The Western Surrender: Australia saw Canadian Liberal virtue signalling and said, ‘hold my beer’

People take part in an "Invasion Day" rally on Australia Day in Melbourne on January 26, 2018. Photo by PETER PARKS /AFP via Getty Images

Article content

All that is great about western civilization is being undermined by a progressive political and cultural project that aims to reject and rewrite our history, prioritize group identity above the individual and embed this agenda into our laws and institutions. Welcome to The Western Surrender, an NP Comment series ranking the five Anglosphere countries by their adoption of these ideas. Today we feature No. 4, Australia.

Article content

Article content

MELBOURNE — Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott is a formidable political intellect. Unlike many of his parliamentary contemporaries, Abbott is steeped in history and political philosophy, and recently published a bestselling history of Australia, highlighting the good in the colonization and European settlement of the southern continent.

Article content

Article content

Article content

As incoming federal president of Australia’s centre-right Liberal Party, Abbott summed up the state of the nation in a radio interview recently.

Article content

“Obviously, our country is in trouble,” Abbott said. “Our economy is stagnant. Our society is fragmenting. Our security is imperilled. And yet, we don’t believe in ourselves nearly enough.”

Article content

Abbott is absolutely correct. Australians retain a national self-image of a resilient and tough people who tamed a vast and inhospitable continent. We cherish elements of the Australian story burnishing those self-perceptions, especially our outstanding military contributions in the world wars. “The spirit of Gallipoli” is more than just a phrase: the solemnity of Anzac Day reminds us of what we believe makes us Australian: courage in the face of daunting odds; a willingness to die for causes greater than ourselves; and that quintessential Australian quality of “mateship.”

Article content

Article content

But self-perception is not reality. Abbott succinctly and eloquently called out the national malaise eating Australian society and culture from within. Australians are consistently told by left-dominated political, social and media elites that they’re “living on stolen land”; their history is a travesty; their biological sex is an irrelevance; and the British and Christian cultural traditions that were founding values of the nation are instead matters of national shame.

Article content

Article content

Over decades, Australian elites have imposed what another former prime minister, John Howard, famously described as a “black armband” view of our history and national character. They demand the rest of us cower in shame at what we and our ancestors have wrought, and tell us we must be welcomed to our own country. Identity politics runs through our political and educational institutions. Federal and state politics, currently dominated by the Australian Labor Party supported by the Marxist-left Australian Greens, prioritize woke social agendas ahead of economic prosperity and national security, and use their bully pulpits to denounce and demonize those who dare contradict them. Former prime minister Abbott is one of the relatively few Australian public figures fearless in calling out wokery wherever they find it.

Article content

On the other hand, current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese embraces identity politics. Since his election  in 2022, Albanese always stands before three flags: the Australian flag, the Aboriginal flag representing about three per cent of the Australian population, and the Torres Strait Islander flag representing  just 40,000 people, if that. “Acknowledgments of Country,” similar to Canada’s land acknowledgements, are ubiquitous in government and business, right down to, as I’ve experienced, online school parent-teacher meetings. Obeisance goes to extremes: for example, last year a law lecturer in Sydney’s Macquarie University threatened to fail students who didn’t make an acceptable Acknowledgment of Country in their course presentations. To call out such mad zealotry is to be labelled racist by woke activists and commentators.

Article content

Identity politics and wokery afflicts the West generally. But due to our shared history as part of the British Empire, Indigenous peoples and immigrant legacy, the five Anglosphere countries — Australia, Canada, Britain, New Zealand and the United States — have notably similar experiences of how wokeness plays out. It’s a tough field in which to compete, but Australia surely must have its nose in front in the Anglosphere Woke Derby. Canada, the U.S., Britain and New Zealand all have horses in that race, but the Aussie horse is, in woke terms, a real stayer.

Article content

Article content

That’s not to say Australian woke is unique. Indeed, in many ways it’s derivative. If woke Australia is the horse, woke Canada is its trainer. We may have become prime practitioners of wokeness and identity politics, but we’re imitators, not innovators.

Article content

Australian multicultural policies, entrenched from the 1970s, looked to Pierre Trudeau’s Canada for inspiration. In Indigenous affairs, we’ve particularly borrowed extensively from Canada. We call Aboriginal kinship communities First Nations, and Aboriginal activists appropriate the term to declare their peoples are not just first among equals but first, period. We not only plagiarize Canadian acknowledgments of Aboriginal land and sovereignty: our judges and politicians who framed our native title laws looked to Canadian precedents. We look to Canada more than any other country as an identity politics pacesetter. Where Canada has gone, however, we attempt to go further.

