I guess an Australian is not an Australian when they have done the bare minimum required to get citizenship and then nip off back to where they came from, treating Australian citizenship like an insurance policy. They have no affinity with Australia and contribute nothing to it, but when they get in trouble, boy, watch them scream and wave their passport around. "I'm Australian, help me!"

Don't get me wrong, native-born Aussies are capable of being useless as well. But citizenship is their birthright, they didn't seek it out as their get-out-of-jail-free card. I can think of "Australian" drug runners (Vietnamese), "Australian" terrorists (Lebanese), and "Australian" spies (Chinese) as recent examples of people who spat all over the welcome we gave them by breaking laws and seeing their passport as nothing more than a ticket out of the mess they'd created. If you come here, contribute and be a part of this country. Otherwise, don't bother applying for citizenship because you shouldn't get it and we shouldn't be obliged to bail you out for your bad behaviour.

Leigh wrote: "Dual citizenship and multiculturalism is gradually creating a land of disparate tribes, where tribes or groups will have nothing in common and nothing to do with each other. A country simply cannot hold together like that."

Australia has become the disunified "cluster of tribes" that Geoffrey Blainey warned about. The shared national identity and culture that Australians once enjoyed has been irrevocably shattered by mass immigration and multiculturalism.

By trashing the old policy of assimilation, Australia essentially signalled that it no longer believed that it had any national identity or culture of its own worth preserving. This shift away from assimilation toward multiculturalism coincided with the beginning of "The Flood", the massive, ongoing wave of non-Western immigration that began in the 1970s. With the policy of assimilation out of the way, concerns about Australia's ability to absord, socially and culturally, this huge, unremitting influx were not longer considered relevant. Rather than threatening the survival of our shared culture and identity, and, indeed, the very survival of Australia as coherent and cohesive whole, this foreign influx was celebrated as providing more "diversity". "Diversity" thus became the highest good, to be pursued as an end in itself, even if it meant destroying the bonds of Australian nationhood.

The result is that, these days, Australia has effectively ceased to be anything approximating a nation in the traditional sense, and could now be described as little more than a global suburb, a home away from home for a range of diasporic communities whose identities are rooted not in Australia but in other countries.

[Continued from above...]

Admittedly, Australia was always bound to face some kind of identity crisis in the wake of the decline of the British Empire. Up until the mid 20th Century, Australia viewed itself as essentially a British society transplanted in the South Pacific. The challenge for Australia would have been to develop a post-British identity, one that still recognised our British heritage, but also recognised our place in the world and the uniquely Australian features of our society.

Multiculturalism essentially destroyed any chance of a new, organic, solid Australian identity forming. We went from being a settler colony of Britain, to developing a national consciousness of our own, and then back to being a settler colony again, only this time a colony of every nation on earth. It can thus be said that multiculturalism effectively destroyed the Australian nation in its infant stage.

“Multiculturalism essentially destroyed any chance of a new, organic, solid Australian identity forming. We went from being a settler colony of Britain, to developing a national consciousness of our own, and then back to being a settler colony again, only this time a colony of every nation on earth. It can thus be said that multiculturalism effectively destroyed the Australian nation in its infant stage.”

I have been asking for awhile, I even claimed a few times that Aussie didn’t appear to have a firm identity and here you are Efranke finally explaining it. This makes sense to me.

Did you read all that Banjo?

Is there a fix or this has to take time for Oz to find its feet?

Maybe taking away the threat of being ejected after citizenship has been granted could help?

Nice convenient peg, multiculturalism.

>>Multiculturalism essentially destroyed any chance of a new, organic, solid Australian identity forming<<

Methinks that statement is itself formed out of "organic solid".

It's like saying that the weather has destroyed any chance of a new, organic, solid train timetable forming.

Although to be fair, the NSW government has used that very phrase.

Efranke
"multiculturalism effectively destroyed the Australian nation in its infant stage"
Multiculturalism destroyed the dream for a british nation in Australia.
Modern Australia is a multicultural, multinational nation and soon or later we will create our own national ID, as happened with USA.
In Australia Anglo Saxons was extremely nationalists before 1955, you know the test for Australian citizenship, not in English language, not in migrant's language but in a language they did not know to fail the citizenship test. NEVER AND NOWHERE people had this kind of tests! NONE migrant became australian citizen from 1900 to 1954!
The mass migration changed the synthesis of australian population and destroyed the dream for a british nation in Australia.
Soon or later the last dreamers for a british nation in south will die, taking with them remaining parts of the white Australia.
We, the new Australians, know that the old bad days passed for ever, and a better future is created for all australians without any kind of discrimination and victimization.
Eviva the multinational, multicultural Australia!
The Pied Pipe thank you my good friend, thank you!
Antonios Symeonakis
Adelaide