There’s a lot here that resonates. The tone has hardened. Identity is back at the centre. That shift is real. Like a lot of Australians, I'm from migrants, and I don’t treat questions of belonging as abstract. Most Australians are only a generation or two removed from being told, subtly or otherwise, to prove they fit.
Where I’d push this further is class and capital. When immigration is framed as the cause of housing stress or strained services, that’s not only culture war rhetoric. It’s also a redirection. It turns anger sideways.
Who benefits when working people argue about cultural fit instead of land supply, tax settings, wage suppression, or corporate profit margins? Who benefits when scarcity is personalised rather than governed?
If belonging is narrowing, we need to ask who gains from that narrowing. Division is rarely accidental. It’s often economically convenient. That’s the harder layer beneath the cultural one.
To spend just 30 seconds contemplating Taylor’s statement that there are people who have migrated to Australia that hate our way of life…don’t want to embrace Australia, and want the country to change for them, would surely throw up some questions.
A Services Australia webpage on migrating to Australia says that “Most people move to Australia to be with family, to work, or as a refugee.”
I’m clearly the kind of person who spends more than 30 seconds thinking about what politicians say. But too many Australians don’t spend time questioning, pulling apart the message in their own minds or in conversation with others. The partnership of the right-wing and msm delivers dopamine on tap, eroding civic thinking skills and inserting, what you’ve articulated so well, the flattening, stereotyping, othering, prejudiced, racist story that they will save the country from if only you’ll give them your vote.
Thank you for your sharp posting, Daniel James. Angus Taylor. The air of oozing entitlement. And all those flags. I’m sort of surprised he didn’t attempt to wrap himself in. A return to the Howard schtick of the ‘80s and 90s? I sincerely hope not.
There’s a lot here that resonates. The tone has hardened. Identity is back at the centre. That shift is real. Like a lot of Australians, I'm from migrants, and I don’t treat questions of belonging as abstract. Most Australians are only a generation or two removed from being told, subtly or otherwise, to prove they fit.
Where I’d push this further is class and capital. When immigration is framed as the cause of housing stress or strained services, that’s not only culture war rhetoric. It’s also a redirection. It turns anger sideways.
Who benefits when working people argue about cultural fit instead of land supply, tax settings, wage suppression, or corporate profit margins? Who benefits when scarcity is personalised rather than governed?
If belonging is narrowing, we need to ask who gains from that narrowing. Division is rarely accidental. It’s often economically convenient. That’s the harder layer beneath the cultural one.
To spend just 30 seconds contemplating Taylor’s statement that there are people who have migrated to Australia that hate our way of life…don’t want to embrace Australia, and want the country to change for them, would surely throw up some questions.
A Services Australia webpage on migrating to Australia says that “Most people move to Australia to be with family, to work, or as a refugee.”
I’m clearly the kind of person who spends more than 30 seconds thinking about what politicians say. But too many Australians don’t spend time questioning, pulling apart the message in their own minds or in conversation with others. The partnership of the right-wing and msm delivers dopamine on tap, eroding civic thinking skills and inserting, what you’ve articulated so well, the flattening, stereotyping, othering, prejudiced, racist story that they will save the country from if only you’ll give them your vote.
Thanks for this concise and cleareyed diagram of the hypocritical narrowing down to a coming cluster of pinchpoints. Deeply disturbing.
Everything old is new again. This is neither comforting or desirable, 70+ years later.
Thank you for your sharp posting, Daniel James. Angus Taylor. The air of oozing entitlement. And all those flags. I’m sort of surprised he didn’t attempt to wrap himself in. A return to the Howard schtick of the ‘80s and 90s? I sincerely hope not.