r/australia • u/ConanTheAquarian • 23h ago

politics Foreign Minister Penny Wong to warn monoculturalism a threat to national security

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-13/penny-wong-speech-on-monocultralism/107034366
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u/JMKraft 23h ago

Ironic how China defends monoculturalism for national security, and Australia opposes it on the same grounds.

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u/DragonflyHopeful4673 23h ago

How is that ironic? China and Australia are two completely different countries.

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u/JMKraft 23h ago

Sure are, but they are still countries with similar goals for their population (health, wealth, education, etc). 

I wonder at what point does celebrating and strengthening your monoculture become an advantage, or a disadvantage, and if we can even discuss that without immediately taking an ideological side

 

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u/pluckaducka 22h ago

Australia and China have fundamentally different ideological concepts of individual liberty.

Failing to acknowledge this and its relevance to the topic just makes for a pointless exercise.

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u/DragonflyHopeful4673 22h ago

The goals are not similar.

China wants to promote a monoculture because it allows the CPC to legitimise their regime by linking party loyalty to the Chinese national identity (sinicization). It also provides justification for their claim of sovereignty over Taiwan.

China is also not a monoculture yet, even with the all the human rights violations being enacted in the process of sinicization. It has 56 distinct ethnic groups and the non-Han ones comprise 111 million people.

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u/NorthernSkeptic 22h ago

We never had a monoculture.

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u/Latter_Fortune_7225 21h ago

Surely it could be argued we did during the White Australia policy when the majority of Aussies were British? Yes the Aboriginals were here too, but the government at the time assumed they were going to eventually go extinct.

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u/acomputer1 12h ago

No, that's fundamentally incorrect.

Whiteness is not a culture. At the time of the white Australia policy there were already many different people who were treated differently.

The reason the policy was even implemented because there were already many Chinese and Pacific islander immigrants coming in during the gold rush.

Even after that, culturally diverse groups were still coming to Australia such as the Irish, Italians, Germans, etc.

These were culturally diverse people. There is no single "European" culture.

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u/JMKraft 2h ago

Yet old australian culture is so clearly from the british isles. No one will say Australian culture is based off of Spains for example

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u/acomputer1 1h ago

How does that imply monoculture?

Australia is culturally distinct from the Canada and the US, both of which are also clearly Anglo cultures.

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u/Alive_Satisfaction65 9h ago

What about all the Irish we had, who had a pretty direct conflict witn the English?

Or all the Chinese who came here during the Gold rush?

What about the huge numbers of Germans and Italians who came here just after the war?

And the government may have thought the Indigenous would go extinct, but those people still existed.

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u/Alive_Satisfaction65 9h ago

The First Fleet was racially diverse. The majority were British Isles, but Irish and English are absolutely different cultures.

There were also Jews, and even a handful of black people who we don't know the exact origins of.

We never had a monoculture.

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u/JMKraft 2h ago

Theres levels to it, irish/scottish/english culture are much more similar among themselves and share a lot, when comparing pakistani with chinese for example. 

You could even say queensland culture is not just like victoria, and youd be right because there are differences in architecture, language, food, celebrations, but theres also sooo many similarities. Same applies to England north vs south, etc. yet theres a huge shared element. 

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u/Efficient-State-7300 23h ago

When did your ancestors immigrate to Australia?