In a 1950 essay, the critic AA Phillips wrote of a “cultural cringe” in which insecure Australians looked to Britain for instruction. Today, some Australians are championing far-right British actors and importing their visions of doom to Australia.

In June, the former Australian Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott spoke at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference, which is organised around the idea of “renewing” western civilisation. “Sustained mass migration, especially from countries with quite different cultures,” said Abbott, “[is] the surest and swiftest way … to dilute and eventually to extinguish the Anglo-Celtic core culture and the Judeo-Christian foundational ethos (which is actually what attracts migrants to the Anglosphere).” Peta Credlin, his former chief of staff, now a Sky News Australia commentator, said: “You are a petri dish … [on] multiculturalism and radical Islam, you are where we don’t want to go.”

Both are fighting a civil war for the command of Australia’s right, on terms set by the challenging party: One Nation, founded by Pauline Hanson, a former fish-shop owner who became infamous in 1996 for claiming that Australia was “in danger of being swamped by Asians”.

Now a Queensland senator calling for a “monocultural” Australia, Hanson’s enemy is Islam. Like Reform UK with the Tories, One Nation is cannibalising the Liberal party in polls, and is second only to the Australian Labor party, which is in government.

Hanson is fresh off a “fact-finding mission” in the UK partly shaped and documented by the Australia’s Channel Seven program Spotlight. She’s photographed with Nigel Farage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in London (a meeting fell through due to the Clacton........

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