George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker Buchholz, let me wish you a happy birthday. I will not go any further or I will make disparaging remarks about the chair! I will tell it to you later.

For more than 200 years, Australia's history and culture have been enriched by waves of immigration. People from many countries around the world came here to share in the freedoms and opportunities that this blessed nation provides. The Italians, the Greeks, the Germans and many others joined the predominantly English, Irish and Indigenous Australians and built one of the most modern and successful Western societies in the world. In the process, a national identity and a national culture was formed that we all know and understand, even though sometimes it is difficult to define.

A multicultural society is one that embraces a number of minority cultures, and multiculturalism is the belief that such a society benefits by maintaining more than one culture within its structure. For more than 200 years, Australia was that country. It embraced a number of minority cultures, and that worked well when those ethnic and national minorities embraced the majority culture, the Australian culture. But I am sad to say I do not believe that is any longer the case. We now have isolated immigrant enclaves and cultural enclaves that do not embrace the dominant Australian culture. They are aided and abetted by the politically correct, the elite and the socialist left, who massage their own guilt complex by rejecting, denigrating and persecuting the majority Australian culture. Their pursuit of equality focuses on tearing everyone down to the lowest common denominator. How can Australia be a successful multicultural society when it harbours enclaves that do not embrace the major culture of the country in which they reside, much less the culture of other minorities?

All human races, nationalities and ethnicities that we find in Australia today are descended from immigrants, and that even includes the nation's first people, who were the first immigrants from across the world. But we cannot call ourselves a successful multicultural society, because one ethnic group is openly reviled, despised and denigrated by the elite, the politically correct, the law, the media and even the Human Rights Commission. Institutionalised cultural suppression does exist in this country today, not to suppress a minority culture but to elevate minority cultures above the majority. Our culture is being oppressed and supplanted by a culture that is so at odds with its hosts that it hates all that the host country and its people stand for, and I talk of radical Islam.

If we were a truly multicultural society—a society that accepts different cultural practices—you might expect the government to step in when school students refuse to accept the cultural practices of others. When male students at Hurstville Boys Campus of the Georges River College refused to shake the hands of women handing out awards, the New South Wales government did not step in. It supported the misogynistic stance of the students. Australian culture, which is men and women being equal, was not accepted by the students. It was deemed unacceptable and had to be denied.

In what definition of multiculturalism would it be acceptable for an immigrant, an ethnic minority or anyone for that matter to defy the cultural practices of the host country? Where is the benefit to society in having violent ethnic gangs creating havoc in the central business district of a major capital city in this country? Where is the benefit to society in having enclaves where a separate community recreates a mini country within its own culture, with its own culture and language, that isolates itself from the rest of the country and attacks outsiders should they dare to set foot on its so-called foreign soil? That is not the warm and fuzzy peace-and-love society that this motion would have us believe multiculturalism to be.

I note this motion calls on the government to condemn those who are actively seeking to incite division. As a member of the government, I am very happy to condemn those who actively seek to incite division. I condemn those who divide the country by isolating themselves and trying to create alternative countries within Australia. I condemn those who divide the country by promoting foreign legal systems, such as sharia law, and creating alternative laws and alternative legal systems. I condemn those who divide the country by not just refusing to participate in Australia's cultural norms but also demanding the rest of the country give up their own cultural norms.

Multiculturalism in Australia was a good thing, but it failed the minute we failed to stand up for the rights of our own culture. That is why I am now against multiculturalism. Our nation was stronger with one culture—a culture we were willing to defend and a culture that had been enriched by people from other lands and other cultures and by people and cultures that were aligned with our own values. If we continue to supplant our culture with one opposed to it, everything will fail. (Time expired)

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