Something is telling about the way Australian political and media elites respond to Pauline Hanson. The moment she speaks, the reflex is to dismiss rather than to engage.
Angus Taylor, the Liberal leader who should know better, recently accused One Nation of wanting to “judge people based on the colour of their skin” — a characterisation so detached from what Hanson actually said at her press conference that it crosses from misrepresentation into something closer to deliberate fabrication.
Hanson had just argued, on the record, that Australians should be treated equally “regardless of race, colour, creed, or where you are from.”
You may disagree with her politics. You may find her tone abrasive. But the political class’s instinct to caricature rather than confront tells you more about their intellectual bankruptcy than about her.
That said, Hanson’s own position and One Nation’s social media amplification of it suffers from a different kind of failure: a divisive cultural nationalism that undermines the very case it wants to make.
Let us start with what is simply correct. The English language is not a colonial relic to be apologised for. It is the operative language of Australian civic life, of courts, parliaments, hospitals, workplaces and schools.
One Nation has recently cited the 2021 Census figure of 872,000 people as evidence of a language crisis. The number is real, but the framing requires precision.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 872,206 people who spoke a language other than English at home self-reported that they spoke English not well or not at all. It is a self-assessed measure, not a tested or verified one, and it applies specifically to those already using a non-English language at home — not to the general population.
That caveat does not diminish the concern; it sharpens it.
On the ABS’s own figures, 3.4 per cent of the total Australian population fell into the not-well-or-not-at-all category in 2021. On a population of 25.5 million, the arithmetic produces roughly that 872,000 figure. And the claim that 23 per cent of households do not use English at home is similarly grounded — the ABS recorded 22.3 per cent of the population using a language other than English at home, which rounds to the figure One Nation has cited.
The numbers, properly qualified, are accurate. They represent a policy failure of the first order, not a data point to be explained away by progressive commentators as merely a sign of diversity.
No serious immigration programme can function if large cohorts of settlers arrive or remain without the language capacity to participate in the society that receives them.
This is not nativism. It is logistics. Hanson is right to press on this, even if she presses on it with a bluntness that invites easy mockery and alienates the very moderate opinion she needs to persuade.
The exchange with the SBS journalist at Hanson’s press conference crystallised the confusion at the heart of this debate. The journalist defended SBS’s broadcasting in more than sixty languages as a tool of integration. It was, charitably, a confused argument — and one that SBS’s own institutional history quietly refutes.
SBS did not begin as the multilingual colossus it is today. It launched on 9 June 1975 as Radio Ethnic Australia with just seven languages, with Greek the first to go to air, broadcasting in Sydney and Melbourne. The expansion to its current 63 languages across radio, podcasting, online and social media has been driven by quinquennial reviews tied directly to Census data, which is itself an institutional acknowledgment that language services are a function of demographic need, not a permanent cultural entitlement.
More telling still is what SBS has been willing to cut. After its 2016 Census review, twelve language services were discontinued or placed in recess — among them Fijian, Cook Island Maori, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Tongan — because the communities in question had either shrunk, integrated, or no longer required in-language services to navigate Australian civic life. After the 2021 review, Albanian, Bulgarian, Finnish, Romanian, Slovak and Slovenian were similarly decommissioned, while newer migrant languages from South Asia were added in their place.
The selection criteria SBS applies require a minimum population threshold and a demonstrable need linked to English language proficiency levels in the community. In other words, SBS itself operates on an integration logic: when a community no longer needs a linguistic bridge, the bridge is withdrawn. The journalist’s argument that multilingual broadcasting aids integration is thus contradicted by SBS’s own institutional practice. SBS does not broadcast in 63 languages because it believes permanent linguistic separation is healthy. It does so as a transitional service — and it removes languages when the transition is judged complete.
So, if SBS can decide that a language community no longer needs broadcasting support, it has already conceded Hanson’s central premise. It just lacks the courage to say so plainly.
This makes the case not for abolishing SBS — Hanson’s blunt instrument — but for something more structurally intelligent. Australia is one of the few countries in the world that funds two full public broadcasters. The combined annual taxpayer outlay on the ABC and SBS runs to approximately 1.3 billion dollars. Rather than defunding the ABC, as some on the right demand, or treating the present duplication as sacrosanct, as the left instinctively does, a merger that preserves SBS’s multicultural remit within a unified public broadcaster, with shared back-end infrastructure, combined streaming platforms, and clear editorial firewalls protecting the language and cultural programming, would serve both taxpayers and audiences better than the current arrangement.
