanad, Pauline Hanson’s One Nation has completely failed to capitalise on the nativist mood sweeping the western world. A bevy of public surveys show supermajorities in favour of immigration restriction. The problem is not with her platform. The problem is and always has been Pauline.
The party produces no projects outside of her influence. She fits in with the rest of the minor-party right, a broken fractal of personality cults, more akin to rival warlords than the generals of an organised resistance movement.

Wilfred Bion’s theory of basic assumption groups explains how dependency dynamics can inhibit a group’s ability to function as a focused, task-oriented working group. PHON’s strong dependency on Hanson as not merely the leader of the party but its proprietary owner creates a dynamic which prioritises personal loyalty over policy development. What we are left with is a personality cult fronted by an unimpressive personality.

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Where Nigel Farage is charismatic, Pauline Hanson is shrill. Where Le Pen’s virile protege Jordan Bardella is young and energetic, Hanson is old. As Donald Trump wins with more radical rhetoric over time, Hanson seems afraid to gin up the nationalist sentiments that swept her to prominence in the late 1990s. She reentered politics in the 2010s to heap scorn on Australia’s relatively small population of Muslims, but in 2024 both major parties have beaten her to the punch in unveiling ambitious plans to wean Australia off of its dependence on mass immigration. She inveighs against the Woke, but has outlined no headline-grabbing policies to address it, as Governor DeSantis has in the United States. We hear nothing about offshoring international students, who now make up 42% of Sydney’s CBD population, or shutting down the visa-mill VET colleges responsible for Australia’s unsustainable population growth.

So far as I can tell, the One Nation party exists to syphon up donations for Hanson’s weekly Please Explain! Cartoon. The media paints the archetypal One Nation voter as a bigoted old man left behind by a changing world, content to laugh at the Woke without acting to arrest Australia’s decline. This is not an attack directed towards those who vote for One Nation, intelligent larrikins unshackled by the politically correct attitudes dominating the other parties. My criticism is directed at the eunuch leeches lurking in the court of Queensland’s crimson-haired queen, who fail to meaningfully articulate or act on the anxieties of her voters. As populists in America are drawing up ambitious plans to completely restructure the federal bureaucracy, Hanson can’t even comprehend governance, let alone election. As James Ashby’s embarrassing trip to the United States revealed, the provincial party isn’t even competent enough to liaise with global power-brokers like A.R.C. or NatCon or other consortiums flirting with a right wing populist internationale.

We come to the real reason for Pauline Hanson’s political longevity. Unlike in Germany and Austria, where right-wing parties that top the polls are locked out of coalition governments, One Nation is clearly preserved as a stalking horse for the Liberal Party, a satellite whether they know it or not. While Hanson languished in jail, John Howard and Tony Abbott implemented some of her ideas to popular acclaim. Howard, to his credit, recognised her supporters’ grievances as legitimate. This marked the peak of Pauline’s political influence, and provided the world with an example of public pressure being correctly applied in a democratic system. The insurgent party manoeuvre was similar to how Farage’s UKIP helped to get Brexit over the line, before that party imploded just after it gave Red Wall Labour voters the permission they needed to vote Tory, or how surrogacy for Robert Kennedy Jr’s alternative-health campaign gave American Silicon Valley billionaires the psychological permission they needed to defect from the Democratic Party to eventually support Donald Trump.

But pressure campaigns require an ideologically ironclad pressure group. To that end, it’s simply incredible that after 12 years of the Liberal Party destroying their credibility with their right-wing base that there has been no viable populist challenge to the party of the sort that we see abroad. The major parties are dying, and 70% of Australians want to rethink our present dependence on mass immigration. But while the Greens and Teals cultivate patronage networks and radical constituencies, Australia has failed to develop an alternative right.

Instead, Australians have intellectually repulsive “meme parties” hoovering up the right-wing minor party vote, subsisting off of the nostalgia of Hanson’s painfully old cult. Like their fellow political transvestite, Victorian Senator Ralph Babet, they wallow in pseudo-Trumpist tastelessness. They import American culture wars, without fully comprehending any of the intellectual criticisms of the postwar consensus that Donald Trump first articulated, and that vice-president-elect Vance, Robert Lighthizer and Jeremy Carl are now intellectualising.

It’s clear that Mehreen Faruqi’s case against Pauline Hanson was wrongfully decided and threatens free speech in Australia. But it perfectly encapsulates the life cycle of a One Nation media story. A performative, self-destructive stunt for donations, before Pauline plays victim to shore up the sympathy of her misguided followers and retreats into the electoral wilderness.

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Despite its pretensions to being “anti-establishment,” One Nation’s internal hierarchies are even more ossified than the cursus honorum of both Australian major parties. Hanson’s proprietary party is run like a feudal estate, officially bearing the name of its queen. It is the only absolute monarchy in Australian politics, proving Hans-Hermann Hoppe wrong about the high time-preference of dictators. Young right-wingers across the country have made the decision that they’re better off creating a fiefdom within the Liberal Party or sit and wait for a new party to emerge than they are anchoring themselves to the fate of One Nation. The party is quasi-dictatorial, and too many pointless controversies to list consume members’ limited time, manpower and money. PHON’s former national executive treasurer was previously charged with fraud. From co-founder David Ettridge’s “Hanson Files,” to James Ashby’s perpetually precarious financial situation, to PHON’s recent deselection of its only Queensland MP before the state election, PHON courts controversy to little gain but its leaders’ self-preservation.

The kerfuffle over former One Nation MLC Mark Latham’s “problematic” tweets was merely a convenient pretext for Pauline to purge another outstanding personality from the party who shared her stubbornness and national name recognition. Particularly with the fractious New South Wales branch alleging that payments from the NSW Electoral Commission’s Administration Fund were being redirected to the Brisbane office.

In the final chapters of his recently released book “On Leadership,” Tony Blair advises future political leaders to create a constituency, and not a clique. A consistent base of political support within civil society, rather than temporary parliamentary allies who will backstab you once your short-term mutual goals have been achieved. The leader’s clique “provides comfort” while a tangible constituency keeps their movement alive after them.

Germany’s controversial Alternative für Deutschland grew out of a matrix of nationalistic civil society organisations predating the fall of the Berlin Wall. It was even once known as the “professor’s party” for its early support from rarified Eurosceptic academics. Its Institut für Staatspolitik think-tank can be viewed as Germany’s answer to Australia’s pugilistic Institute for Public Affairs. Has One Nation created anything like this, or even anything like the Young Liberals? Or is it merely a grift kept alive so an Ipswich fishmonger doesn’t have to get a real job? 32 MPs have quit One Nation in its relatively short lifetime; is there a reason for that?

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Should you disagree with my evaluation of Hanson’s competence and sincerity, the unavoidable fact is that PHON are ineffectual as a political party and do not deserve votes. They represent a species of political antimatter hampering the successful populist victories achieved across the pond with Winston Peters’s NZ First Party.

Political figures should be judged by how well they succeeded in fulfilling their stated goals. As we approach the 30th anniversary of Pauline Hanson’s Maiden Speech, her quixotic attack on the multicultural industry has produced no results. Multiculturalism has not been “abolished.” Political correctness, “reverse racism” and mass immigration are worse than ever, and the Aussie battler continues to pay the bill. Hanson’s complete failure to create a constituency that will survive her strangled Australian nationalism in its crib. For any New Right party to emerge, and for the LNP to properly reform, PHON needs to die.

Australians are natural nationalists. Our offshore refugee processing and points-based immigration systems are the envy of populists across the world. Australians habitually scorn tall-poppy elites and their social-engineering schemes, as reflected in the results of the Voice Referendum, but these laudable cultural attributes time and again fail to find a political expression independent of the cartelised major parties. Why did the populist moment miss the Antipodes? You may point to “structural factors” if you wish. I will drink to the demise of Hansonism.

Written by Elias Priestly, you can find all his previous articles on the Australian Natives Association website and find more of his content on 𝕏 @Aussie_EliasP

January 2025 was an amazing month in Australian nationalism. From climbing mountains to protesting on the street, we have seen various nationalist groups engage in a wide range of activities that have both celebrated and defended the Australian spirit. Key dates of the month such as Federation Day and Australia Day were celebrated, but we also cannot forget that state persecution continued with the activists of the “Australia Day 17” facing ridiculous charges from the police. Yes, we will remember and learn lessons from this month, but it is a broader theme of memory that needs to be discussed, which is the importance of cultural memory.

Cultural memory, in contrast to your own private memories, is the memory that is shared by a group and is reinforced through collective ceremonies and embodiment in memorials such as statues and shrines. Just as an individual, if he loses all his memory, loses much of his identity, a collective nation, if it does not reinforce and defend its cultural memory, loses itself and becomes easy prey for its enemies. When anti-Australian activists topple statues and protest on Australia Day, they are engaged in an all-out war on our national psyche. They seek to erase our memory of who we are.

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Given that our enemies are actively fighting on this front, it is vital for nationalists to both defend and take ground in the struggle over our cultural memory. With Australia Day having ended for the year, the nationalist movement should now look forward to the next events on the Australian calendar to guide our thinking, debates, and actions around cultural memory. Of course, we all already understand the importance of ANZAC Day, and like Australia Day it is a key event that the state has yet failed to extirpate, but I believe that it is important that in each month we have at least one day that we can focus on to build our understanding of ourselves.

Last year, the Australian Natives’ Association held its first Banjo Paterson Night on February 17^th, the day of the great poet’s birth. The idea behind Banjo Night is that nationalists should consciously seek to strengthen our awareness and appreciation of our national culture and literature by taking time to celebrate the man who is Australia’s best-known poet and, alongside Henry Lawson, a key creator of Australian identity. While we focused narrowly on Paterson’s poetry last year, this year we will cast a wider net and look at Lawson and the Jindyworobak poets for their expression of our unique character and vision of our future.

