Australia has never been a monoculture, and importing American-style grievance politics only distracts from the real challenges facing ordinary Australians, writes Rob Powell.
THE YEAR WAS 1995, and a little-known Melbourne funk band called Cranky released ‘Australia Don’t Become America’, which soon hit the airwaves on Triple J.
In doing so, they forced us to confront a broader question: what is Australian culture?
They answered that Australian culture begins with the denial of Indigenous culture, captured in the line, “40,000 beers cannot erase 40,000 years”. It is a particularly poignant observation given that this piece was drafted as Australia marks NAIDOC Week.
At the time, the song was primarily a warning against importing American consumer culture: its brands, values and the cultural flattening they cause. Thirty years later, the warning still resonates. Indeed, it may be even more urgent now, given the danger American-style politics presents to Australia through our friendly “pelican”, who is importing some of the most base elements of global grievance politics into Australian public life.
Senator Pauline Hanson claims to be the protector of Australian culture, but her idea of an Australian monoculture is historically false. Australia has never possessed the single, homogeneous culture her argument presupposes. Across more than 65,000 years of First Nations civilisation, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were never a single culture.
Australia was and remains home to many distinct nations, languages, laws, traditions and systems of belief. AIATSIS identifies more than 250 Indigenous languages and around 800 dialects, each connected to particular peoples and places.
First Nations cultures alone therefore undermine the myth that Australia possesses a single ancient culture or that cultural diversity is merely a modern concept. Migration and cultural exchange have also long shaped Australian life. This includes trade between Makassan visitors from Sulawesi and the peoples of Arnhem Land, as well as historical interaction between Melanesian peoples from Papua New Guinea and communities in the Torres Strait and northern Australia.
Successive waves of modern migration have since transformed Australian society. Even the Australian Government’s Multicultural Framework Review describes migration as fundamental to the Australian story.
Australia has no defensible historical heritage of monoculture. Hanson’s monoculture is nostalgia turned into policy: a retrospective fantasy whose political effect is to preserve the dominance of British settler culture over modern Australia, regardless of whether every person promoting it consciously intends that result.
Hanson’s vision is not a recovery of Australian culture, but the elevation of one part of Australian history above all the others. Indeed, when she tried to explain her monoculture by telling the Senate to “bring back Paul Hogan and Norman Gunston,” Hogan rejected the compliment, describing her position as racist and saying that she was “living in the past”.
Hansonism borrows from some of the worst elements of American cultural politics. It uses anger, resentment, anti-elite language, anti-globalisation, hostility towards the media and the performance of outsider status to achieve its political objectives. Its political appeal does not depend entirely on a coherent body of policy. It depends heavily on emotional recognition.
Supporters feel seen through their grievances and that recognition can remain politically powerful even when the policies offered are incomplete or contradictory.
That is why questioning both Hanson and her supporters matters more than merely reacting to them. It is through answering real and difficult questions that flaws in reasoning, gaps in knowledge and contradictions within policies can be exposed.
While many people focus on the mainstream media and its complicity in the rise of Hansonism, the comment sections of social media complete the grievance machine. Hanson says something inflammatory. Opponents of Hansonism perform their outrage. Supporters of Hansonism perform their victimhood. Social media platforms reward the resulting engagement.
Research has found that hostility towards political out-groups is a particularly powerful driver of social media engagement, giving platforms and political performers an incentive to keep the conflict alive.
Some commenters then compete over who is the most ideologically pure. Those judged less pure, even within the same political tribe, can be ostracised and abused by people with whom they broadly agree. Meanwhile, the substantive political questions disappear. Politics becomes emotional performance: a pantomime that divides people into tribes and reinforces existing biases. Critical thinking and sceptical questioning are buried, as though all the time and money spent on education were a total waste.
At the end of this massive charade, ordinary people do not necessarily benefit from grievance politics. Economic elites, however, can benefit when political anger is redirected away from concentrations of wealth and power and towards cultural symbols and convenient scapegoats. Research into identity and political conflict has found that cultural identity can obscure class differences and dampen political conflict over redistribution.
While ordinary people are given symbols to fight over and somebody else to blame, rent, wages, taxation, welfare, housing and corporate power receive less attention. Meanwhile, Australia has reached a record 178 billionaires holding more than $686 billion in combined wealth.
This does not prove that billionaires created Hansonism or consciously control every culture war. What it does show, however, is that grievance politics can protect concentrated wealth by diverting political attention away from its distribution. Those who already possess economic power can benefit from that diversion, whether or not they deliberately engineered it.
Grievance politics operates as a pressure-release valve for economic anger. For people living in tents, caravans and makeshift encampments, trapped in precarious housing or going without meals, positive GDP figures and favourable OECD comparisons offer little comfort. Their immediate concern is that their incomes no longer cover the essentials. According to the Foodbank Hunger Report 2025, one in three Australian households experienced food insecurity during the previous year.
Grievance politics can turn class pain into culture war. It can weaken the possibility of class solidarity by encouraging people with similar economic interests to understand one another primarily as cultural enemies. Instead of generating demands that those at the bottom be lifted up through redistribution, material insecurity can be redirected towards migrants, minorities and other convenient targets. Meanwhile, instead of wealth trickling down, Australia continues to experience wealth flowing upwards towards those who already possess it.
In the end, Australia does not need a monoculture. Biological monocultures provide a useful, although limited, illustration of why uniformity should not automatically be confused with strength. Consider the Cavendish banana. Commercial Cavendish plants are propagated clonally and possess extremely limited genetic diversity, leaving them particularly vulnerable to Panama disease and extinction.
A society is not a banana plantation, so this biological example cannot prove that cultural diversity necessarily produces social resilience. Its value is metaphorical: it demonstrates that uniformity is not always the same as strength. The political argument for diversity must stand on its own grounds. A plural society can draw upon a wider range of experiences, knowledge and perspectives, but diversity becomes a source of resilience only when people are connected through inclusive institutions and a meaningful common life.
Research in organisational theory similarly suggests that well-managed diversity can strengthen the capacity to anticipate problems, cope with disruption and adapt to change.
Australia should therefore build its diversity around that collective common life. It can include shared institutions: public schools, public housing, Medicare, including dental care, early childhood education, fair wages, public broadcasting, unions, local sporting clubs, libraries, public parks, regional communities and democratic accountability.
Shared public institutions are fundamentally different from the enforcement of cultural sameness. They create places where different people can participate in a common society without surrendering their cultural identities. A healthy country does not need everybody to think, worship, speak or live in precisely the same way. It needs people to be able to live together without being manipulated into hating one another.
All these years later, Cranky’s warning still matters: Australia should not become America. But the threat to Australia does not come from migrants, multiculturalism or pluralism. It comes from importing a style of grievance politics that fractures the common life by converting material insecurity into cultural hostility.
Hansonism does not defend Australian culture from an American monoculture. It franchises American anger into Australian colours. The answer to this is not more comment-section hatred. It is persistent questioning, democratic accountability, stronger public institutions and a politics that refuses to allow the pain of ordinary people to be converted into a profitable culture war for the wealthy.
Rob Powell is a retired mature-aged student currently studying politics and philosophy, focusing on how ethical frameworks shape public policy and political behaviour.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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