MASS MIGRATION IN AUSTRALIA (essay)

In my view, the basic ethical outlook of Marxist and Catholic philosophy about the relationship between the human race and the material environment are quite similar despite the apparent conflict between them. Over the course of my own life both have contributed to the formation of my attitude to the migration question.

Both ethical systems regard the human species as the highest development of evolution and start with the notion that the interests of human beings are the primary point of departure in judging most ethical questions. Marxists would have it that human consciousness is the highest product, so far, of material development, and Thomists and Catholics would have it that the human soul and humanity are the peak of God’s creation.

While both ethical systems would not neglect at all the importance of the rest of the material world, the animal world, etc, they would regard the interests of the human species, viewed as a totality, as the primary point of departure in developing an ethical framework for migration policy.

In this, they would both be different, for instance, to the ethics of Peter Singer, who would rate the interests of the animal world as being on the same plane as the interests of humanity. The ethical standpoint of deep ecologists, and people like Tim Flannery, Ted Trainer and Mark O’Connor would, I believe in practice, give greater weight to the interests of the natural world than to those of the humans that use it.

These two moral standpoints, the Marxist one, expressed in the slogans of socialist internationalism: “the unity of labour is the hope of the world”, and “workers of the world unite”, and the similar Catholic moral view that all humans are brothers and sisters under God, have been major defining ideological influences, sometimes in conflict, but surprisingly often reinforcing each other, in the evolution of the labour movement in Australia.

The eventual, relatively recent, emergence in the labour movement of the idea of the unity of the human race as the dominant ideology, is really a kind of flowering of the ethical views of both the above streams. This flowering of humanism is one of the main reasons why the labour movement’s attitude to migration has so dramatically changed in the 20th century from entrenched British Australia racism to support for non-discriminatory migration and multiculturalism.

In Australian cultural terms I am a Marxist atheist of mainly Irish Catholic cultural background. All the original ancestors of the human population of Australia, including the indigenous population, are migrants. The migration history of Australia has been one in which, from the beginning, indigenous Australians, the Irish Catholics and the secular working class of British origin, initially convicts, were in constant conflict with the British ruling class of the new colony.

I’m mainly descended from the Irish, and I identify totally with the conflict against the British ruling class in 19th century Australia, in which my ancestors participated.

From my standpoint, every additional wave of migration has helped to undermine the cultural and political hegemony of the British ruling class, and this is unambiguously a good thing. I celebrate a healthy, plebian, popular Australian nationalism, which is necessarily, and has been historically, in conflict with the reactionary British-Astralian nationalism of the Australian ruling class.

The desperate nostalgia of someone like Miriam Dixson about the passing of what she calls the “Anglo-Celtic core culture” produces in me a certain bitter amusement. I celebrate the passing of that culture. It wasn’t my culture at all.

The new, diverse and cosmopolitan Australia, in which we all have a stake: indigenous Australians, Irish Catholics, the secular working class and middle class of British origin, and each wave of non-British migration, including the recent and spectacular Asian wave, has produced, and is constantly reproducing, a robust modern Australian culture of great diversity and strength, which I enjoy and celebrate.

Many of the most stimulating features of this modern culture are the product of, in particular, the post-war waves of mass migration. My Irish Catholic forebears, and the secular working class, took the process of humanising brutal British Imperial Australia a fair distance in the conflicts of the 19th century and the early 20th century, and the recent waves of migration have further civilised Australia.

Even the unquestionably important contribution of the civilised and humane strand within the British cultural tradition, as exemplified by a scholar such as Manning Clark or a writer like Patrick White, can only really come to full fruition within the framework of a healthy multicultural Australian polity, cleansed of the bigoted ethnocentrism of the old British ruling class Australia.

Anyone who has lived, as I have, from 1937 to now, has only to reflect on and remember the claustrophobic cultural atmosphere of British-Australia in the 1950s to understand what I mean in this context. It is hard for any young person now to even imagine the tension created in a cinema in 1960 if you didn’t stand up for God Save the Queen.

The most conservative forces in society, which hark back nostalgically to the useful cement provided for the preservation of class privilege by all the ridiculous and unpleasant cultural impedimenta of British-Australia, are at the centre of the sporadic attacks on multiculturalism. Their political motivation in these attacks is quite clear.

Cultural diversity and multiculturalism, incorporated as they are into a new modern, plebian Australian national identity, are a far more civilised human environment for us all to live in.

Those who disagree with me on this can try to reverse these developments, but I don’t rate their prospects of success very highly. ............