We will also maintain the focus on Paterson by shining more of a light on a less well-appreciated aspect of his life and poetical aspirations, which is that he sought to be a poet of the British Empire. This is best seen in his work from the time of the Second Boer War when he was a special war correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. It was at that time that he first met Rudyard Kipling in person, although Kipling was already something of a model and inspiration for him in his own literary journey. Indeed, the Barrier Miner newspaper of NSW depicted their meeting in the words, “The Australian Kipling has met the other Kipling.” The influence of Kipling is important, as it was partly through his influence on the Banjo’s wartime ballads that we developed the image of the Australian soldier that would become central to the ANZAC legend. That ANZAC legend is now a pillar of our cultural memory. The following stanza from the poem The Reveille is illustrative of this imperial influence:

When we hear our brethren call,
Sound a clear reveille.
Then we answer, one and all,
Answer that the world may see,
Of the English stock are we,
At their side we still will be,
Sound a bold reveille.

This leads into the next key event on the nationalist calendar which is the 10^th of March: Commonwealth Day, or, as I still like to think of it, Empire Day. There was a time when Empire Day was the biggest national celebration on the Australian calendar, while Australia Day was a much more minor affair. As we can see from Paterson’s writing, even the strongly Nativist identity of the bush poets was still firmly placed in a context of Empire. I have argued in the past that, although Nativism must come first, it is very important to strengthen the civilisational bloc that is the Anglosphere.

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The celebration of Banjo Night in February followed by Empire Day in March sets a pattern that I believe is very important for nationalists to follow. We must first prioritise our uniquely Australian culture and history, which is the core of our identity, but then turn to the broader and internationally shared circle of British Imperial culture which also, undeniably, shapes our national expression. We are not merely British people in Australia, but we should be grateful to that parent nation that we took so much from. This is reason enough to celebrate Empire Day, but it will also provide us with an opportunity to build our international ties with our closest kin in related nationalist movements. I can see a time when this will once again be a proud celebration across the entire Anglosphere.

Of course, we should not look past all the mistakes of the British Empire, or even desire to reconstruct it in its inherently multiracial character. After all, it was the British Empire that several times prevented the implementation of immigration restriction policies in this country. Nevertheless, we should look to the “Old Commonwealth” of white British colonies as the image of the core of the Anglosphere. We also shouldn’t neglect Ireland although it has, in many ways and for good reasons, fallen out of the common fold. Many Australian nationalists would do well to spend a little more time studying the history of the British Isles, and especially pivotal events such as the British Civil Wars, and a little less time on the Continent with our German friends.

We have been bequeathed one of the finest political legacies in the world, and with some tweaking the British system of government can be refined into that great unity of organic nationalist feeling with rigorous platonist reason that Hegel proposed as the next stage of the advancement of Western politics. But, to make this a real possibility, we must remember who we are. We must defend the monuments that embody our memory in the spaces of our land. We must strengthen our cultural memory and shape the flow of time in the year after nationalist patterns.

By engaging with key dates on the national calendar, like Australia Day or ANZAC Day, Banjo Night or Empire Day, people tap into and absorb cultural memory. The nationalist movement must act as the cultural vanguard for the Australian populist right, because there is no one else who can do it.

Remember who you are.

Article written by Dr. Andrew McIntyre for the original National Observer, Summer 2004 issue.

Early in June, New Caledonia's President, Pierre Frogier, who is also a member of the French Lower House in Paris, told fellow M.P.s that "Pacific island states were falling into anarchy". Frogier was speaking during debates in the French National Assembly in Paris, where he stressed that New Caledonia was "lucky to have major natural resources such as nickel, a third of the world's reserves". He could have well added, New Caledonia was lucky to still have France.

Australia has sent troops to the Solomons as a last desperate move to prevent a slow and irreversible decline into anarchy. Our English-speaking Pacific neighbours are suffering catastrophic social, economic, infrastructure, educational and governance collapse.

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Little talked about, and standing in stark contrast, is the fact that New Caledonia, along with Tahiti, have a first-world standard of living and infrastructure to go with it. The per capita G.N.P. for New Caledonia ($U.S. 15,000 ) and French Polynesia ($U.S.17,000) are in the top 20 in the world; both are higher than New Zealand. Life expectancy in New Caledonia and Tahiti is 73 and 72 years respectively, compared with 54 for New Guinea, 66 for Vanuatu and 65 for the Solomons. Literacy rates are at 91 per cent. And to top it off, all have the same basic rights as French nationals.

Whatever one thinks of this French presence, one thing is certain. Notwithstanding the recent small Kanak protest against President Chirac on his three-day visit in late July, a very large majority of ethnic Kanaks do not want to end up like their Pacific neighbours.

It is true that in the 1980s New Caledonia was marked by political instability and civil unrest, but all of that has radically changed. In 1988, the Matignon Accords were established between the French Government and the two major political groups, the F.L.N.K.S., a coalition of pro-independence Kanak parties, and the "loyalist" R.P.C.R. — made up largely of white Caldoche settlers, metropolitan whites, some Kanaks and minority immigrant groups. A decision on independence was postponed for ten years.

This led to the framework of the Noumea Accord, signed on 5 May 1998, with a further vote on independence in 2014. Although the balance between separatists and loyalists has always been weighted towards staying with France — only 43 per cent of the population are Kanak — any move towards independence will always involve winning the confidence of the white "Caldoche" settlers and ensuring economic viability.

Nevertheless, the present French policy has specifically enshrined a process that is moving towards independence. There is a deliberate policy of openness towards its neighbours, support for the local Melanesian culture with the building of the huge, multi-million dollar Kanak Cultural Centre — an important focus for cultural exchanges with other Pacific Island countries — and government-to-government exchange programmes for training Kanaks, not to speak of huge infrastructure and training budgets.

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The Accords also contain an agreement for a process of inclusion of Kanaks in political power-sharing and a redirection of economic resources to Kanak provinces.

Sceptics will doubt French motives. France, unlike Britain, has had a long tradition of holding on to its former colonies. Martinique, Guadeloupe and Reunion are now integral parts of the French Republic, as much as, say, Calvados, or Savoie. But it would be hard to argue that this is for reasons of economic self-interest. All of these overseas departments, and the overseas Pacific Territories represent a net drain on the national purse of around $A2 billion annually. The fundamental principle on which France's policy rests is that of the will of the local population.

For New Caledonia, however, senior French diplomats see independence as inevitable and desirable. Nobody I have spoken to thinks otherwise. But when one considers the enormous amount of work still to be done by France in New Caledonia, there are seen to be important lessons to be learned about the disastrous results of hasty decolonisation seen elsewhere.

The strong European presence — 37 per cent of the total population — ensures a careful and long-term devolution towards independence, but at a pace that guarantees stability, adequate infrastructure and good governance. This is precisely why New Caledonia has a distinct advantage over its neighbouring Anglophone countries, and it underlines just what are the obstacles to successful decolonisation.

The Kanak population is very young, with 40 per cent under the age of 20 and a large majority of them dispersed in the bush. It is this group, naturally, that is struggling to improve its educational levels. Nearly a quarter of the European stock have a university education, whereas only 1.6 per cent of the indigenous Melanesians do. As with other Pacific Island peoples, the lack of motivation and opportunity, social and cultural difficulties due to the physical isolation of tribal villages, go a long way to explaining this situation.

Access to education is being addressed through a massive building programme and the establishment of live-in boarding schools. And all this comes with a sophisticated education system and a large number of highly trained metropolitan teachers.

There is also a comprehensive and successful "400 Managers" programme to address the specific deficit of managerial expertise in the indigenous population. The arrival of water, electricity and telephones has improved things enormously in the bush, but this infrastructure also requires skilled technicians to maintain it. Only a fifth of plumbers, electricians and builders are Melanesian, and of the 8,675 construction companies, nearly 80 per cent are in the southern province in and around Noumea, with only 4.9 per cent in the offshore islands.

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A little admitted fact is that neither tribal life nor traditional practices are compatible with the economic development activities that sustain independence. To bridge this gap, for instance, each region has a programme that goes out to the villages to provide technical and administrative training and support for small business. The Chamber of Commerce has developed a similar programme. In all, there are 80 training organisations in the territory, of which 60 are private. The state budget for this work has more than tripled since 1988. In 2002, over $200 million was set aside. Already, by 1998, 2,365 people had been on courses, including apprenticeships and training in mining, tourism and agriculture.

The problem of transforming a traditional, tribal society to a modern one is difficult and will take much time and effort even within this efficient and functioning wealthy state. Special effort has had to be expended to create work where it would otherwise be easy to become discouraged due to lack of experience.

The repeated demands of political separatist groups such as P.A.L.I.K.A. and other anti-colonial separatist groups, such as the Pacific Islands Association of Non-Government Organisations (P.I.A.N.G.O.), which continue to affirm "the indigenous Kanak people's right to self-determination and political independence from France", look very pie-in-the-sky, particularly in the context of the social, cultural, economic and political catastrophes surrounding them.

The truth is that, as Roger Sandall observes in his book, Culture Cult, (2001) "the best chance for a good life for indigenes is the same as for you and me: full fluency and literacy in [a world language], as much maths as we can handle, and a job". This of course is exactly what France's presence is attempting to establish for the Kanaks in New Caledonia. Through its infrastructure and long-term presence, France provides those things necessary for success.

At some stage we might just be honest enough to admit that hasty independence often does not work. The point of comparing the French experience with neighbouring states is that this process is not easy. Even in a society such as New Caledonia, where a large number of the people are European, with good infrastructure and an efficient, first world democratic governance, it will require a sustained and long-term effort. As Sandall emphasises, "Studies show that the contrast between the wealth-producing cultures of Western Europe and the poverty-producing traditional cultures goes back for centuries." Critically, he observes that "the break with communal arrangements was the essential first step forward". Clearly this is a long and painful process.

The strident rhetoric of separatism and imported images of Bob Marley and black revolutionary heroes used in the eighties have difficulty today convincing anyone that a solution lies down that road.

We should thank France for its sanguine and steady purpose in paving the way for a truly independent, sovereign and successful neighbour.

Written by Mark Richardson, convener of the Melbourne Traditionalists. Article originally published in the ‘Oz Conservative’ on 30th of November, 2024.

I saw the following brief exchange on social media this morning:

The idea being put forward here is that we fail to truly comprehend the opposite sex because we do not adequately comprehend how different the minds of men and women are.

