Frijters and Beatton want to know why "we" don't bemoan the "loss of diversity within Anglo-Saxon heritage"...it's because loss of diversity is meat and drink to nationalists. Loss of diversity is what gives nationalist movements strength. English nationalists didn't bemoan the loss of diversity because they deliberately set out to destroy that diversity. Or, across the Channel, as Charles de Gaulle once said, "nobody can simply bring together a country that has 365 kinds of cheese".

Ernst Gellner (no Marxist, he) made a fairly sound case to show that the founding of modern nation-states depends upon the erasure of localised village/provincial differences into an homogenised national identity that spans considerable geographic distance.

This is how the national identities of England, France, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, US, and all the great nations were formed.

To anybody for whom nation-states represent the sine qua non of human society, the pinnacle of human organisation beyond which we cannot progress, then diversity is to be regarded with suspicion and anxiety, since diversity attempts to reassert the simple humanistic liberal values of individual difference.

But for anybody who thinks that monolithic compulsory identification with a nation-state leads to, as George Orwell put it, a "boot stamping on human face, forever", then diversity, the assertion of individual will and preferences, has its attractions...

I think it has become patently obvious that multiculti was a spectacular failure. As for our aborigines, clearly the best thing for them is to be taken away from so-called "aboriginal culture" the moment they are born!

Neokommie,
If opinions like yours are still held by people in positions of authority, or even by one joe blog on the street, I can see why the aborigines are still dying.
Thank you for airing views that are responsible for genocide. It is good to know the nature of the idiocy aborigines are up against.

While there are those who are in despair and it is the end of the world because we have bonded our fortunes to the dinosaur industry of coal extraction. As some see it we are to painfully switch to flourescent lights. Water restrictions visciously punish those poor battlers with swimming pools and hot tubs. The price of the rare turnip rises. The petrol peak means the days of drag racing and burnouts are numbered. Has the Indigenous culture which has survived failed? Is it really multiculturalism that has failed? It appears it is our western culture which has hit the fan.

We will get our diversity back , when a couple of drought forced famines have us inventing a hundred ways of cooking weedy desert turnips. The same recipes that will in a few hundred years fill the plates of decadent restaurants in post pollution Australia.

Ah Mercurius, you're a funny beggar.

We bought our parsnip at the local corner shop where they keep the parsnips right next to the turnips, just where they've always been in the root vegetable category. We were happy to satisfy the kids' curiosity about those white carrots, but drew the line at turnips.

I'd like to see the much maligned brussels sprout resurrected as a decent vegetable. They're only horrible if you boil them to death, an unfortunate habit we learned from our multicultural British ancestors.

Neokommie, if you don't like Australian society you can always leave. Siberia is apparently nice at this time of year and there won't be too many bothersome people around to upset you. How about the moon?

Memo to Frijters and Beatton:

Colonisation of this continent without treaty = Apples.
Subsequent immigration by lawful programmes = Oranges.

You can't seem to grasp this elementary point, yet off you go comparing apples and oranges to try and make some point about diversity, and then you see fit to lecture the rest of us about misuse of data.

Missing the point much?

PS - Agree chainsmoker: I like Brussel Sprouts, but I only know 2 intricate ways of cooking them. One involves a wok, which I know is a shocking abrogation of my Anglo-Saxon heritage, but if you don't like my brussel sprouts, you can leave too ;-)