Time to engage cultural wars
RACE Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane’s term expires in August and the Turnbull government cannot afford to miss this opportunity to stake out its ground in the culture wars.
Conservatives are sick of Coalition governments which appease the Left, curl into a ball and try not to cause outrage while Labor-Green governments remake the culture in their own image.
The country always takes two steps to the Left with a Labor government, and not much better than one step to the Right or even staying in place with the Coalition, which puts us on a very bad trajectory indeed.
The result is that the cultural Left has encroached on every aspect of our lives, from the relentless push to change Australia Day to the genderneutral birth certificates proposed by the Queensland government.
From corporations paralysed by “diversity and inclusion”, to Christians hounded out of the public square.
From the promotion of Islam in school religion classes to the feministthemed, virtue-signalling Commonwealth Games closing ceremony which emptied the stadium in record time.
The Left’s “long march” through the institutions that Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci once dreamt of has been a raging success.
Every time a Labor-Greens government is voted in, it wastes no time appointing fellow travellers and cleaning out anyone associated with the old regime.
But when Coalition governments arrive they don’t do much more than benignly preside over the status quo, even when run by avowed conservatives.
So government gets bigger and more intrusive, the ABC continues unimpeded, destructive quangos such as the Human Rights Commission proliferate and the cancer of identity politics takes hold.
Little by little, our remarkable nation is transformed, and the seeds of division take root. The self-reliance and entrepreneurial spirit of Australians is sapped and the bonds of mateship are eroded. But it doesn’t have to be that way. The only way to arrest this dispiriting drift to the left is for Coalition governments to stop pretending there are no culture wars and get into the trenches and fight.
The symbolic value cannot be over-estimated of replacing Soutphommasane with a Commissioner who doesn’t want to use race to divide us.
That’s all this 36-year-old Frenchborn son of Laotian refugees has done since he was appointed to a five-year term by Kevin Rudd in 2013, a month before the Abbott government was elected.
Despite the fact Australia gave Soutphommasane’s family a home, a free education and a Commonwealth scholarship to Oxford University, he preaches that this is a racist country.
Despite the fact this is the most successful immigrant country in the world, Soutphommasane tells us that culture is toxic.
He saw the great honours bestowed on him such as membership of the board of the National Australia Day Council and the $340,000 gig at the Australian Human Rights Commission as proof, not that this was a country which offered equality of opportunity to all comers, regardless of the colour of their skin.
No, he saw it as more evidence of anti-white racism which needed to be set straight with social engineering.
Soutphommasane’s latest obsession is to impose ethnic diversity quotas on corporate Australia. He declared last year that there were too many white people running Australian companies.
In his five years he has just libelled Australia, creates race-based social divisions and helped fuel a backlash against immigration.
So it’s not good enough for the government to appoint, as is mooted, an innocuous replacement who just avoids the headlines.
If we must have a Racial Commissioner then let it be a clear-eyed patriot who loves this country.
Warren Mundine is the best person for the job.
Well respected, brimming with common sense and optimism, he has proven track record as a businessman, and as an Aboriginal and political leader. He would unite us around what’s best about Australia.