I'd like to try to contribute something to addressing this issue. Before I do I need to point out that anything said on this topic is likely to be a generalisation lacking nuance, and that this type of discussion is mostly observational and therefore more tentative than, for instance, a discussion about the logical outcomes of political principles.

Men and women both clearly experience thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites. What I would propose is that men are more likely to have a self-awareness that leads them vertically toward "logos" - the ordering principle to be found within reality. A man's sense of self, therefore, is not centred in what he is thinking or feeling at any given time. It lies at a layer immediately above this, allowing men to disassociate to a degree from what is happening at the level of emotion and thought. A man might watch his thoughts and emotions rather than inhabiting them as his "self".

What this means is that it is possible to disagree with a man's thoughts or opinions without it much affecting his sense of self. It is very rare for a man to talk about not being "validated" or "seen" by someone who fails to agree with him. Men are more likely to fear the consequences of a lack of self-mastery, as reflected in a lack of real world competency.

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Men too are more likely to consider things from a wider ordering principle than are women. Feminists, for instance, have never really moved beyond considering the sectional interests of women. They have shown little interest in coming up with a vision of society which considers how all the different parts might be arranged to serve a larger good.

The success or failure of the male mind runs largely along a vertical axis. When working best, the male mind is receptive enough to comprehend the higher things above the self, including logos (when in the state of the "porous self"). But it is also able to look down on thoughts, feelings, impulses and appetites and order them, so that the lower serves the higher. To be actively engaged in this task should lead to self-knowledge, and a sense of how the order of the larger world (the macrocosm) is reflected in that of the self (the microcosm).

Again, when this is operating at its best, the sense of the self serving a higher good, and being ordered to it, is linked to the heroic virtues in men - of harnessing one's strengths and powers to defend something greater than oneself. When the masculine self is working well it tends toward a selflessness of purpose.

But the vertical axis can be broken. Western men are not as good as they once were at perceiving a higher level of existence - there has been a flattening of horizons. When there is nothing above the self, there can still be oversight of thoughts and feelings, and attempts at self-mastery, but toward lower ends and with a stunted growth toward wisdom.

Similarly, men can fail at using their self-awareness to order their thoughts, feelings and appetites, to the point that they lose "right mind". In older phraseology, they become slaves to their passions. Their awareness is trapped at their own thoughts and appetites, unable to move upward along the axis.

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Women's sense of self is located more at the level of their thoughts and feelings. That is perhaps why women have such a strong need to have their thoughts and feelings validated. If your sense of self is closely tied to what you are thinking and feeling, then a failure of another to validate these things will feel destabilising or perhaps even be perceived as demonstrating a lack of love or care for who you are.

When a woman's mind is working well the movement is more along a horizontal axis than a vertical one. Because her sense of self is centred on her thoughts and feelings, she will be sensitively attuned to the thoughts and feelings of others. At its best, the female mind might be perceptive about the thoughts and feelings of others, and gradually come to a type of self-knowledge and wisdom via this faculty. This is a type of close in, sideways movement of the mind - from one's own thoughts and feelings to someone else's.

However, things can go very wrong. If the horizontal axis is broken, a woman can be trapped within her own emotions and thoughts. Not only does she lose her ability to sense the thoughts and feelings of others, she can become solipsistic, and see others only in terms of what she herself is thinking and feeling. She might "merge" the other person with these thoughts and feelings and not recognise them as having a mind of their own. She might mistakenly view them as experiencing whatever she is experiencing. (I wonder, too, if this helps to explain why a woman might sometimes believe that a husband should be able to read her mind - because of a failure on her part to recognise him as fully differentiated).

Which brings me to the main point I'd like to raise, namely the issue of how we guide our behaviour. If what I have said is true, at least as a broad generalisation, then men can potentially step outside of their own thoughts and feelings along a vertical axis to engage with logos, and the higher ordering principles. This means that there are guiding principles that are not outside of, or alien to, the workings of the male mind.

If women's sense of self is centred more on what they are feeling and thinking, and the movement is sideways toward what others are thinking and feeling, then women do not have the same engagement with logos. Left to themselves, they can be guided instead by what heightens their sense of feeling (e.g. a film that triggers their sense of pity or empathy or indignation) or (when her mind is working well) by a sensitivity to what others might feel by a word or an action. But there is not the same sense of what ultimately orders a person or a society to a longer term good.

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And so women are, in at least some respects, in need of guidance. Where might this come from? In modern society, mostly from two sources. First, therapists. This is not a very effective source of guidance. Therapists are not really supposed to advise clients on what to do. Women often use therapists instead as an expensive form of validation. The use of therapy has the advantage for women that it is "validation with a qualification" - the therapist is supposed to be a trained expert, so even if the therapist is a young woman with little life experience, her validation has a stamp of authority which gives it a special standing (I am not rejecting therapy here in all circumstances - it might well be helpful for those in real need. I just don't think it is adequate in terms of moral guidance or to supply prudential reasoning.)

The second source of guidance in modern society comes from other women, for instance, via social media. Modern technology has created "bubbles" in which women can network and socialise with each other without much input from anyone or anything else. Again, this is often a poor source of guidance, as women often understand what other women primarily need to be validation.

In traditional societies there were various sources of guidance women could have recourse to. Social norms were important and also effective in guiding women's behaviour, due to the conscientiousness of women and also women's sensitivity to their standing within social groups (the "inclusion/exclusion" axis). There were also the wiser sort of older women with life experience who were willing to dispense genuine advice rather than validation. But most of all there were men that a woman might trust and lean on for guidance: priests, brothers, husbands and fathers.

I find it interesting that the wiser sort of women on social media are often the ones who accept this masculine role in their lives. It supplies something for them, that then allows them to develop further than other women. It does not constrain them but allows them to push further forward in their self-development.

I think women are aware of what I am trying to describe here. That is why the issue looms so large for women. A woman can find a man she trusts and cooperate with his efforts to order life toward a higher good, or she can reject this masculine element of life and rely on the workings of her own mind alone. Women are increasingly going for the second option. How this works out varies, because the quality of the female mind varies, but there is a trend toward a more chaotic experience of life, manifested in high rates of anxiety and depression in younger women and instability in relationships and family life.

One final point. I have argued that the male and female minds work differently, along a different kind of axis, and that men can usefully provide a masculine element when it comes to the pursuit of the good. Some men who agree with me on this take the argument too far, and believe that it means that only men are accountable for what happens in society. I disagree. People have different resources for making moral choices for all sorts of reasons (their level of life experience, their upbringing, their intelligence, their personality traits). Nonetheless, we still have free will and a conscience, and we are therefore still ultimately accountable for the choices we make and for what we make of ourselves. If anything we need to return to the idea of women having their own significant moral mission in life.

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Postscript

I'm not the first to suggest the importance of the masculine in accessing the vertical axis. Lawrence Auster, coming at the issue from a different angle, once wrote:

Symbolically, the father is the structuring source of our existence, whether we are speaking of male authority, of the law, of right and wrong, of our nation, of our heritage, of our civilization, of our biological nature, of our God. All these structuring principles of human life, in their different ways, are symbolically the father. The rebellion we've discussed is...a rebellion against the father. The belief that the universe is structured, intelligible, and fundamentally good, and that one can participate in this universe - this is the experience of having a father, which is the opposite of the experience of alienation that drives contemporary culture.

And the Danish historian Henrik Ibsen also made these connections in his book The Fatherless Society:

The masculine — which Henrik calls the “father” — is not simply about men as individuals but is an essential aspect of culture.

He sees it as the vertical dimension, which includes everything that human beings have looked up to, from God on high to ideals and excellence as well as the father’s traditional moral authority.

That vertical dimension is the source of our higher aspirations. This upward reach needs a strong foundation of healthy human relationship — which the more horizontally inclusive world of mothering traditionally has provided. As Henrik said to me, there needs to be a balance between the two.

I thought it interesting as well that the following interview dropped on social media this morning (with actresses promoting the film Wicked). It is an unusually intense expression of the female mind, and sweet in its own way, but almost completely devoid of masculine influence. There is self, emotion, sensitivity, vulnerability and validation. A culture cannot run on this alone, not without the more bracing influence of the masculine:

The following is part 2 of an essay written by AAFI and Australia First Party co-founder Denis McCormack, presented by Graeme Campbell as leader of the fledging Australia First Party to the Federal Parliament in 1996.

Read Part 1 HERE

In August 1980 a conference, titled 'Future Directions', was held at La Trobe University, Melbourne. A book of the proceedings was later produced. The conference was sponsored by many of Australia's largest companies (mining, oil, brewing, retailing, building, transport, media) and, of course, the churches. Many who were then little known rising stars of state and federal politics, academia, big media, government bureaucracy, union leadership, aboriginal and ethnic activists attended: e.g. Gareth Evans (Foreign Minister), Joan Kimer (recent Premier of Victoria), Bob Brown (now Tasmanian Greens parliamentarian), Julian Disney, Ranald McDonald et al.

The following extract from the Melboume Age 18/8/1980 gives many pointers to policy now in place.

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MOVE CLOSER TO ASIA OR FACE ISOLATION

Australia faces growing isolation if it does not move closer to South-East Asia, the conference "Austrasia" group said, it said such a future would not be comfortable and envisaged a new multinational regional grouping.

The task of the group was to investigate the impact of closer integration - economic, social, and cultural - between Australia and the countries of South-East Asia .... The assumption behind changing Australia into Austrasia was that, by 1990 10% of the Australian population would be Asian in origin. There is a further assumption that a multicultural Asianised Australian society with a growing diversified economy which takes account of regional needs is preferred despite the stresses which will accompany its emergence.

