It is
interesting to listen to conservatives try to explain why things like patriotism
and nationalism have seriously declined in our nation. For instance this
discussion on Sky News, where they put the blame on education,
“IPA senior fellow John Roskam says an “entire generation” of
young Australians have been taught to be ashamed of their country.
His comments come amid low enlistment numbers in the
country’s defence forces.
Mr Roskam revealed the Institute of Public Affairs conducted
a poll last year among Australians aged 18-25 which found only 32 per cent
would fight for their country if it was attacked.”[i]
This is a
staggeringly low number of Australians who are willing to fight for their own
country. But the numbers are not really that shocking when you consider a few
other points.
For the last
couple of decades Australia has engaged in a mass immigration experiment to
grow our population and inflate the economy with incredible numbers of people
coming in each year. The result of this is that as of 2021, 29.1% of all
Australians are actually born overseas. When you consider that many of these
people have had children while here, this means that a large percentage of Australians
are only first or second generation citizens.[ii]
The largest group of these people is from England, where our culture
predominantly comes from, but since 2011 the largest increase in immigrations comes
from India, and many immigrants come from other nations as well.[iii]
Now the views of these immigrants will be diverse, but immigrants do not magically change their culture, practices or ideas when they come to a new country. This fact was on full display this week where disturbing Palestinian protests happened across Australia, and the western world, in support of the attack on Israel from last week. I don’t want to get bogged down in discussing the ongoing conflict in Israel, it is a tiresome discussion; this conflict is several generations old and should not concern Australians. However, this conflict has been big news here in part because Australia has immigrants from both sides in the Middle East and as these Palestinian protestors show, immigrants do not change their views when they change locations, they bring their politics with them.
How is a country with such divisive perspectives represented amongst their citizenry supposed to unite for the purpose of something like self defense? Considering the focus on making Australia multicultural over the last few decades, is anyone really surprised that so many young Australian citizens want nothing to do with fighting for this country? We are a nation divided by deliberate policy choice.
Add onto
this the fact that since 2001 Australia has tightened its alliance with the United
States and gotten involved in disastrous wars across the world. Many
Australians are sick of these wars and want nothing to do with any more foreign
conflicts. There is a big difference between defending your country and being
used as auxiliary forces in an imperial war in the Middle East or somewhere
else, but very few Australians would be willing to risk signing up for the
defence forces to defend our country, because they would be concerned about getting caught up in another stupid foreign war far from our home land and interests. For
several decades Australians were told that being sent to Afghanistan was defending
their nation, or going to Iraq was defending their nation. But more and more
people have seen through these forever wars and want nothing to do with them.
All this
being said, that does not mean that education has nothing to do with this
problem. Australians have been taught to be less patriotic. But alongside of this they have been taught that anyone can be Australian if they have the
right paperwork, it has nothing to do with heritage or nationality anymore, it
is simply a matter of what your passport says, and therefore, it is simply a
matter of whoever the government says is Australian, is Australian? How can
anyone get patriotic about this situation. This is statism not patriotism.
Say what you
want about Israel, but they have focused on creating a country there for their own people that has a vision to be a bastion of Jewish culture, and they have enacted
policies to hand this tradition down to the future generations. It is easy to
see why this has been far more successful in building a patriotic culture, than
the approach of our nation for the last few decades. Maybe we should pay attention to that?
Ideas have
consequences and the consequences of the demoralization of Australian identity
and ethnicity and culture are starting to have devastating effects. For those
of us who love our country, this is horrible to see, even though it was also eminently
foreseeable.
[iii] https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/people/population/australias-population-country-birth/latest-release
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