It is good to read a throughful contribution on this topic by a public intellectual....thank you, David.

My comment is about context: what are values? How does they differ from virtues. Or ethical principles. Or, even plain common sense? There is a deal of discussion about the furniture, but scant regard for the room - whether in this article or other recent contributions being made.

For instance, naming English as a value seems strange, to me. Every community has a lingua franca, neccessarily. If we said 'Good day, mate', in Aztec or Zulu - or 'Australian' - would that make us less Australian? At most, we can point to the need for a shared language, whatever it is, as a basis for community, but that is surely more a matter of universal common sense than an 'Australian value'.

Identifying the Crown as an Australian value seems similarly ideosyncratic. A majority of Australians do not favour having the Queen (or King Charles) as our head of state, but that surely doesnt make them less Australian. In fact, it is open to Australian republicans to argue that they are more 'true blue' than those who oppose the republic - as I do. Similarly, the rule of law is hardly a value (or ethic) unique to Australia, and nor are Judeo-Christian values (whatever those actually are). Federation? Would we no longer be Australian if we rationalised our governing arrangements to two tiers?

David Flint does seek to offer an historical ontology for grounding his shopping list, and this is more than what many contributors have offerred. Good on him. But the philosophical challange of identifying the architecture of a worldview, and within that, identifiying how Australian values are to be distinguished from human and Western worldviews more broadly, needs to be met if this discussion is ever actually going to go anywhere, it seems to me.

David James

Is this a typo?
"Our nation was born without war, loss of blood or violence."

This is just too pathetic to critque. There was plenty of war, loss of blood and violence in the invasion/colonisation and establishment of Australia.

Surely there is sufficient hard documentary evidence on the history of Australia for the editors to challenge the credibility of this article.

Shame on OLO for printing such drivel. It certainly rustled up the same old redneck rabble though it is sad way to invoke greater readership.

Good old David Flint engaged as ever in romantic fantasy. Perhaps he ought to understand that we live in a pluralistic society and give up the search for some eternal set of values inscribed in stone

David Flint hints that Australia vis-a-vis Germany is somehow exempt from destructive ideology. In my book, as a researcher of multiculturalism of 14 years standing, multiculuralism is a destructive ideology which is constructive to a few of whom personalities and motives ought to be brought out and discussed with all promptitude. Multiculturalism on the one hand rejuvenates Plato's idea that a 'golden class' would preside over classes of 'zinc' and 'iron' telling the 'noble lie' that all is naivete. Remember the giggling Al Grassby here! On the other hand, multiculturalism is an inversion of Nazism cooked up by Edward Shils at the University of Chicago and taught by Professor Shils at the LSE. This may be understood in that Nazism harnessed tradition into the extremes of the nation state which tolerated the annexation of Austria and eventually the holocaust. Multiculturalism, as we now see, removes the traditions which keep society from 'biting its own tail' - compare the London home-grown terrorists - and requires very heavy laws, aimed to stop terrorism - legislation so replete with notions of the Nazi state. Again, our commercial districts need so many uniformed security guards. Are not the swaggering uniformed transit guards with more powers than our police especially in Sydney and Melbourne so highly reminiscent of Nazism?
Multiculturalism also has one higher aim of being a means to change the Commonwealth Constitution because Austrlia's golden class think the Commonwealth Constitution is too good for ordinary Australians for a start. If one finds it difficult to accept this thesis, the best reference to be had is Bob Hawkw's 1979 Boyer Lectures.

Really Professor Flint, you and Kevin Donnelly are welcome to "Judeo-Christian values". So would these be Catholic Judeo-Christian values or Protestant Judeo-Christian values? Myself, I prefer the secular humanist values of the Enlightenment, which I believe underpin much of Australia's success as a tolerant society. As to the esteem most Australian's place on the Crown? I'll go out on a limb here and suggest the likelihood of King Charles of Australia is pretty slight.

You forgot, David, that wisdom builded her house with seven pillars. What would the seventh pillar be; perhaps egalitarianism? After all we know how much you hate elites. Of course, what the dictionary defines as elite, and what you mean by elite are two different things.

Oh my gracious goodness, the six pillars revelation from the divine hands of provident teddy (god) to free us from the darkness of sin and death, ...... to raise us up to life eternal, .... to never pass away, absolutely absolute with no further new public revelations, ... but this heavenly gift to be preserved, venerated with the same sense of loyalty, by an unending succession of cheerleaders until the end of time......... AND the salvation of man shines out. ..... Yo!

Man needs a final authority for creed and conduct, for faith and practice and here we have Soapy's (.... i.e. Flint's) floating soap bubble ... a heavenly gift in perpetuity from teddy.

Well it's a fantasy but perhaps teddy entered into a covenant with Soapy. Who knows? But before we can have sublimely inspired pillars we need a foundation and I see no mention of a foundation. Where are the material constituents to put in place these magic pillars? Well of course we need a country and let's say we have this land with striking dimensions, the smallest of the continents, the lowest, the flattest and just about the driest with ten deserts. Droughts, flooding rains and searing temperatures producing a highly variable climatic pattern that moulds a distinctive landscape, its fauna, flora and you guessed it ....... it moulds human activity and shapes our character.

Soapy's floating soap bubble is oblivious to geography and hence our foundation. For starters we have a legacy of unsustainable uses of natural resources over the course of the past century and a half. We also are driven by "populate or perish" mindsets which prophetically will ensure suicide by immigration.

I just wish this teddy had given us the good gardener rather than the good shepherd. Mate, we've been dudded.