Laboratory Politics: Monoculture Down Under

Words can function as prisons and windows. They can cage meaning and suffocate understanding. They can also reveal concepts which breathtaking clarity. “Monoculture”, a recent word running through the podcast-press corps stable down under, is very much of the prison variety, one planted by that most mini-syllabic of politicians, Pauline Hanson. Unlike her conservative opponents in the Liberal and National parties (her One Nation Party proudly proclaims to be more right wing), she continues to show why she is not on the endangered species list.

In her June speech before journalism’s version of a monoculture, Australia’s National Press Club, that forum of stultified air and safe practice, Hanson put her case for a party she has, with tyrannical enthusiasm, made her own. Much of the address seemed generated by ChatGPT or some Large Learning Model. Her use of various terms (“transgender insurgency” was a joy of aggrieved exaggeration) proved extraordinary and misplaced. But it was her reference to monoculturalism that caught the attention of those present. “We cannot be a multicultural society. We are a multiracial society, but we must be monocultural. Australians must live under the one cultural umbrella.”

To demonstrate the extent of her confusion, Hanson, in subsequent remarks, pointed to that least monocultural of entities, the Australian football team, as Case Exhibit One. The Socceroos, she insisted, were a model of monoculturalism in practice. These were players from “different backgrounds and cultures and nations” who all wore “the green and gold and representing one nation under one flag and succeeding under the same set of rules”. On Sky News, Hanson thought “monocultural” to be “the culture of the nation”, proceeding to insensibly claim that Australia had a monocultural language, dress, laws and “cultures”. (Is the mind aching yet?)

Monoculture is a word normally reserved for laboratory practice. It makes sense in the context of agriculture, notably when producing genetically modified crops that have no prospect of seeding beyond their harvest. It is meaningless in the human swirl of cultures and engagement that can be found in every society on this planet, however insular. Not even the hermetic terrestrial tyranny of North Korea could qualify. For starters, such a country retains the source vectors of Japan and China in its cultural orientation.

Confusing monoculture with homogeneity, if, indeed, she understood that term, Hanson decided that Japan was a good national example of her muddled concept. That she should pick an Asian country as a finely attuned model of cultural probity was astonishing, given her historical fear of Australia being “swamped” by Asians. “Japan has a monoculture, so what’s wrong with Australia having a monoculture?” she wondered on Channel Seven’s Sunrise program.

Most entertainingly of all, many Australian politicians do not seem to know what monoculture means, mostly due to their failure to understand its inapplicable properties, at least when it comes to human societies. The Nationals leader Matt Canavan admitted that he did not “like the word monoculture, I’d never heard of it before, really, until last week”. His preference was for “a common culture, a common culture that unites us all.” As for multiculturalism, he did not care much for that either. Having “no problem with people celebrating their diverse cultural activities and practices”, the thought “that the concept of multiculturalism [had] been abused by activists on the left to seek to erase our common culture.”

The harried Liberal Party leader, Angus Taylor, told Channel Nine’s Today Show that “I don’t know what monoculture means”, which set the scene for his descent into the quicksand. On June 23, when given a chance to clarify where he stood on matters of the multi and the mono in light of Hanson’s press club spray, Taylor stumbled, calling such terms “vague”. The next day, he reluctantly conceded that he believed in a “version of multiculturalism”. His deputy, Jane Hume, was less confused. “We are a multicultural society. Let’s face it, we already are.”

And what of Japan as Hanson’s monocultural exemplar? “I hear,” Taylor ruminated, “it’s something like Japan. I don’t want Australia to look like Japan.” Japan might well be homogeneous on set principles; it is hardly monocultural. Even those arguing against using that term in describing such national groups as the Japanese have fallen for the trap of turning inapplicable language into a credible debate. “Right now,” says a stumbling Peter Chai of Waseda University in Tokyo, “foreign labour makes up about three to four percent of the population. So, compared to some Western countries, that level is still low, but compared to historical levels, in Japan, that is actually a very high level.”

The point is utterly missed. Ravines, mountain villages, isolated hamlets untouched by the internet, would still resist a monocultural designation; in them exist various fed versions of culture. This might have been due, at stages, to the exchange of trade, the adventurous, occasionally carnal minded merchant, intrepid travellers and, let us not forget, brutal invasion and rapacity. Cultures are not airtight experiments conducted in controlled conditions.

What a stupid debate this turned out to be, and one that further shows the electoral dangers that await the Coalition. Thankfully, the veteran scribbler on politics, Annabel Crabb, showed a sense of embarrassed fun and good sense in telling readers that it was “well past time for everybody to go home for a lie down.”

Dr. Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He currently lectures at RMIT University. Email: [email protected]