The cluster of recent horrific events here and abroad has swung attention in Australia back to the idea of “social cohesion”. The hideous mass killing at Bondi Junction mall was followed quickly by the stabbing of the rebel Bishop Mar Mari Emmanuel in Western Sydney, which prompted a near-riot and has now been charged as a terrorist incident.
This quinella was preceded by Israel’s unilateral attack on the Iranian embassy in Damascus, Iran’s responding missile attack, and Peter Dutton’s deeply foolish comparison of a pro-Palestine protest with the Port Arthur massacre.
Months earlier, when Israel’s destruction of Gaza and the protests against it had begun, Anthony Albanese had chided the latter, implying they were a disruption to “social cohesion”, which appears to have introduced the concept into the public sphere. Now it is becoming a mantra, repeated without much interrogation.
This is unlikely to be helpful. First off, there is no social cohesion, ever, in societies of any size. Social life is equally cooperation, conflict and competition, and any notion of a “rest point” is an illusion. We bring to social life differing interests, imperatives and moral codes, and that is all the more so in a multi-origin — rather than multicultural — society.
So it is particularly unwise to use an umbrella term such as “social cohesion” to cover both robust debate and public political action on the one hand, and violence on the other. The only way to manage a multi-origin society is to instil respect for this division.
The right to robustly make what one might call “propositional speech” — something that argues something, however vestigially — must be recognised as different from physical, violent action. That lesson has to be enforced not because we should choose it but because we have already chosen it.
Decohesion has already happened
Once you’ve decided on having a multi-origin, multi-culture, multi-faith society, you’ve already committed to a society in which pluralism, as a highest or even meta value, must trump any more concrete, particular value system. Eventually, it becomes the only overarching value to which one can demand universal commitment.
Thus, the right-wing press occasionally spits out an article lamenting “multiculturalism” and demanding the return of “assimilation” — to which the answer is, “Assimilation to what?”. Once we committed to mass, multi-source immigration, we were already on the road to decentring monoculture.
Such notions of “Ellis Island”-style mass immigration, in which people get an English surname and write Irving Berlin songs as soon as they step off the boat, are corrosive and politically self-serving, designed to fuel the resentment that the right feeds off.
But Labor’s notion of “social cohesion” is equally fantastical and comes from a municipal, vaguely whiggish direction. It is a barely disguised legitimation of moving the state into the space of the public sphere, ultimately to make the latter an appendage of the former.
Sadly, this has become a go-to move for the party, which once stood up for enhanced free speech, a legacy of the labour movement’s necessary demands for such. The enthusiasm for vilification laws, disinformation laws and the like is because Labor has replaced labour.
The party now sees itself as the manager of an imposed elite formula — on global alliance, on economy, on social form — and actively works to discourage debate about different possible pathways to the future. This is easily rolled over to a wider notion of social control of discourse.
That is a mistake. And Labor’s method — eliding the discourse–violence division — is a potential disaster. Progressives, who devised it and made it central to Labor’s (and the Greens’) policy, intended it to make vicious speech more visible as to its harm and consequences.
It’s obvious the opposite has occurred, with violence legitimised as a form of communication, an expression of one’s extreme anger, righteousness or whatever. If it is all of a piece and all an equal sin against social cohesion, why not go all the way?
The world is an amazing (and violent) place
But there is another and related way in which “social cohesion” is used to avoid a real reckoning with the way we live now, and that’s through a false division between the inside and outside of the country.
Put simply, if you reconstruct your country as a multi-origin society, then there is no longer a hard-and-fast border of attachments and loyalties. To pretend there is, to revive the Ellis Island fantasy, is simply to deny the way by which people have collective meaning.
This has been on display since Labor was elected. Its specific Left leadership needed to appease its specific Right factional allies, who are deeply bound up with the permanent Defence establishment and US agencies.
So it has made an oleaginous and total commitment to AUKUS, an alliance grounded in old, US-led, Anglosphere assumptions of global control. When the current Gaza crisis came along, this was expressed by a commitment to Israel.
Our government’s reaction to Gaza makes a mockery of, for example, the Multicultural Framework Review report, just about to drop and which urges the government to use the framework to put aside “long-held historical grievances”. How, if your government is helping bomb your cousins?
If the Albanese, or any, government thinks that will get it off the hook, it should think again. That’s why Labor has been blindsided by the vehemence of resistance by its non-Anglo base to the government’s response to Israel’s destruction of Gaza — by their anger at the negation of Palestinian and all non-European-descended peoples, by the resilience and stamina of the movement, and by the detailed and sophisticated counter-line deployed in response.
After October 7
The Albanese leadership thought that it could cosset the Zionist lobby, with the usual obeisances to antisemitism as the oldest and greatest hatred, without realising this simply does not work in a society at the end of a century of the conflicts of imperialism, and in part a product of it.