... the groups initial reaction to the, 'difficult area of defence' was to abandon the ANZUS pact and forge new defence ties within the region... they dealt with five main areas, trade and investment, cultural and social, migration, knowledge base and 'adaptive mechanisms'. Trade and investment: trade links with Asian nations were increasing but, as mutually beneficial economic links brought more understanding, it was important that two way trade and investment be accelerated. Restrictions on the flow of capital should be freed allowing more Asian investment in Austrasia and more Austrasian investment in Asia. Cultural and Social Changes: this area presented possibilities of great enrichment, but also stress of individuals because of challenges to values, the group advocates a 'soft' approach in this area. Among the actions which should be taken are the promotion of exchange tourism; the acceleration of Asian languages teaching in schools from primary level; the establishment of an Austrasia Council to encourage cultural exchanges ... Migration: to encourage the development with minimal stress in Austrasia, the initial emphasis in settling Asian immigrants should be wedded to decentralisation... it recommends encouragement of voluntary Asianisation on a regional basis using local opinion polls and similar consultative mechanisms to achieve community agreement before new settlers are introduced. 'Existing community refugee resettlement schemes provide a model. These should be underpinned by financial support to facilitate the adaptation process.' The group further recommends that special entry conditions for Asian immigrants should apply. They would include dual citizenship and family reunion. Adaptive Strategies: if the suggestions in the other areas including trade and cultural exchange were, 'sensitively and courageously' implemented, these themselves would be positive forces for change to the new Austrasian direction.

Other actions which should be taken specifically to ease change and conflict were the encouragement of individual family hosting schemes and the development of multicultural resource centres."

The Abolition of the White Australia Policy: The Immigration Reform Movement Revisited, Edited by Nancy Viviani. Australia-Asia Papers No. 65, Grifith University, Queensland, Australia, Jume 1992 [product of a sympostum held with the intention of getting the inside story from the founders of the Immigration Reform Group who are still alive and very influential in their various reincarnations]:

"This paper seeks to place the work of the Immigration Reform Movement in a wider context - and their relevance for contemporary debates on Asian migration." piv.

"... remember Sir Keith Hancock's view that White Australia was the indispensable condition of every other Australian policy." p.1

'Another social change of relevance was the impact of the post-war immigration program. [it hasn't stopped.] In parts, the program was instituted to protect White Australia [populate or perish was the slogan], but as H.C. Coombes notes, it in fact 'paved the way for the abandonment of the racist White Australia Policy' ... north-western European sources quickly exhausted ... Australia was forced to accept southern and eastern European immigrants [then middle Easterners, etc.]. ... It is hard to believe that the White Australia policy would have been challenged successfully but for this major development during the early post-war period." p.2

"… expressed their concerns about the policy in a post-war world which would supposedly be based on the tenets of racial equality as expounded in the Atlantic Charter." p.5.

"The 'modification by stealth' aspect of the LCP [Liberal Country Party coalition] government's strategy between 1958 (or thereabouts) and 1966 deserves closer scrutiny ... it entailed bowing before the winds of change to some extent (but not too much), and achieving a kind of 'inoculation effect' of letting several thousands of Asians into Australia, but without getting into a head-on fight ..." p.31

"That in turn helped to pave the way for the changes in political attitudes and bureaucratic thinking which made it possible for Hubert Opperman, the then Minister for Immigration, with Prime Minister Holt's support, to introduce major reforms in March 1966, soon after the retirement of Sir Robert Menzies. (I have been told that Opperman had proposed the changes to Menzies some time before, not long after an Immigration Reform Group-Victorian Association for Immigration Reform delegation had lobbied him on the matter, but had been rebuffed with words more or less to the effect that I know such changes have to come sooner or later, but not in my time ...')." p.22

[Regarding the formation of the Immigration Reform Group in the late 1950s] "I suppose I had in mind something like the (early) Fabian Society role in Britain as an opinion-forming think tank." p.26

"The abolitionists proposed a minimalist start to Asian migration and a gradualist program. They knew that a century of entrenched anti-Asian sentiment (revived in the 1950s by the Chinese communist threat) would not change quickly, that a small beginning would be acceptable and that experience should be a guide to future liberalization. By this stance, they cut the ground from beneath the image of 'floods of Asians' so effectively used by their opponents."

".. it's also worth noting three other things about these people: first, they were idealists but a more pragmatic, realist bunch you'd travel far to find. This, I think, was one secret of their success. They did not present their case as a great struggle between good and evil, but as part of Australia changing to meet the post-war challenges of being located in Asia, as part of a necessary change in social values also being undertaken elsewhere (Canada and the United States, but not in South Africa, for example), as a need to retrieve and recreate Australia's damaged image in the world from being that of an irremediably racist country. Second, they were internationalists..." p.34

"It is the acting on these ideas that sets this group apart, and makes them a prime example of intellectuals helping to change policy and, in this case, history." p.35.

"The most profound effect of the abolition for 'recreating Australia' internally was, I suppose, the bifurcation of identity: the intertwining of whiteness and Australianess in our nationalism was rent asunder, as they say, - in about a decade as Asian migration reached close to half of our total migrant intake by the end of the 1980s. In this age of nationalism and ethnicity, this, along with the assertion of migrant rights, has turned us to this occasionally passionate, but more often desultory, search for a 'new identity'. It is ironic, but unsurprising, that just in this period of the assumed triumph of internationalist and cosmopolitan ideas, the ideas of closer communities of nations and ethnic groups should be simultaneously contesting the high moral ground. I suspect it was rather like that for our abolitionists a couple of decades ago."

"But the abolition of White Australia also has some powerful direct and indirect effects, through Asian migration, in recreating Australia. It has partly redefined what we mean by rich and poor, how we look at ethnic rights and equality of opportunity, what we mean by multiculturalism and how our economy operates. It has important implications for the hold on power structures of the old white male elites. We are only now beginning to see our way through this actual recreation of Australia."

"But the abolition had a more profound impact externally. The White Australia Policy had been the core of all our foreign relations - the alliances, the trade patterns, our defence and the defining of 'we' as Western European in the international system. From Billy Hughes at Versailles to Vietnam and the UN, it underpinned it all. Without the White Australia Policy, new thinking about all our motives for dealing with region and the world was needed. Much of the struggle in our foreign policy since 1973 had been about that.

Thus we are in the process of being recreated by others." p.38

"How much was the abolition to do with the 'spirit of the age"? It happened in the middle 1960s, after all, though its origins were much earlier. What did it have to do with that 1960s political ferment of ideas regarding race, ethnicity, Aborigines, peace movements, Vietnam and feminism? Or is it really the product of earlier intellectual streams - left liberalism, conscience radicalism?"

"How much of the abolition had to do with shifts in norms in the international arena? Canada and the United States removed their restrictions about the same time, so we need to ask about the influence of international instruments (Declarations of Human Rights, instruments against racism, decolonisation, etc.) and their use in diplomatic pressure on restrictive states." p.41

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The Intellectuals and Socialism, F.A. Hayek, University of Chicago Law Review, 1949.

"The character of the process by which the views of the intellectuals influence the politics of tomorrow is therefore of much more than academic interest ...What to the contemporary observer appears as the battle of conflicting interests had indeed often been decided long before in a clash of ideas confined to narrow circles."

I could expand greatly on the preceding, however, my conclusions are:

1. The intended changes to Australia and its people were brought about through skilful networking, manipulation, and infiltration of elite power structures over decades, with great patience and subtlety, going well over the head of John Citizen, his wife, their kids, and majority opinion. John and his family rarely blame the migrants - they know the politicians, businessmen, and journalists are the real problem.

2. Their intellectual opponents of the day did not take them seriously enough - the complacent majority phenomenon prevailed. The few public intellectuals who today are occasionally writing and speaking out have so far displayed neither the cohesion, courage, nor charisma to politicise the issue in the manner required, although the means are at their disposal. Graeme Campbell, Federal Member for Kalgoorlie, is the only Parliamentarian representing the majority point of view. He cannot do what is required on his own.

3. Given the massive changes under way as a result of such thorough indoctrination of propaganda throughout the education system for decades now, it is doubtful that any meaningful brake remains to be applied to achieve a sustained and significant slow-down, let alone reversal of current trends (unless the tooth fairy delivers on 2 above).

4. Of Australia's 18 million population today, over one million are of Asian background. With the Asian component of the immigration program running at over 50 percent, and the higher fertility/birthrates of Asian migrants, it is hard to see the traditional public opinion against Asianisation, and all it entails, remaining at majority level in opposition to the status quo; it must erode over time. The demographics dictate that Australia's population will be 27% Asian in 25 years, and it won't stop at that. Phil Ruthven, a big business futurologist happily forecasts that Australia will be two-thirds Asian by late next century. He hopes for an Australian population of 180 million by that time. Mr Ruthven is often invited to repeat his message at Government Immigration conferences.

5. Tri-partisanship whereby the media support political bi-partisanship against majority opinion is a very tough nut to crack.

6. On the current trend of policy, the future management of the continent is going to change hands with the inevitable demographic swamping now under way and predicted to continue. It will no longer be Australia, it will be something else. Australasia is an old term that is acquiring a whole new meaning. This is the reason the pro-Asianisation lobby is now well and truly out of the closet, as evidenced by the opening two paragraphs of Living with Dragons: Australia Confronts its Asian Destiny. This volume of 12 essays from specialist insiders is edited by Greg Sheridan, Foreign Editor and leading pro-Asianisation spin-doctor for the only national newspaper in Australia (Rupert Murdoch's The Australian). It was published in April 1995 by Allen and Unwin in association with Mobil Oil Australia. By Mr. Sheridan's own admission (Weekend Australian, August 19, 1995) in an article explaining his 1979 conversion experience to all things Asian (through reading a book, The year of living Dangerously, about political turmoil in mid 1960s Indonesia) he "had no particular South East Asian connections and as a grade D journalist, no professional mandate or opportunity to go there. I did instead two things. I read Koch's other books and I realised that while I couldn't for the moment go to South East Asia, South East Asia had come to Australia. In 1979, Malcolm Fraser [Prime Minister, Leader of the Liberal Party] had made the momentous decision to accept large numbers of Vietnamese boat people. This decision changed Australia forever." Given his uptake on this, hence Sheridan's record rapid rise from D Grade joumalist to A Grade spin-doctor which he has been for some years now at The Australian. Sheridan dedicates the book to his wife, Jasbir, and their three sons, Ajaypal, Lakhvinder, and Jagdave.

