Greens are a threat to Australia’s bipartisan tolerance

To have a political party standing side by side with protestors who call for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea” is intolerable.

GEORGINA DOWNER | The Australian Financial Review, 12 June 2024

Robert Menzies and Joseph Lyons, credit: Museum of Australian Democracy.

Joe Biden said last year that history teaches us that hate never goes away. That most ancient of hatreds, antisemitism, has reared its ugly head recently in Australia, and the Australian Greens are fanning the flames to try to win seats from Labor. Tragically, this is undoing the tolerance, pluralism and egalitarianism developed over decades by farsighted Australian leaders across the political spectrum.  

It's important to reflect on how far we have come in Australia to bolster our determination not to let the Greens destroy what has been bipartisan intolerance of racial discrimination and attacks on minority ethnic groups. 

Australia’s colonial and early Federation history is marked by the White Australia Policy. Viewed through today’s eyes, this is abhorrent, but support for White Australia was bipartisan and uncontroversial a century ago. 

At the same time, Australian settlers had embraced religious pluralism and tolerance free of any established Church. Drawn from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, these settlers were free to practise their own doctrinal strands of Christianity, from Catholicism, Anglicanism, Presbyterianism, Methodism, and even Judaism. 

In 1938, United Australia Party Prime Minister Joseph Lyons announced that Australia would take 15,000 refugees from Czechoslovakia following that country’s annexation by Nazi Germany. This decision was remarkable not least as a humanitarian gesture but because it was the first time Australia would officially welcome a group of non-British migrants. Sadly, administrative delays meant only half of the refugee places offered were filled before World War Two started in September 1939. 

Lyons’s decision was the first formal departure from the White Australia Policy. In under 30 years, a combination of Liberal and Labor Governments would ensure the termination of the White Australia Policy. 

Like other countries, World War Two and the dark shadow of the Holocaust would change Australia forever.

Faced with the existential threat of the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces, Australia needed to populate or perish. With British migration to Australia drying up, political leaders from Labor and the centre-right United Australia Party could see that the population would need to come from countries other than Britain. 

At the end of the war, Australia’s Prime Minister, Labor leader Ben Chifley, welcomed thousands of displaced people from Europe. This heralded the start of the post-war migration boom, and what would become a permanent shift in Australian identity away from Britishness towards more multicultural notions of who could be an Australian. 

This was bipartisan and was done in the national interest. Australian politicians knew that  questions of demography would need to be above politics.

 My grandfather, Alick Downer, reflected the changing view within Australia towards non-British migration. He was an Empire man. Proud of Australia’s connections to Britain, he was also a supporter of the White Australia Policy. It was his incarceration in Changi as a POW that broadened his views, and he began to see the benefits of migration from European countries to Australia. 

 “People from the Continent have broadened our horizons in a way that our British kinsfolk never could do”, he said. “They have induced a wider tolerance in the Australian mind, something in the past which was noticeably lacking in our mental composition.”

When Alick became the Liberal Party’s  Immigration Minister in the Menzies government in 1958, he abolished the notorious European language dictation test used to bar  ‘aliens’ - non-whites - from entering Australia. Contrary, the Labor mythology that Gough Whitlam ended the White Australia Policy, its dismantling was a bipartisan project decades in the making. 

Tolerance and pluralism used to be uncontroversial. There have been debates over multiculturalism and the extent to which that celebrated overseas cultures to the detriment of our own. Sure, politicians have quibbled about immigration policy and there have been debates around Australian values. But mainstream political parties in Australia have practiced religious tolerance and pluralism and helped create one of the most multicultural and harmonious societies in the world. 

The events of October 7 were a horrific reminder of the human capacity for evil. But what makes October 7 unique in the Australian context (and unlike after 9/11 and the rise of Islamic State)  have been the shows of support - starting outside the Opera House and extending to university campuses and outside MP’s offices -  for Hamas’s anti-Semitic terrorist evils. 

And what has changed is the Greens' willingness to politicise ancient hatreds imported from overseas for domestic political advantage at cost to Jewish Australians who feel unsafe in their own country. 

Australian politics has for decades been above this.To have a  political party such as the Greens standing side by side with protestors who call for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea”  is intolerable. The Greens, once true to its name as a party of environmentalism, is now helping foster intolerance that is trashing the core of Australian values. 

This is based on Georgina Downer’s chapter in the forthcoming book Beneath the Southern Cross: Looking for Australia in the 21st Century (Connor Court).