Siding with the Zionist lobby put Labor in the position of de facto endorsing its version of what was and wasn’t antisemitism and hate speech, which quickly included, by the lobby’s account, a poster, a slogan, and a black-and-white scarf.
The Zionist lobby was happy to roll the progressive notion of speech as violence into its campaign to stigmatise and limit the speech of its opponents. Thus Labor found itself in the position of denying the full humanity of Arab-Australians and other related groups, those who were protesting against real violence: our government’s active support for mass civilian slaughter made on cynical and bogus grounds.
The Zionists deployed the progressive language of emotional safety — for example, in response to the “from the river to the sea” one-state slogan or, again, the keffiyeh — not only demanding restrictions but that its particular interpretation of such things be given state recognition. All this in the name of “social cohesion”.
Hopefully Labor has got the message from the shellacking it has received. Its leaders, all student pollies from the 1980s, still have their heads in the 1980s, when Australia was an Anglo society with add-ons.
Labor thought it could sign up to AUKUS without internal consequences. It thought it could run the Voice referendum, and portray this call to recognise a fundamental division of history and peoples’ fates on this continent as a process of “unity”.
Now it thinks it can rubberstamp the unending slaughter in Gaza, many of the victims of which are on their relatives’ speed dial here. It ain’t gonna work, and if Labor keeps believing it can face these challenges without working out an integrated idea of who it reckons we are now, and projecting it, then it will stumble from one disaster to the next ahead of the next federal election.
Dutton’s disaster
Still, the government has had a rare piece of luck in the opposition having proved even more venal and destructive to a notion of pluralism.
Three days before the Bondi Junction mass killing — in which a deeply disturbed man deployed misogynist violence at strangers — Peter Dutton compared a peaceful pro-Palestine protest to the Port Arthur massacre. Senator James Paterson defended this on RN Breakfast on the Friday morning before last, a mere 30 hours before the attack. Paterson lacked Bridget Archer’s basic courage and decency; no surprises there.
This is the party that went to town on the use of Section 18C in the Racial Discrimination Act, a law containing both a necessary provision against abuse and, in my opinion, an excessive sanction against opinion. Sticks and stones, etc, Paterson and his IPA gunzels went on. Words and actions are separate things; suddenly they became comparable, if not identical. The cynicism, dishonesty and desperation are pathetic.
Finally, what of progressives? They have been buffeted by Zionist lobby efforts at cancellation, organised removal from their jobs, and the destruction of their careers. But progressives provided the weapons now used against them, with their efforts at cancellation and sacking during the gender and trans wars. Maybe they’ve finally got the message about this, too.
The new political contract
In a totalised Anglo-Celtic society, with excluded Indigenous peoples and small minority communities, there was a degree of cultural cohesion regarding shared beliefs, habits, tastes and objects. That started to end in 1948, and the right’s memory of it as some utopia of cohesion has only been achieved by blanking out the brutal and sometimes lethal conflict between Angl(o)ican and Catholic, the limitation of Jewish access to the professions, and much more.
But politically, we can’t agree on anything and we never have. We were born as a society through the Frontier Wars — hardly social cohesion. We fractured ourselves over conscription in World War I. The Communist Party dissolution bill tore the country apart, and the Split reopened the wounds. Violence connected to alcohol, supercharged by the era of social liberation, was huge from the 1960s into the ’90s, its prevalence now hidden from us because the cultural arc of it was so great that much of it was never charged or recorded by police.
From 1948, basic cultural divisions, hostilities and non-acceptance continued for decades; it only looked like cohesion from the point of view of a heavily dominant Anglo society. Once that began to shift demographically in the 1990s, the contractual nature of multicultural social life was made visible.
An automatic and unspoken (and coercive) political contract has been removed, and so we have to create a new one — one more explicit and visible as a constructed object and made through robust debate.
The task will be impossible if we try to hark back to an earlier cohesion created by given origin. Such nostalgic fantasies of perfect safety combined with a state-run “social cohesion” imperative may now well be used to introduce a series of useless restrictions on de facto public spaces like shopping malls.
That would be a mistake. Repress robust and dissident social life and it will return in a desocialised form. Instead, we need to put discursive pluralism at the centre of our political life. We need to talk more, not less, and value robust opinion. That might well involve advancing a social decorum of not taking offence wantonly. But it is of utmost importance to reject the equation of strong, even insulting language with violence, and to reinforce the absolutely singular character of physical violence against persons as unjustifiable and wrong.
But that will all be of no use if governments — Labor, Labor-minority or Coalition — continue to believe they can sign up to unjustifiable violence in the world and see no effect at home. We are the world now.
Our foreign policy will have to conform to the minimum requirements of our domestic policy for social peace to be even possible. The reverse, which we are pursuing now, is a path to hate, division and disaster.
What does the concept of “social cohesion” mean to you? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