"A revolution is sweeping across Australia. The nation is changing fundamentally and irreversibly. The old order is gone, a new order is taking shape with astonishing speed and force. An old mental universe has died, a new universe has come into being. A comprehensive set of attitudes and aspirations and material circumstances has been left behind. A new pattern is emerging. Unlike most revolutions, this one is bloodless, but is no less profound and consequential, shattering to some, liberating to most; the one thing that can be said for certain is that nothing is unaffected the old order can never be restored."

"This revolution is occurring within the Australian psyche and also within Australia's material circumstances. That is why it is so comprehensive a revolution - it is a transformation of the spirit and the body. I speak of the Asianisation of Australian life." p.3

"Paul Kelly [Sheridan's simpatico pro-Asianisation editor-in-chief at The Australian], in his seminal book on the 1980s, The End of Certainty, described the pattern of decisions, policies and institutions which emerged in the first years of Federation and which became known as the Australian Settlement. The Australian Settlement, he said, had five fundamental pillars. They were: white Australia, industry protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial benevolence (with the United States later replacing Britain as the relevant imperial power). The politics of the 1980s, he argued, was a politics of creative destruction, in which all five pillars were torn down. At the end of 1994 it is easy to see that Kelly's essential thesis was right. White Australia has given way to perhaps the most authentic racially non-discriminatory immigration policy in the world. Tariffs were torn down and by the turn of the century Australia will have virtually no significant industry protection." [Or industry!]

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"Kelly's thesis was thus right, but incomplete in two critical respects. It failed to recognise how all of the crucial policy changes of the 1980s led directly to the Asianisation of almost every sphere of Australian life. Similarly, it failed to recognise just how totally the relationship with Asia has defined Australia from its earliest days, so that the embrace of Asia which accelerated so greatly in the 1980s was not just something new for Australia, but the total reversal of the means of national self-identification throughout our history. This is the stuff of revolution." p. 4-5

"... in education, as in so many other areas, internationalisation for Australia has meant Asianisation." p.16

"In Australian foreign policy, Asia is now nearly totally dominant." p.17

"I have often run into views among writers and artists and others in China that are similar to those expressed in the following passage. The passage comes from a forthcoming book by the Brisbane-based Chinese writer Sang Ye, The Year the Dragon Came, a collection of oral histories of Chinese people newly arrived in Australia:

'My landlord is an old man who's seen a lot of the world. He thinks of Asia as a filthy place, contaminated both spiritually and materially. I agree. He also thinks Africa's a mess and Europe is too old, and he's right there too. But I don't agree with him when he says Australia's the best. That's bullshit. In the eyes of the Chinese, you're a second or third-rate country. It's just that you've opened your doors a bit wider than the rest and we've all crowded in. The first-rate countries are America, then France and West Germany: in the second tier are Northern Europe and Japan and only then Canada and Australia. Canada's a bit better than Australia because it's closer to America. To put it more bluntly, Australia's become a refuge for drifters, a dumping ground for the world's garbage.' p.154

"It is to cast our minds forward - say, 50 years - to a time when we are totally cheek by jowl with our Asian neighbours, when every facet of Australian life, from entertainment to industrial relations to political party platforms, will be affected by Asian societies and cultures, because we will be part of an Asian political confederation in fact, even if not by way of a European model of a Treaty of Maastricht." p.164

"I am a constant champion when I am in Asia for Australia and for the great success of Asian immigration and the many other things which make this a lovely, honey-coloured society." p.171

Australians have never been given the message so plainly, clearly, and matter-of-factly, before in a mainstream paper-back edition.

Will it create any backlash? I doubt it! Australian intellectuals and academics who work in the system on immigration problems have been so thoroughly intimidated and subdued over time that many won't even admit the word "Asianisation" to their vocabulary for fear of attracting flak - understandable, but pathetic.

On October 17, 1995, I had a chat with Rupert Murdoch face-to-face at the Los Angeles airport. I told him what I thought of the totally corrosive, corrupting and all-pervasive pro-Asianisation line pushed daily in his down-under flagship The Australian, and that Kelly and Sheridan were the cheer squad leaders. After speaking about Peter Brimelow's Alien Nation, he told me that Brimelow and he were acquainted and he knew the book. I then asked him point-blank if he agreed with and was happy about the obvious long-term demographic implications regarding racial, ethnic and cultural swamping that must occur if Labor/Liberal bi-partisanship policies on immigration, multiculturalism and Asianisation are not changed. Mr Murdoch's response: "No, I think it's gone too far, and we risk balkanisation of Australian society in the future...". He undertook to read and listen to the materials I gave him. Wouldn't it be good to be able to make a difference! In his case, the mega power of one, but will other factors intervene? And what will they be?

Denis McCormack, spokesman, political researcher
Australians Against Further Immigration
November 1995

The following is part 1 of an essay written by AAFI and Australia First Party co-founder Denis McCormack, presented by Graeme Campbell as leader of the fledging Australia First Party to the Federal Parliament in 1996.

The essay remains fascinatingly relevant to this day.

The historical evidence relating to bipartisanships role in long term immigration objectives which have resulted in the not-so-gradual Asianisation of Australia is overwhelming.

To enable the political and general communitys better understanding of our current immigration dilemma, I tabled in Federal Parliament (Hansard October 28 1996) a research paper by Denis McCormack titled, “The Grand Plan: Asianisation of Australia - Race, Place and Power.”

For those who wish to demolish the orthodox drivel on immigration as exemplified in the bipartisan Parliamentary Statement on “Racial Tolerance” (Hansard October 03 1996), the background documentation provided in this paper will be very helpful.

For those who continue to support immigration bipartisanship, they will learn from this paper the weakness of their position, and their mounting responsibility to adjust their views to reality.

The Grand Plan: Asianisation of Australia - Race, Place and Power

Presented at 20th Anniversary Conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, Latrobe University, Melbourne, 10 July 1996

by Denis McCormack, Political Researcher, Australians Against Further Immigration

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Until relatively recently, power elites in Australian business, journalism, and politics would steadfastly deny, or refuse to seriously discuss, the grand plan for the long-term Asianisation of Australia. Now. however, one cannot escape these same peoples' self-congratulatory writings which boast so openly of their treason (n. - to give or deliver over to or up; betrayal of trust or faith; treachery. Webster's New World Dictionary, Third College Edition 1988). Prime Minister, Paul Keating in a speech to the Australian Chinese Forum in Sydney on October 12, 1995, said

"Asia is emphatically where this country's security and prosperity lie. It is where an increasing number of our people come from and - unambiguously and wholeheartedly- it is where we want to be .... Our efforts on free trade, multiculturalism, and education and training are all part of the same strategy."

The Prime Minister's uncritical embrace of Asia, is matched only by the opposition leader, John Howard's similar behaviour. To some they are a national embarrassment in their relentless sycophancy.

Crucial to the Federation of Australia in 1901, and to the foundation of the Australian Labor Party in the 1890s, was the notion that predominantly Australia was racially and culturally European in its roots, British in its institution base, and that it should stay that way - forever. The first Act passed by the new Federal Parliament in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act which was unashamedly, but not offensively designed to maintain Australia, as ethnically, culturally and commercially European. In 1995, with a Labor Party Government in office since 1983, the pendulum has not only swung, but is airbome and out of control in the opposite direction. This is due to decades of political bipartisanship not only on immigration and multiculturalism, but on a whole clockwork mechanism of related federal, state and local government policy cogs which simply had to produce today's chimes heralding the accelerating pace of Asianisation against the demonstrated majority opinion. In May 1993, Ex-Prime Minister Bob Hawke (Labor) at a Govemment Immigration Conference publicly admitted what all serious observers knew.

According to reports in the Melbourne Herald-Sun and Sydney Morning Herald of May 25 and 26, 1993, respectively, he said:

"he could not deny the contention that the major parties had reached an implicit pact to keep immigration off the political agenda. He said that for most of the post war period the parties had maintained bipartisan support for immigration in the face of public opposition.
He also stated that there are no other issues on which the major political parties have been prepared to act in this way ... to advance the national interest ahead of where they believed the electorate to be."

I favour the term "grand plan" to describe the phenomenon outlined below in preference to "conspiracy", because the latter is too rigid and confining. In the popular mind, it implies that secret detailed agendas, designs, and time frames are set for predetermined outcomes by particular people or groupings at certain times and places. This is clearly not the whole story but nor is the "it just happened" historical accidentalist theory a satisfactory explanation. The following quotes indicate a path towards radical change which was trod by many elites who considered themselves and their world view "progressive". They entered into long-term co-operative networking and planning on a whole constellation of internationalist economic and social issues which they hoped would bring about the radical changes they desired. They accurately identified the destruction of Australia's traditional immigration restriction policy as their top collective priority, which would prove pivotal in the quest for much other social change which was to follow. Although this particular study is by no means exhaustive, I believe it adequately makes the case for the existence of a sort of grand plan for the Asianisation of Australia in the medium/long term. The who, when, where, what and how are recognisable through research, but the definitive "why" is as slippery as ever. Perhaps the answer was best given by James Burnham back in 1941 when in "The Managerial Revolution," he accurately predicted the outcome of World War II, along with the three global trading blocks which would evolve thereafter to manage global trade and politics. Does the following quote from Burnham foreshadow EU, NAFTA, APEC?

"I have predicted the division of the new world among three super-states. The nuclei of these three super-states are, whatever maybe their future names, the previously existing nations, Japan, Germany, and the United States.
It is of great significance to note that all three of these nations began some while ago their preparations for the new world order.

...but decisions as to what parts and how much of the rest of the world are going to be ruled by each of the three strategic centres. It might be thought that a "rational" solution could be worked out along "natural" geographic lines, dividing the world into three parts.

... to the United States in the northern two thirds of the two Americas; to the European centre in Europe, the northern half of Africa and western Asia; to the Asiatic centre in most of the rest of Asia and the islands nearby. But there is much left over, and, besides, the rivals will not be willing to admit any "natural" geographic right.