The Australia Institute has already recommended consolidating the two broadcasters’ online news and streaming services, noting that sharing content, translation and publishing systems presents genuine efficiency gains without gutting the public interest mission of either.
The ABC’s own trajectory is instructive: in 2009, Radio Australia broadcast in eight languages, including Khmer, Vietnamese, Indonesian, Mandarin, French and Burmese. By 2018, following budget cuts in 2014 and 2016, it could be heard only in English and Tok Pisin. The ABC has, in fact, been moving away from in-language domestic services, not towards duplicating SBS. A merged entity would rationalise what is already a fragmented and sometimes redundant public broadcasting landscape, and produce a genuinely wholesome broadcaster with the best of both institutions — without the ideological overcorrection of abolition.
But the deeper problem with Hanson’s framing is not the data; it is the conclusion drawn from it.
The proposition that Australia needs “one strong Australian culture” that is cohesive and defined against a corrupted multiculturalism is not a policy framework — it is an emotional slogan.
What does “one Australian culture” mean, exactly? The culture of the gold rush? Of the White Australia Policy? Of the bush ballad or the inner-city café?
Australian culture, like every living culture, is not a fixed quantity to be defended. It is a negotiated, evolving set of civic norms built around what people actually share — and what they genuinely need to share is not the same thing as cultural uniformity. The distinction between monoculture and civic integration is crucial, and One Nation collapses it.
For example, an Indian-Australian woman who speaks fluent English, pays her taxes, knows her legal rights, votes, and raises children who think of themselves as Australian — she has integrated. That she also celebrates Diwali and cooks butter chicken is not a threat to social cohesion. It is colour in what would otherwise be a beige civic landscape. Demanding that she surrender this is not integration policy; it is cultural imperialism dressed in the language of belonging.
What Australia actually needs is not the fantasised monoculture, nor the performative multiculturalism of progressive elites who treat the 872,000 figure as a diversity statistic rather than a governance problem.
It needs a firm, unapologetic civic integration framework: English language proficiency as a verified prerequisite, not merely a self-declared one, for permanent residency; a migration intake calibrated to absorptive capacity rather than ideological targets; and a willingness to name the failure when communities of any origin develop parallel institutional lives that corrode shared norms.
The appeasement instinct that has overtaken Australian mainstream politics, and indeed much of the Western political class, is the real rot. Politicians on all sides have spent two decades treating ethnic communities as electoral blocs to be soothed rather than citizens to be engaged.
The consequence is that legitimate questions about language, integration and civic expectation have been ceded to Hanson by default, precisely because the centre lacks the courage to say things that might complicate a preference vote.
Hanson fills a vacuum created by elite neglect, and then the elite attacks her for filling it.
Taylor’s performance, attacking Hanson for racism on the very day she explicitly disavowed racial categorisation, is a symptom of this neglect turned aggressive. It is easier to throw a slur than to develop a policy. The Liberals, who presided over their own extended failures on immigration and integration policy, have no standing to lecture anyone on this ground.
Hanson is not always wrong. She is often inflammatory and strategically limited in her capacity to build the broad coalitions that lasting policy change requires. But the monoculture she reaches for and the civic integration she actually needs are not the same thing, and her rhetoric too often obscures this.
The English language argument is worth making with precision and dignity. The SBS argument is worth making with an understanding of what SBS actually does and how it actually works. And the broadcasting reform argument is worth making as a fiscal and structural proposition, not a cultural war.
“One Australian culture” is a slogan that forecloses the very conversation it claims to open.
Australia is not a monoculture. It never was. What it can be, what it must be, is a country with non-negotiable civic common ground: a shared language, a shared legal framework, and a shared expectation that those who make their home here contribute to rather than shelter from the society that receives them.
That argument is available to any thoughtful person across the political spectrum. It is a pity that it keeps being made, and kept being answered, in the worst possible terms by almost everyone involved.
Support our Journalism
No-nonsense journalism. No paywalls. Whether you’re in Australia, the UK, Canada, the USA, or India, you can support The Australia Today by taking a paid subscription via Patreon or donating via PayPal — and help keep honest, fearless journalism alive.
