The Australia Day debating season has now finally, mercifully, come to an end for another year.
It is clear the right and left in this country have very different perspectives about how January 26, 1788 – the date a new British colony was established in Sydney – should be commemorated.
What is less well known is that these warring political tribes tend to have a similar ‘black armband view of history’ when it comes to a much more important event: Federation, the date our nation-state formally came into being.
Scratch any member of Australia’s centre-right liberal market intelligentsia and you will likely soon find that most have very mixed feelings about the founding of our Commonwealth.
Often there is an overly critical attitude towards our constitutional set-up, as well as elements of the legislative program now referred to as the ‘Australian Settlement’.
But, above all, it is the national policies on trade and immigration that were introduced around or around Federation which they find most objectionable.
These policies are portrayed at the very least deeply misguided, if not outright immoral.
They are seen as a product of backward parochial thinking as well as an unwelcome departure from the then-dominant British liberal philosophical tradition. These errors, they claim, were only started to be corrected around 70 years later.
Influential academics in books such as William Coleman’s Their Fiery Cross of Union and David Kemp A Free Country: Australia’s Search for Utopia reflect this outlook. It is a view held by many friends at Australia’s leading centre-right think tanks like the Institute for Public Affairs and the Centre for Independent Studies.
You will inevitably hear a wistful lament in these circles that if only the arguments of ‘true liberals’ like George Reid, Bruce Smith, or Joseph Carruthers had prevailed, rather than ‘protectionists’ or ‘nationalists’ like Alfred Deakin, Edmund Barton, or David Syme, things would have been so much better.
The problem is, like the late 19th Century liberals they idealise, many in the intellectual right in Australia seem incapable of understanding why supposed noxious policies on trade and immigration were introduced and why they are being adopted again in the United States and elsewhere today.
Take trade. Today there remains resolutely bipartisan support in Australia for an agreement with China that allows practically 100 per cent of their manufactured goods to be imported into our country duty free.
But most of our nationalist leaders at Federation would have thought this deeply unwise. They would have understood, correctly, that such an approach means we will never have a meaningful manufacturing industry in our country, and this would bring risks to our security, economic well-being, and sovereignty.
America’s new secretary of state, Marco Rubio, at his confirmation hearing, declared that ‘an almost religious commitment to free and unfettered trade at the expense of our national economy, shrunk the middle class, left the working class in crisis, collapsed industrial capacity, and pushed critical supply chains into the hands of adversaries and rivals’. Many of our founders would have recognised and agreed with these arguments, unlike those still stuck in the open borders Hawke-Keating-Howard era.
There also remains little sign of any real change in our mainstream political parties when it comes to immigration. Both are committed to importing recklessly at least a Canberra’s worth of new people per year.
The new American administration by contrast has bluntly stated that ‘the age of mass immigration must end’. Former Conservative Party Cabinet ministers in the UK and Nigel Farage also now talk about reducing annual numbers to the ‘tens of thousands’ if not ‘net zero’. Something none of the major parties has done here.
Australia’s first founders would have been on the same page. They were aware of how carefully immigration needed to be handled and how important it was to build and maintain a unified people. This is why they introduced very strict policies which included Trump-style deportations and other measures which focused on social cohesion in our new nation.
Some seem harsh in retrospect. But not imposing them would have made as much sense as Italy having an open borders policy with North Africa in 1901.
Our immigration policies of recent times have been far less careful. While purporting to be more caring, they have instead played a large part in the ethnic disputes we see on our streets today.
What the centre-right in Australia have not yet appreciated is that Donald Trump and the new nationalist parties in Europe did not arise simply because they promoted a generic form of patriotism. It is not really about symbols or respect for the flag. Their electoral success occurred is because of they recognised that serious changes were needed to key national policies, most notably trade and immigration.
Similar changes are required in Australia today, as urgently as they were at the birth of our nation.
Dan Ryan is the Executive Director of The National Conservative Institute of Australia