The backward areas, which include a majority of the territory and people of the world, are not going to line up automatically behind one or another of the three centres, or merely stand aside while the three fight over them. In the dissolution of the capitalist world political structure and during the internecine conflicts of the great managerial states, the backward peoples will attempt to break free altogether from domination and to take their destiny into their own hands."

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Mountains of documentary evidence exist which show the tracks of those involved, and how they have achieved such a dramatic series of policy reversals over the last forty-odd years. The quotes below, however, show conclusive evidence of the grand plan -from the establishment's own primary source books, which are widely recognised, available and mainstream library fare, and which bring you right up to the present. Square brackets [...] denote my explanatory or bridging remarks in the context of the quotes and sources. Books will be fully cited ahead of the quotes from them.

Macmahon Ball's Goodwill Mission to Asia, 1948, Garry Woodard, Australian Journal of International Allairs, The Journal of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, Vol. 49, Number 1, May 1995:

"Burton's [External Affairs Department Secretary 1940's] vision of a Northern Australia economically integrated into neighbouring South-East Asia is just beginning to approach fruition." p.133

"In 1949, an election year, the Secretary of the Department of Immigration, Heyes, at Burton's invitation met with Asian Heads of Mission in Canberra in the Department of External Affairs and spoke to them of prospective flexibility in Australia's immigration policy, that is, he repeated the theme which had proved so controversial for Ball in 1948 [in Malaya and Singapore and elsewhere around Asia!]. 1949 was an election year and Calwell [Labor Gov. Immig. Minister, later Labor Leader, and renowned upholder of the traditional Immigration Restriction policy] was strongly defending his conduct of his portfolio, keen to make it an election issue. There would have been maximum embarrassment for him if Heyes' remarks had been leaked to the press [because traditional government, opposition, and public support for immigration restriction against mass Asian immigration was so strong], but confidences were kept." p. 134

It would seem that there was some extraordinary duplicity and deceit practised at the highest levels in 1949 and that 'confidences were kept' so effectively that even the Prime Minister, Ben Chifley, (Labor) didn't know what his bureaucrats were planning as evidenced by the following editorial from the Melbourne Age 31/5/1949.

*NATIONAL IDEAL OF WHITE AUSTRALIA [Editorial Title]

In a few plainly expressed homely paragraphs, the Prime Minister, in his Sunday night

"weekly broadcast," re-stated the basic factors behind our national policy of vigorous but selective immigration. These, as Mr Chifley pointed out, are as valid today as when the statutes of the respective states were incorporated in a federal law early in this century.

There is no ideal in which national agreement so nearly approaches unanimity as the desire for homogeneity, colloquially expressed in the terms "white Australia." Any tampering with this policy for economic gain on the part of some small, affluent minority who would welcome a flood of cheap, coolie labor [sic], or by a few impractical sentimentalists, would arouse wide spread indignation. Australia asks only the same right as that recognised and practised by every other nation - the right to determine how her population shall be composed. This generation of Australians recognises a duty to preserve the heritage passed on by the pioneers who developed this continent and made it habitable.

It is to be hoped that Mr Chifley's clear disclaimer will dispose of the false and mischievous notion that any sense of racial superiority is expressed or implied in our national policy. The blare of publicity which has attended the routine carrying out of the law in a few exceptional cases arising from the peculiar circumstances of the war, is to be deprecated. If traced to its source, this clamour will be found to be motivated, not by any mass urge of Asians to gain unrestricted right of entry into Australia - a right which they themselves do not accord even to other Asians - but by the strong desire of critics prepared to discredit the government by any propaganda device.

The peoples of Asia, toward whom in their upsurgent consciousness of nationality Australia adopts good-neighbourly attitude, would not find in this continent with its own problems of light rainfall over wide semi-arid areas and liability to droughts, any appreciable relief from their population pressures. Their leaders who are well informed on the subject will endorse Mr Chifley's words that, "the only way for Asians to achieve peace and prosperity for all their nations, was through strenuous efforts in their own lands, and not through emigration." To this end they can rely on the good will, cultural friendliness and the material benefits of mutually advantageous trade with Australia."

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Immigration: Control or Colour Bar?; The background to White Australia and a proposal for change, by The Immigration Reform Group, edited by Kenneth Rivett. [founder in 1959 of I.R.G.] Published by Melbourne University Press 1960 and this expanded edition 1962.

"All we ask for at this stage is a small annual intake (1,500) ..." [of 'non-Europeans' for an experimental period of 3 to 5 years]. p.126

Australia in World Affairs, 1961-1965; edited by Gordon Greenwood and Norman Harper, published for the Australian Institute of International Affairs by F.W. Cheshire, Melbourne 1968.

"The Association for Immigration Reform ... the first of these associations had its origin in Melboure University... Similar bodies came into being in other Australian states, while their membership was not large, they were extremely active in their efforts to influence community attitudes generally, the more significant organisations such as trade unions and churches and, above all, the political parties... the Australian Labor Party, which in one aspect represents an intermingling of domestic nationalism and international idealism, for the first time in many years began, through its conferences, to debate seriously if cautiously the form of immigration policy to which it should give its support. The established platform had, in fact, used the term, 'White Australia' policy, a term which had never been employed in any immigration legislation. In 1959 the platform was strongly restrictive, though the emphasis was placed upon the assistive side, upon the encouragement of suitable immigrants which shall be strictly regulated so as not to impose any undue strain on the Australian economy or to imperil full employment or Australian industrial conditions through over-competition for available work."

"It was not, however, until the Sydney conference of 1965 that any significant change was made. The offensive term 'White Australia' was dropped from the party's platform, and formally at least the way was open for a restricted number of Asian migrants to enter Australia should a Labor Govemment be retumed. The new definition of policy should be placed on record:

XVI: IMMIGRATION

Convinced that increased population is vital to the future development of Australa, the Australian Labor Party will support and uphold a vigorous and expanding immigration program administered with sympathy, understanding and tolerance.

The basis of such policy will be:

(a)Australia's national and economic security.

(b) The welfare and integration of all its citizens.

(c) The preservation of our democratic system and balanced development of our nation.

(d) The avoidance of the difficult social and economic problems which may follow from an influx of peoples having different standards of living, traditions and cultures.

Despite the gains from the new wording, too much should not be made of the change; Mr. D.A. Dunstan, the then South Australian Attorney-General, who moved the new policy statement, was insistent that the Australian Labor Party did 'not propose to open the floodgates to Asian immigration.' [Note the similarity of Senator Edward Kennedy's comments in the very same year of 1965 on U.S. immigration law changes,"... the ethnic mix of this country will not be upset ... S500 will not inundate America with immigrants from any one country or area or the most populated ... of Africa and Asia ... the ethnic pattern of immigration under the proposed measure is not expected to change...". He went on to describe the critics as "bigots', 'irrational', etc. Sound familiar?]

The Government, for its part, did not introduce any alteration in its basic policy during these years, apart from the changes in administrative practice already mentioned. But it was anxious to make plain to the world that it had no sympathy with any form of racial discrimination, and that Australian immigration policy was not an expression of racial superiority, but simply the application of the well-established right of all national communities to determine the composition of their own societies in the light of the existing values of those societies." [which is more or less what was expressed by the Immigration Restriction Act in 1907]. p.84-85.

"... as the reception given to Asian students has shown, there is little active racial hostility, perhaps because of the remarkably homogeneous character of the Australian population and the absence of the problem of significant racial and cultural minorities." [i.e. no threat, no problem]

"...because of the aggressive attitudes towards race problems by some of the leaders of the newly independent states, and partly because of the tensions observable in Britain, and indeed elsewhere, leading in the British case to regulations restricting the flow of immigrants which in practice severely reduced migration from the West Indies, India and Pakistan. The outlook by the end of 1965 would appear to have been one of majonty approval for permitting the entry of a limited number of non-European migrants who for educational and other reasons could fit into the pattern of Australian life. There was, if anything, a hardening of attitude against a large-scale influx of non-Europeans of low educational and economic standing, which might introduce the social tensions existing elsewhere." p. 86.

"Australia was not seeking to become an Asian nation, nor did the Government conceive Australia to be a part of Asia; what the Government was attempting to do was to work out a partnership with a number of Asian countries in which Australia could fulfill a useful contributory role...". p.120

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The above authors clearly hadn't picked up the profoundness of the ideological changes within both the major parties in Australia, which incidentally coincided with identical phenomena in other two-party tweedledum-Tweedledee democracies around the Western world at the same time on the same issues ... but that's another story. The authors dismissively mention "changes in administrative practice" instituted by the government. In announcing these changes in March, 1966, Prime Minister Harold Holt (who took over only two months previously from Sir Robert Menzies, founder of the Liberal Party Australia's longest serving PM, who stood firmly for Australia's traditional immigration policy) said in parliament that:

"Australia's increasing involvement in Asian developments, the rapid growth of our trade with Asian countries ... the expansion of our military effort, and the scale of diplomatic contact, the growth of tourism to and from the countries of Asia combine to make such a review desirable in our eyes." Hansard 9.3.1966

Australia and the Non-white Migrant, edited by Kenneth Rivett for the Immigration Reform Group, Melbourne University Press, 1975:

"Australia's intake of non-Europeans.. should rise to say, 20,000 a year." p. vi Preface [Remember? the same man from the same organisation only 13 years earlier in 1962 was asking for a mere 1,500 'non-Europeans' - the wedge and the plot thicken quickly]

“..under the Immigration Restriction Act, Asians who were here already were allowed to bring their wives and children. Then, alarmed by the numbers entering, the govemment withdrew even that small 'concession' and faced Asian men with the choice of either leaving Australia or else separating permanently from their families. It would have been better not only for the victims of Australian policy but also, in the long run for white Australians if, at that stage, we had been called to account before a world assembly. Instead, we were able to shelter behind our membership of the British Empire and a balance of power which, for a little while longer, was to stay tilted absurdly in favour of the European. And on the first occasion when the racial aspect of our immigration policy did come to the notice of an international conference, we used our small bargaining power foolishly and with a degree of selfishness which, even by the standards of the time, can never be excused." p.20.

