* I’ve thought a lot about why Australians work to maintain their culture. They are unique among all Western nations in doing this.
I think it ties into Steve’s theory about how Western culture literally killed off their violent members over hundreds of years. What no one talks about, and what seems clear has happened, is that a tipping point of some kind has been reached in the West where we have become TOO civilized. We treat our own cultural survival as something to work against.
Australia has never reached the point of cultural sophistication normal in all other first world nations. They are proudly uncouth. They are descendants of criminals and jailers and are proud of the fact. They speak in a manner which one local researcher claims is a result of everyone in the entire country being drunk during its formation (not as outlandish a claim as it may seem).
* The thing about the ‘refugee’ debate in Australia is that it started a long time ago – almost 15 years – and we’ve gone all the way from harsh, then to compassionate, then back to harsh again. So all the complaints, pleas, moral blackmail etc. has been debated, heard and exhausted many times over.
It went like this:
1)The boat-people problem explodes under a conservative government. Refugees travel through multiple safe countries so they can claim asylum in wealthy Australia. The government puts them in detention centres and processes them according to our U.N. treaty obligations.
2)But crusading left-wing lawyers and left-wing judges make deporting the ‘asylum seekers’ almost impossible, so most end up staying.
3)Word gets back along the people smuggling network that if you get to Australia you will be detained for a while but then get residency so even more are encouraged to come and the problem gets even worse. Refugee boats sink in rough seas and many hundreds drown. Asylum seekers are kept in detention centres in the desert. The Left and the professional grievance industry become hysterical.
4)But then a crisis! Some boat-people actually hijack a Norwegian cargo ship called ‘The Tampa’ and force the captain to take them to Australia. The Australian government forbids the ship entry to Australian waters but the captain ignores this order and continues coming. The Government acts strongly by sending the Australian SAS to board the ship and prevent it’s entry.
5) The government then uses this incident to attempt to change the law to allow ‘off-shore’ processing on small Pacific islands. The purpose of this change is to take the refugees outside the jurisdiction of Australian courts. This will give the government a much freer hand in deporting people. On the eve of an election the Left-wing Opposition loses their nerve and backs the government’s legislation.
6) Slowly but surely the policy works. Word gets back that asylum seekers are no longer getting Australian residency and the numbers coming steadily drop. Eventually the problem is solved. The detention centres empty. Everyone assumes the issue has been decided.
7)The government changes. And in an act of mind-boggling stupidity the new Left-wing government undoes all of the laws which had worked, including offshore processing. Presumably they thought with the conservatives having done all the hard, nasty work they could get moral bragging rights without any cost.
8)The refugee boats return. The Left-wing government refuses to admit they’ve made a mistake and allows the numbers to increase. Eventually thousands arrive every week. Many boats sinks and many hundreds of refugees drown. Belatedly the government tries to stem the flow but fail. They don’t have the nerve to get tough.
9)The governments falls and the conservatives return to power. The new government restores offshore processing and also physically turns boats around, towing them back to Indonesia. They even put refugees in unsinkable life-rafts and send them back in those.
10)The policy works and the boat people arrivals return to zero.
Throughout this long saga we heard every moral argument the Left had to make many times over. Eventually the Conservatives won the day by acting harshly and getting results – while claiming a humanitarian motive (you need to stop the boats to stop the drownings).
Of course white Australians are being replaced by massive legal immigration anyway so the only difference is we get to choose our replacements rather then have to accept whoever turns up.
* It is worth looking at the Human Development Index, which puts Australia at No 2 (behind Norway but ahead of Switzerland, The Netherlands and the US). It’s not a measure of cultural sophistication exactly, but a fair proxy for it.
There is an element of truth in the “descendants of criminals” claim, and some Australians have a propensity to boast of it. But the proportion of convict ancestry in the Australian population is actually very small (perhaps 2 per cent overall; zero in my own case). At any rate it doesn’t tie into Steve’s theory about the West killing off its violent members: none of the convicts was transported here for homicide and our historical and current homicide rates are comparable to most European countries’ (and white America’s).
On top of that, we also are plagued by academics and an MSM that have all the same obsessions as they do in the rest of the West (perhaps that is what you mean by ‘cultural sophistication’). They have prevailed in the past on open borders; but by good fortune they don’t prevail right now.
* I think some of it has to do with the vast stretches of wilderness that comprise Australia, where urban areas are a minute fraction of the overall landscape. That and their isolation from the rest of Western Civilization give them a more rugged, individualistic outlook. Also, the number of people of non-Anglo-Celtic heritage only began to increase since WW2. Whenever Anglophone countries start bringing in people of non-Anglo-Celtic background the first order of business of the new arrivals seems to be to destroy the Anglo-Celtic majority By Any Means Necessary.
* Australia has held off “same-sex marriage” longer than the rest of the (white) Anglosphere.
* In terms of livability (discounting the current insane property bubble) it is clearly one of the best places on earth to live.
It is, however, not a place where snobs are welcome. Socially it is intentionally very low brow. A bar on one of Sydney’s fanciest streets made the news because they banned reflective vests as acceptable attire! People with blue collar and white collar jobs mix socially. That may seem normal if you live in Australia but is not elsewhere. Blue collar and white collar work is rewarded fairly equally – inconceivable elsewhere. The “Aussie Battler” is part of the political lexicon.
Realistically the percentage of people with convict/jailer ancestory is dramatically higher than 2%. Australia was a penal colony and everyone in some way was connected to it. There was no other game in town for a long time. An Australian family who is not a fairly recent immigrant story almost certainly has part of their bloodline from this period.
My point is that the bottom group of English society managed to create one of the best countries on earth when given a blank slate (with apologies to the Aboriginals). Why is this? Why are they the only ones intent on maintaining a great country?
* Americans seem to want to cling on to this myth that Australia is somehow different. That at least one white country is not so set on demographic suicide. Unfortunately this couldn’t be further from the truth.
White Australians are being replaced as quickly here as in any other part of the world. The hard line on boat arrivals is a fig leaf for runaway legal migration, which has the support of the financial and business elite, as it does everywhere else. Current legal migration leves from Asia, Africa and the Middle East will eventually make White Australians a minority unless an explicitly pro-white immigration policy is implemented.
The likelihood of that is next to zero in the current climate. Australia is as firmly in the grip of the cultural marxist agenda as anywhere else. Any claim to an Australian identity based on shared British, or even European, heritage is met with the utmost outrage and incredulity. We are supposed to agree that being Australian requires nothing more than putting a hand out for a passport.
The notion that maybe the famous Australian stereotype, popularised by the likes Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin, was a reflection of the British people that built the country, rather than some voodoo magic that overcomes a person when he arrives on this particular piece of clay, is unspeakable.
I feel that our allies in the US and Europe do us a disservice by propagating the myth that we somehow have a stronger sense of our selves and our own preservation. Things down here are going in exactly the same direction as they are up north and I don’t expect anything to change for us until it does for you.
* Australia is just a committed to national suicide as the ret of the western world. Our immigration intake is insanely high.
The crackdown on boat people was a smokescreen to distract Australians from the real problem which is legal immigration.
And you won’t find much testosterone in our new prime minister. Malcolm Turnbull is a hand-wringing SJW.
