The idea of a monoculture is repressive. What Australia needs is the opposite – a revived cosmopolitan version of multiculturism.

Pauline Hanson is insisting that Australia must be a monoculture and that any attempts to transform it into a multicultural society should be resisted. Angus Taylor seems to be tiptoeing around a similar proposal, insisting that ‘Australian values’ need to be ingrained in the minds of all Australians.

Senator Hanson has suggested that Japan is an example of a successful monoculture, demonstrating how little she knows of the cultural differences that have historically characterised Japanese society and still do today. Maybe she was thinking of North Korea where Kim Jong-Un’s totalitarian government determines what its citizens can know and how they must conform with the Dear Leader’s dictates? Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are not far behind North Korea in the ways they control their citizens. Are there aspects within these authoritarian monocultures that inspire Pauline Hanson’s idea of an Australian monoculture? Does she – or Angus Taylor for that matter – understand that the repressive nature of a monocultural society is a fundamentally political construct? As Marcia Langton has appropriately recognised, it is a prelude to a proto-fascist state.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century and well into the 1960s immigrants were expected to assimilate or integrate into Australia’s mainstream Anglo-Celtic culture. Prime Minister Menzies declared that he was – and by implication all Australian citizens were – ‘British to the bootstraps’.

Presumably Pauline Hanson is nostalgic about this era, which was often........

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