[After Prime Minister Holt drowned in 1967, John Gorton took office as PM. He said approvingly whilst in Singapore in January 1971] "I think that if we build up gradually inside Australia a proportion of people without white skins, then there will be a complete lack of consciousness that it is being built up and that we will arrive at a state where we have a multicultural country."

"Here Gorton directly contradicted the earlier statements of Snedden, who, when Immigration Minister [under Gorton] had said more than once, that Australian immigration policy was 'certainly not a policy which is directed towards the creation of multi-racial society' ". p.31-32.

"In immigration matters, an element of gradualism is not only inevitable but desirable." p.40.

"We are ranked after South Africa and Rhodesia as Racist Enemy Number Three." p.98.

This is Part 1 of Denis McCormack’s essay, Read Part 2 here!

Article written by founder of Australians Against Further Immigration, Denis McCormack. Originally published in ‘The Social Contract’ Summer 1992 edition, the contents of this article remain prescient today, over three decades after it was penned.

Immigration mistakes are big mistakes. They don't go away. They only get bigger.

- Meyer Burstein, Director Strategic Planning and Research Directorate, Canada Employment and Immigration Commission

Back in November 1990, as I sat through a couple of days of conferencing hosted by the Australian government's Bureau of Immigration Research, Meyer Burstein's above-quoted comments went politely unnoticed by the predominantly pro-immigration and ethnic-industry audience. Such candor from an immigration industry bureaucrat is a rare gift. Seldom do their public statements strike such accord with observable reality or public opinion.

In 1990 we saw the first tentative trimming of Australia's immigration program, the numbers of which had been arbitrarily drifting upwards for some years and had reached 170,000 in 1989-90. Further cuts followed in 1991-92. The details of the 1992-93 program reductions and modifications continuing the trend were officially released on May 12, 1992.

Under the sobering cold shower of recession, even some people in big business - the hard core of the pro-immigration growth lobby - began adding up the costs to industrial productivity and the public purse of English language training, unemployment, health and other welfare benefits that were directly attributable to immigration - figures which immigration reformers had been stressing for some years. Nor had the massive costs associated with city building and infrastructure establishment for the newcomers been so easy to finance in a country burdened with escalating and increasingly frightening foreign debt repayments. Indeed, a growing number of influential economists (including the Labor Government's own recently-resigned Finance Minister, Peter Walsh) came to believe the 1980s immigration excesses to be a significant contributing factor in the nation's declining economic fortunes.

The environmental movement is currently clearing its throat in readiness to rearticulate the common sense on population it espoused a decade ago. Environmentalists appear poised to engage the internationalist utopian element within their ranks, which, in recent years, has paralyzed the movement's logic with the all-too-familiar name-calling when population issues have been raised.

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When, on May 12th this year, Immigration Minister Gerry Hand took to Cabinet a recommendation that the numbers for 1992-93 be cut by 31,000, to a gross figure of 80,000, he reported the ''best support'' for any proposal he had ever taken to Cabinet. Non-dependent relatives (a category which includes cousins, nieces and nephews) faces the biggest cut - from 19,000 to 6,000. The independent skills category, which has never matched with labor market needs, has been cut from 30,000 to 13,400. The humanitarian component is down from 12,000 to 10,000. Stricter requirements in the independent category and concessional family category (which covers non-dependent relatives) are among key program changes. English will be required for independent and concessional category entrants. Full or partial up-front fees for English-language training will be a prerequisite for those with poor or no English; however, those applying for entry on humanitarian grounds, and preferential family grounds, will be exempt from the language requirements.

Predictably, the Housing Industry Association, along with ethnic lobby groups, objected to the cuts. The opposition Liberal Party had been seen in recent times to be leading the Labor Government in the push for lower numbers and, in response to the latest reductions, claimed that the cuts didn't go far enough. The downward bargaining between the two major parties is being viewed with some relish by a public whose opinion, when polled over the last decade, revealed an increasing majority in favor of lower numbers. That opinion was consistently ignored on a bipartisan basis, allowing the numbers to drift upward unchallenged and unchecked.

As compelling as the environmental/ economic/ socio-cultural arguments for immigration reduction may be, the general unease about immigration policy and multicultural policy is bound to continue. Some rather novel and as yet unexplained redefinitions of the ''national identity'' and the ''national interest'' are currently taking shape at elite levels - way above the heads and out of the earshot of ordinary Australians, the vast majority of whom, along with their children and grandchildren stand to lose much (if not all) as a result of such far-reaching socio-cultural and ethnic policy experimentation.

"...when polled recently, Australians by a clear majority did not see themselves as 'part of Asia' nor are they in favor of 'integration with Asia.' "

The new Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has significantly raised the ante by actively promoting a new economic and cultural orientation for the nation's future. He calls it “integration with Asia.” Foreign Affairs Minister Gareth Evans pushes similar top-down views in his recent book, Australia's Foreign Relations in the World of the 1990s. In effect he outlines the way Australia's foreign affairs, regional trade, and defense policies, when artfully conflated with immigration and multiculturalism policy, can bring about far-reaching and irreversible change to Australia and Australia's future - whether they know about it, or like it, or not! Minister Evans states “We are, whether fully recognizing it or not, engaged in nothing less than the re-shaping of our national identity...” and “...all of this is going to take time to convert into mainstream, popular sentiment in Australia.” Germane to these comments is the fact that, when polled recently, Australians by a clear majority did not see themselves as ''part of Asia,'' nor are they in favor of “integration with Asia.” In 1991-92 over 50 percent of all immigrants into Australia were of Asian origin, which reflects the recent shifts in immigration policy emphasis.

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There is some fierce political maneuvering happening around and within immigration/ multi-culturalism policy-formulation circles at present. The night the Immigration Minister, Mr. Hand, released details of the 1992-93 program he appeared on a widely-watched current affairs TV program. He admitted that the granting of temporary residency to 34,000 Peoples Republic of China students and their dependents after the Beijing-Tienamen Square massacre could lead to a chain-migration flood of 300,000 relatives, should all those in Australia take up their options under the family-reunification component of the program. Mr. Hand's comments followed a recent revelation that Prime Minister Keating had made a pledge, in a letter to a local Chinese-language magazine, that those who had been told after the massacre they could stay on a four-year visa could now settle permanently.

Is it any wonder many Australians question the long-term strategic planning and social engineering policies already in place, when these were never adequately canvassed in the broader community?

While immigration is down, it is clearly not yet out. Immigration reformers have joined forces from across the political spectrum in Australia. Their efforts have earned for the nation some valuable time to think things through. The argumentation they have put to the government, to the opposition, the media and the public over recent years is well-developed and philosophically sound. While it cannot be eroded, it could again be ignored in pursuit of the redefined ''national interest.'' Given the clear majority of public opinion on immigration, multiculturalism, and integration with Asia, the stage seems set for a period of political instability as yet unknown to Australia.

Immigration mistakes are not the only big mistakes governments can make, but they manifestly have the capacity to both create and magnify many other problems. We ignore them at our peril.

Written by Mark Richardson, convener of the Melbourne Traditionalists. Article originally published in the ‘Oz Conservative’ in 2007.

It's unusual for a cardinal to make a bold foray into mainstream society, but that's what Cardinal Thomas Williams, leader of New Zealand's 480,000 Catholics, did recently.

Pulling no punches, he published an essay titled "The Spiritual Bankruptcy of Liberalism". In the essay Cardinal Williams writes that,

Relativism and permissiveness have been deliberately promoted and morality reduced to purely subjective preference. Our failure to protect basic values and rudimentary citizenship is fast converting our society into a moral wasteland.

We have rejected the moral sustenance of the past and are attempting to live on junk food provided by a bankrupt liberalism ...

Can we restore health and sanity to society? My answer is yes. Yes, by challenging a culture asserting the exaggerated individualism that what one does is no one else's business.

The cardinal was immediately challenged in his views by Jim Perron who runs a classical liberal (a traditionally right-liberal) think tank. Mr Perron protested that,

When Cardinal Williams attacks "relativism and permissiveness" he is attacking the idea that individuals can make choices and should be free to do so provided they do not violate the equal right of others ...

At its core liberalism is about liberty and liberty means the right of the individual to make choices ... People may choose to live according to values which others find abhorrent. But in a liberal society, unless those values directly violate the life, liberty and property of another person they are allowed.

I believe that the cardinal is right and Jim Perron is wrong in what they claim about morality. However, I concede that the liberal approach put forward by Jim Perron sounds appealing. The idea that people can do whatever they like provided it doesn't directly harm the "life, liberty or property" of others seems reasonable at first view.

So why then is it wrong?

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1) General standards of morality are important

The liberal approach assumes that we each determine our own moral standard by which we freely make individual moral choices.

But it's not as simple as this. There also exists a general moral standard in every society which exerts a powerful influence on the choices we can and do make.

Therefore, we need to be concerned not only about our own individual standard and choices, but also about the general standard.

The problem is that liberalism doesn't allow us to do this. Liberalism makes the defence of an existing general standard illegitimate. Therefore, the general standard is left unprotected to gradually fall to whatever it is that a minority of people are willing to do.

This doesn't help the majority to freely enact moral choices. The influence of the general standard doesn't go away, it simply reinforces the lower standards of the minority rather than the higher standards of the majority. Many people find themselves having to resist the lowered general standards, rather than being inspired by a higher standard.

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2) Liberals aren't morally neutral

Liberals claim to be morally neutral. In other words, they claim that they are merely concerned to establish the framework of moral "liberty" and that they don't enforce a positive morality of their own.

In reality, though, liberals do advance a positive view of morality. They aren't really able to leave things just to individual choice, but do instead assert a kind of "good" which they seek to enforce across society.

To a minor degree, this positive view of morality is traditional. For instance, if I were to walk up the street naked with a heroin syringe hanging out of my arm, I wouldn't be directly harming anyone's life or liberty. But even a liberal society draws the line somewhere and I would be quickly removed from the scene. It's not possible, in other words, for liberals to live entirely consistently according to their own theory.

Generally, though, the positive liberal view of morality is anti-traditional. This is because liberals believe that we should be self-created by our own will and reason, rather than by something we inherit or by something external to us, like a traditional code of morality.

