What is The Point of Australia?

We might be too busy to contemplate the meaning of this sunburnt country, but circumstances demand we do so anyway. Or perish.

This might seem an inappropriate time to ask what the purpose of Australia is — what with inflation going through the roof, teenagers running around stabbing each other with machetes and World War III about to break out.

Who’s got time for pretentious navel-gazing?

On the contrary, the question has now become unavoidable. Inflation is through the roof because the federal government — having realised that in fact there is very little unifying purpose to Australia — has won the past two elections by instead appealing to the self-interest of as many disparate ethnic groups as possible, regardless of whether those groups have earned such taxpayer-funded largesse or are even grateful for it. Such policies cause almost irreversible inflation, among other fatal economic and social maladies.

Reversing this begins with Australians deciding what the purpose of this country is (I’ll get to what that might be eventually) and demanding the government pursues that instead of pretending to be Father Christmas — or whatever the Muslim/Hindu/Confucian equivalent of him is — all the time.

Teenagers are roaming the streets with machetes because some leftist apparatchik wanted to experience a fleeting feeling of moral vanity for having rescued a poor family from some civil-war-stricken dump and plonked them in an ethnic ghetto conveniently far away from his or her own sedate middle-class enclave of public servants and rent seekers.

Our intake from Third World cultures is a superficial distortion of the Christian charitableness that most civilised westerners feel. But it is misdirected. Our first obligation is to our own people. Destroying our society by importing violent thugs is neither charitable nor viable, it’s suicide.

And World War III is potentially about to break out because more assertive countries than ours are acting more and more like bullies squaring off in a playground. This wouldn’t bother us quite so much if there was a teacher whose skirts we could cling to while watching the action from a distance, but sadly no such protector exists in international affairs. We will get caught up in the fight whether we like it or not.

Picking a side will depend on what we believe in. Right now, that has never been more vague. If Australia did find itself in active conflict, I doubt our various ethnic groups could agree on the colour and style of our uniforms, let alone which enemy to point our rifles at.

Sadly, rather than offer inspiring resolve in these uncertain times, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese embodies our collective identity crisis better than anyone.

He is ambivalent about AUKUS, the Australia-UK-US agreement to share nuclear submarine technology and hardware that will cost Australia a total of $356 billion. His oratorical skills are poor on a good day, but even by his standards his support for AUKUS sounds like a Soviet bureaucrat outlining a five-year farming plan: “What AUKUS offers the United States is, firstly, the support that we’re providing for their industrial capacity. Secondly, the increased capacity to have their subs in the water as well because of the maintenance facilities that will take place at Henderson.”

He says nothing about AUKUS’s real purpose, which is to alleviate the threat from China (whose communist leaders he is terrified of offending) at a time when Australia is more vulnerable to a naval attack or blockade than at any time since World War II.

Compare that to Albo’s fears about Donald Trump, expressed at a music festival in Byron Bay in 2017: “He scares the shit out of me.” No ambivalence there.

Albo isn’t the most complex character. He exudes a leftist undergraduate-style dislike of the United States and Trump, but I suspect doesn’t want to be the prime minister who ditched the US alliance because too many other, smarter people than him have in the past considered it kind of important.

One can imagine the relief he felt when Trump stood him up at the G7 this week, which frees him up to instead focus on reviving the defence and security partnership he discussed with European Commission dictator Ursula von der Leyen in Rome last month. That deal, Albo said, would be based on “Europe’s values being consistent with Australia’s values”.

You can say that again. Europe and Australia share four fundamental “values” at the moment: censorship, authoritarian bureaucratic governance, an exaggerated vilification of Russia and the unrestrained migration of hostile welfare dependents from Third World countries.

Our Foreign Minister, Penny Wong, is similarly cavalier about what were once standard Australian values. She has given $26 million to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency in Gaza since the barbaric attack on Israel on October 7 2023, despite some of its employees having participated in that attack. While terrorists don’t offend her, democratically elected politicians do. Last week she pretentiously imposed sanctions on two Israeli Ministers, calling them “extreme proponents of the unlawful and violent Israeli settlement enterprise”. This is a radical reversal of what Australia once stood for.

You see what I’m getting at here. Albo and Wong are freestyling our foreign relations because they have no idea what Australia’s purpose is any more. And neither do we. Multiculturalism, environmentalism and a Rousseauian elevation of indigenous culture to the level of spiritual enlightenment fill the vacuum for now, but are — what’s that word they use? — unsustainable, especially against Chinese imperialism and Islamic jihad.

We Australians have managed to survive for more than 200 years without explicitly explaining what holds us together or why we are here. That we built one of the freest and most prosperous nations in history from a penal colony did the trick for a while. It suited our irreverence — possibly our most defining characteristic — which was the legacy of the original convicts’ disrespect for their supposedly superior prison guards. Plus, it was funny. What kind of people turn an open-air jail at the arse-end of the world into a thriving egalitarian paradise? We do! Isn’t that hilarious?

Well, yes. But the joke is getting old now.

We have little reverence for our own history, and our Constitution offers no inspiration. Unlike the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, for example, our founding document is simply a legal arrangement between six states agreeing to share the burden of defence and foreign affairs. It makes no grand assertions about liberty and fraternity, nor holds any truths to be self-evident.

Not that we don’t agree with such noble ideas, mind. Australians (and New Zealanders) have traditionally been instinctively eager to sail off to far-flung places to defend the sort of freedom they take for granted at home.

England offers a vivid and terrifying example of what quickly happens to a country when it loses its purpose. It was only 12 years ago that Daniel Hannan, a British Member of the European Parliament and early advocate to leave the European Union, was boasting in his book How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters, that the “Anglosphere’s gift to the world was not just freedom as an abstract ideal, but a practical system of liberty under law, rooted in the habits of the English people, which they carried to every corner of the globe”.

Those were the days. Britain still had a discernible culture and ethnicity then, and Poms felt a high level of mutual trust and obligation. Not any more. British police were recently locking up people for expressing honest and reasonable opinions on social media at the rate of 30 a day.

Hannan wrote despairingly in The Telegraph on the weekend that Britain — its streets covered in litter, its retailers enduring an epidemic of shoplifting and the police morphing into enforcers of state ideology — now resembles an underdeveloped nation. “We are sliding into what used to be called the Third World. And the worst of it is that we don’t seem to care.”

Sound familiar? Similar pessimism is widespread here.

A collective purpose is both tangible and intangible. It’s as much in our definable Christian values and western heritage extending back to Ancient Greece as it is in the sight of Ayers Rock rising from the desert, the opening keyboard riff to Khe Sanh or the taste of a Barossa red in a beachside restaurant at sunset. It could be myriad things, but they need to be things we understand and know instinctively together.

If we don’t start accumulating and treasuring them again soon, this once happy, thriving and peaceful nation is finished.