Article content

How woke is Australia today? Let me count some ways.

Article content

When I was growing up in suburban Sydney in the 1960s and ’70s, the history of colonial and modern Australia was a thing of deep national pride. The 1970 bicentenary of Captain James Cook’s arrival at Botany Bay was not only a huge national festival, but a full-scale royal event, with Cook’s landing re-enacted before the late Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip, the now King Charles and Princess Anne, and a hundred thousand onlookers, including seven-year-old me.

Article content

Article content

Fast forward to 2020 and the 250th anniversary. The anniversary was barely mentioned in the media, and official commemorations were token, despite at the time the federal and the New South Wales governments being notionally conservative. Cook’s landing place on the southern headland of Botany Bay, a national park, is now neglected and overgrown. And around Australia, monuments to Cook are now regularly defaced and vandalized, where previously they celebrated his heroic achievements.

Article content

British settlement followed Cook in 1788, when the Royal Navy’s Captain Arthur Philip established the penal colony that became Sydney. The day Philip proclaimed the colony, Jan. 26, is now Australia’s national day. But instead of Australia Day being celebrated as modern Australia’s birthday, it has been traduced by left-wing and Aboriginal activists rebadging it as “Invasion Day.” Worse, as it falls at the end of Australia’s summer holiday silly season, when the media struggles to fill space, every January we have to endure weeks of newspaper columnists and talking heads blathering about the shameful significance of Australia Day, lecturing that the anniversary is offensive to Aboriginal Australians, and demanding we should “change the date” of our national day.

Article content

Such attitudes to the country’s European foundation permeates the perceptions of our colonial and federal history. Our left-dominant political class purveys the myth that, prior to British settlement, Aboriginal tribes lived in a noble state of nature, free of the vices and violence of Western civilization. Some activists have convinced themselves that at least some pre-1788 Aborigines had developed permanent settlements and sophisticated agriculture rather than being subsistence hunter-gathers, aggressively denying that the state of Aboriginal nature they extol was actually nasty, brutish and short. A self-identified Aboriginal writer, Bruce Pascoe, wrote a bestseller promoting his “evidence” of this, and a junior edition of his book, Dark Emu, is now a popular school textbook.

Article content

As Abbott’s revisionist history of Australia makes clear, the good of British and European settlement far outweighed the bad. That hasn’t, however, stopped detractors from accusing Abbott of historical denialism. Nevertheless, Abbott bucks the now received “wisdom” that permeates Australia governance and educational institutions.

Article content

Article content

Despite in 2023 the Australian electorate rejecting a federal constitutional referendum installing a nebulous “Indigenous Voice to Parliament,” my home state of Victoria has just established a de facto parallel Aboriginal parliament under a “Treaty,” a body with the power to scrutinize and potentially veto any state government legislation or policy proposal, and providing a highly-paid gravy train for activists funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. South Australia has a state “Voice” consultative mechanism, but nothing like Victoria’s parallel government.

Article content

And if you want to win a government contract in Australia, don’t bother competing on quality and price. You’ll get nowhere if you don’t have extensive Aboriginal and DEI employment plans in your business, and have the hires to prove it. 

Article content

Despite all this lip service, and our federal and state governments continuing to spend billions on Aboriginal community support, health, education and welfare programs — roughly doubling comparable government spending per capita for the rest of the population, the problems among Aboriginal communities remain tragically intractable. Aboriginal life expectancy and health outcomes remain far lower than the national norm, and family violence, substance abuse and welfare dependency in remote communities continue to be endemic.

Article content

Article content

The Rousseauian “noble native” vision of pre-settlement is embedded in Australian schools and universities. My daughter is seven. She goes to her church’s Sunday school, but she attends a government primary school in suburban Melbourne. One day, she came home insisting the world was created by a mythical eagle named Bunjil, who then “looked after the world until Jesus came.”

Article content

Her confused belief reflects what she was taught. Education in our home state of Victoria is nominally secular. No religious instruction — be it Christian, Jewish, Muslim or Hindu — is permitted in government schools. But young children learning Australian Aboriginal myths is all but mandatory in Victoria, reflecting the left’s long march through Australian institutions and the woke values derived from Critical Race Theory now instilled in Australian children from toddlerhood.