Therefore, in a liberal culture, it will be seen as "emancipated" to throw off in your own personal life traditional understandings of morality. This is particularly true of the liberal intelligentsia who exert a tremendous influence over culture and the arts.

This is another reason why the general trend in a liberal culture is toward a lower standard of morality: on the one hand, as explained above, it is made illegitimate to defend a general standard of morality, and on the other hand, liberal intellectuals will mostly act to deliberately "deconstruct" traditional morality as a logical outcome of their first principles.

There is one final way in which liberals seek to enforce a positive morality. Liberals believe that we should be unimpeded to act according to our own will and reason. This belief itself then becomes a kind of moral law for liberals, which is enforced as an overriding moral good.

This leads liberals to set up their own versions of censorship and thought crimes which are far more intrusive than anything which traditionally existed in Western societies. When we talk of "political correctness" for instance we are mostly talking about a kind of intimidating regime of what we may and may not believe.

Another example of liberal censorship and thought crime is a proposed law in France which would make any "incitement to discriminate" on the basis of gender or sexuality punishable by a year in prison. The real effect of this law depends on its interpretation, but if taken literally it would mean that someone arguing that it's morally wrong for women to be sent into military combat would be "inciting to discriminate" on the basis of gender and could risk a lengthy jail term.

So, despite liberal claims to be morally neutral, modern liberal societies are becoming very lax in some areas of morality and increasingly repressive in others.

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3) Morality is not just about power

I started out by conceding that the liberal theory of morality seems appealing, at least on the surface. However, there is one particular aspect of the theory which immediately seems less plausible. That is the idea that morality is just an attempt by one group to assert power over another.

For liberals what is important is that we are equally free to to create ourselves according to our own will and reason. Therefore, when someone asserts something to be generally a moral good (ie to place it beyond individual choice) liberals interpret this is a kind of authoritarian power play: an illegitimate attempt to assert the power of one person's will over another.

Liberals are especially inclined to make these claims about the Christian Churches, which have traditionally held some moral authority in the West. Instead of judging that the churches have tried to uphold a genuine, objectively existing moral good in what they teach, many liberals assume instead that the churches are really motivated by an authoritarian "will to power".

That's why right-liberal Jim Perron makes the claim that,

From the start the Church opposed liberalism because liberalism opposed state control and the Church desired to merge church and state into one monolithic centre of authority. For the Church power was something granted by God to the ruling elite. It did not, and could not, reside in the people themselves particularly in individuals.

Left-liberal Niall Cook is cruder, explaining the Christian religion as,

A fallacy created in dim distant times by powermongers and fanatics ... and perpetrated by religious organisations in a bid to spread their dominance over the ignorant unwashed multitudes.

The historical record, though, suggests something very different. Here, for instance, are the words of Pope Pius XI lamenting the fact that power was becoming overly centralised in the modern state:

On account of the evil of "individualism" ... things have come to such a pass that the highly developed social life which once flourished in a variety of prosperous and interdependent institutions, has been damaged and all but ruined, leaving virtually only individuals and the State ...

The idea that the Western religious tradition has all been about a competing will to power is unreasonably cynical, and shows the extent to which liberalism is stuck within its own ideological framework.

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Making the argument

Let's say that you're debating a moral issue with a liberal. You as a conservative make a positive moral claim. The liberal replies that people can act however they choose provided they don't violate the life, liberty or property of others.

What could you then say in opposition to the liberal? You actually have several choices. You could reply with any of the following:

1. But people make moral choices within the framework of a general standard of morality. So we have to be concerned about the general standard.

2. But you liberals don't just leave people free to make their own moral choices. You seek to enforce your own understanding of morality. You actively reject traditional standards and you are gradually enforcing a liberal understanding through repressive thought crime laws.

3. But you liberals limit morality to individual choice because you are too caught up in an ideology of "equal wills". You wrongly see general claims about morality as an authoritarian power play. You're too cynical and unrealistic in limiting moral claims in this way.

I expect that there also exist other arguments against the liberal position. The point, of course, is to become adept at making whichever arguments we think best, so that we can follow the lead of Cardinal Williams and begin to challenge the orthodoxy that liberals have established in dealing with moral issues.

This article is written by Matthew K. Grant, National Governor of the Australian Natives Association. The Australian Natives Association is a men’s fraternal organisation, dedicated to the advancement of Australia and is notable for its extraordinary stability in the ordinarily turbulent world of dissident politics.

The fair question that is posed to members of the ANA by interested parties and by our critics amongst the more broader patriotic community is ‘what do you actually do’, and more broadly, ‘why do you do it’.

Firstly it must be stated that our association is a fraternal organisation first, a political organisation second: this stems from the view that political change, pressure and lasting political victories can only be achieved with a cadre of capable men who are both of strong character and who, collectively, possess significant financial, institutional and human resources. Our first objective takes positive example from the original ANA founded in 1871: to see to the development and cultivation of a cadre of solid, capable men who are bound together in an anti-fragile organisational structure which is able to endure a changing environment, survive shocks and see to the welfare of our own men and families.

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We recognise that, strategically at this point in time, our political adversaries have far greater financial, political and human resources at their disposal and as it is written in the Art of War “Carefully compare the opposing army with your own, so that you may know where strength is superabundant and where it is deficient …. If he is in superior strength, evade him.” – there is little strategic advantage to aggravating the state to attack you unless you are prepared for him, as in civil society, with the best combined legal and economic resources that can be mustered.

When the Japanese landings occurred in Papua 1942, the Australian 39th Battalion, significantly out-numbered and resourced, inevitably were compelled to retreat, fighting a number of rear-guard actions for some months as the Japanese continued to push their offensive up until September when Australian infantry had managed to dig themselves in to a position which could be defended despite the numerical imbalance, the campaign ultimately stretching out Japanese supply and making them vulnerable to Australian counter-offensive.

There is no dishonor in playing to win as the 39th did. If you are of the strategic assessment, as we are, that the Nationalist movement in Australia is in its infancy, it cannot sustain a frontal battle with the full media, state and financial apparatus that occupies our Commonwealth, and consequentially, we must rally in a defensible position, to build our numbers and resources that make available an offensive posture that does not lead to a swift defeat. As much as we might have admired a courageous 39th battalion who out of sheer determination and courage, faced down the Japanese landing at Gona and were swiftly killed and defeated – we, as likely the last generation of Nationalists with an opportunity to have an impact, cannot afford defeat, and we in the ANA do not for the sake of prestige choose to fight in circumstances where the relevant risks outweigh the potential gains of the battle.

We have seen, and nobody would dare deny that, over the last half-century of Nationalist advocacy and politics in Australia, many hundreds (if not thousands) of potentially active and committed nationalists have been lost to the cause, principally due to burn-out: the rewards of participation do not stack up to the ordinary man sufficiently to cover the potential risks and burdens, which in many ways have manifested in the form of state persecution or by private persecution by doxxing and harassment.

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The recent failures of nationalism in the last few decades are a sharp comparison to the great successes of nationalism in the 19th century which organised itself in the same manner that we do; it was the slow, 50-year march of a mature and sensible Australian Natives’ Association that won back an “economic zone” that was exploited by Anglo-American financial interests in the 1860s to a proud, self-sufficient White Australia at the time of federation. It was the secure financial, legal and human resources that underpinned the ANA that enabled and supported a number of patriotic institutions both in media, industry and in parliament – something that may be learned from in this day, particularly when contrasted with the alternative discussed above.

So far, despite the admirable courage and determination of many nationalists in the last decade, there remains a significantly high casualty rate, as discussed in my other article ‘enduring the long march’. It is for this reason, and based on lessons from the past, that we organise ourselves in a way that:

1. Encourages the retention of and cultivation of the best qualities of our members,

2. Appeals to (and does not alienate) the recruitment of patriotic professionals who can bring significant financial and human resources to our association,

3. Encourages the development of new and young leadership in our constitutional framework building lasting anti-fragility in the association more broadly,

4. Raises awareness for Australian issues without being assuming the role of a dancing monkey for the media apparatus,

5. Builds sources of employment, housing and other charitable support to increase the endurance of our membership and the appeal to risk-averse candidates.

6. Encourages the development of, and connection to, Australian culture, history, art, literature and music.

Our activities involve regular formal meetings to cultivate meaningful friendships, practice in the art of rhetoric, raise funds and consider action on issues in the local community. Further to this, our association members arrange for outdoors activities, hiking, camping, hunting, road-trips and skills and career workshops. These events all contribute to the cultivation of a meaningful sense of community and provide the framework from which we continue to grow in group identity and purpose, enduring the long march towards our organisational objectives.

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Our efforts for the last few years continue to bear fruit, we can confidently say, in line with our organisational objectives, that, within this decade, every member of the ANA will be able to walk with their head held high with the knowledge that a comprehensive system of legal, financial and human resources is on-hand to support them in their public or private advocacy for Australian interests and that our organisation is both a community and a strategic bulwark to the cause of the patriotic Australian, as it once was from 1871 to the post-war period, in which tens of thousands of patriotic Australians across the country were able, in their totality, to wield a significant amount of power and influence over both the state and the media, and drive home an Australianist position.

We envisage, that by the early to mid 2030s, ANA members will be engaged in media advocacy, electoral action, industrial organising and syndicated property acquisition, all with the support of a matured and capable national organisation underpinning the security of all activities.

The critique may come that simply, ‘we don’t have a decade‘. Our suggestion here is simply this, the alternative mode of organising around the banner of aggressive street activism has been tried by many over decades and there is nothing meaningful to show for it, other than juicy news headlines. Our response simply is this: we don’t have a second more time to waste trying to revive the tried and failed road of activist martyrdom. We must lock away and secure every victory we can, grow and endure with minimum human and financial losses, our children simply cannot afford an inheritance as bad as we got from the last 50 years of nationalist organising.

As we continue to grow, our advocacy will only permeate more sectors of society, and we will continue to grow in our credibility as the representative body of patriotic founding-stock Australians. It is for this, slow, patient but secure strategy that we work every day, to secure a better tomorrow.

This is an article written by Matt Grant for the Australian Natives Association, join the ANA today!