Article content

Indeed, Australia’s entire national curriculum is being decolonized. Not just history and social studies, but even maths and science. If there is a way to inject Aboriginality into any subject, it’s being done. And it isn’t just  Aboriginal culture that features in official decolonization narratives; it’s multiculturalism generally. As long as you’re not descended from British colonial “oppressors,” you’re all right.

Article content

Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong recently ignored the British contribution altogether.

Article content

“It’s great to be in Melbourne, it’s one of the great multicultural cities of the world, that’s been built by so many people from our First Nations Australians to our newest migrants,” she said in Victoria’s capital — which activists provocatively rechristened as Naarm, just one of the many Australian cities, towns and localities so renamed both officially and unofficially.

Article content

Wong’s sweeping dismissal of the British and colonial contribution to the Australian story highlights how identity politics has redefined Australia. We have become a less open, more intolerant society, told to be ashamed of our modern origins. Instead of proclaiming that all sharing common liberal democratic values are welcome here, the country is increasingly a loose collection of ethnic and religious tribes keeping to themselves. The multicultural landscape since October 7, 2023 is especially damning. Antisemitism has been permitted to erupt and fester and, partly for fear of offending Muslim voters concentrated in Labor suburban seats, and pro-Palestinian left-wing elites, Albanese’s government is afraid to call out Islamist extremists for what they are, including the father and son who perpetrated the Bondi Hanukkah terror massacre last December.

Article content

Article content

Then there’s the identity politics of gender and sexuality. Under changes in 2013, Australian discrimination law no longer recognizes biological male and female sex; instead your gender is whatever you want it to be. The improbably named case of Tickle v Giggle, in which a biological male identifying as a woman was denied access to a women’s online safe place, attracted global notoriety, compounded last month by Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner contorting herself in a parliamentary committee hearing to insist that biological males can be “potentially pregnant.” This nonsense from a A$450,000 government appointee! The defendant who owned the Giggle app, Sall Grover, has been vilified not just by the usual gender activists, but by the judges in the case itself who loaded proceedings to make it almost impossible to defend herself.

Article content

On sexuality, Sydney’s annual Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras is treated as must-cover by the national broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and it’s just emerged that the Australian Defence Force, besides celebrating gender diversity and LGBT inclusion as much as, if not more than, martial prowess, actually tests the fitness of its members according to their gender self-identification, not their biological sex and physiology.

Article content

Article content

And when it comes to warped woke priorities, Australia’s most decorated living soldier, Victoria Cross winner Ben Roberts-Smith, has been charged with alleged war crimes related to fighting the Taliban, his arrest deliberately made a media circus to maximize his humiliation. Yet Australian-citizen Islamic State brides last month were brought home with government help. Despite joining a barbaric caliphate determined to destroy secular liberal societies like Australia’s, most were offered extensive settlement and welfare assistance.

Article content

But if Australia ever was leading in the Anglosphere woke competition, indications are it won’t be for much longer. Australians are waking up to woke. After rejecting the 2023 Voice referendum decisively, since Australia’s 2025 general election the right-wing, populist and very anti-woke One Nation party, with its firebrand founder and leader, former fish-and-chip shop owner Pauline Hanson, has rocketed from just six per cent of the vote at the election to around 30 per cent in the latest opinion poll. Hanson’s is a party of grievance rather than a party of solutions, but for decades she’s been fighting identity politics and voters are suddenly rejecting the mainstream Labor and Liberal parties in agreement with her.

Article content

Facing an existential threat from One Nation, the conservative Liberals have ramped up their own opposition to identity politics and DEI. Both Hanson and Liberal leader Angus Taylor stand before only the single Australian flag to highlight they represent all Australians equally, and that no group of Australians is more equal than all the others. And, thankfully, no Uriah Heepish Acknowledgement of Country will ever come from them.

Article content

Whether the One Nation polling bubble soon bursts, and whether the popular backlash against the political establishment goes far enough to stop the long march of woke progressivism, let alone reverse it, remains to be seen. But if being the most woke country is indeed a horse race, most sensible Australians hope it’s a race Australia eventually will lose.

Article content

Terry Barnes is an Australian political analyst and commentator 

Article content

To ensure you catch every entry in The Western Surrender series, sign up for our NP Platformed newsletter at nationalpost.com/platformed. You can also bookmark The Western Surrender page. Send any feedback and questions to [email protected].

Article content