MONOCULTURE: GREEK-AUSTRALIANS AND HANSON

 When Pauline Hanson recently declared that Australia must become “monocultural,” describing multiculturalism as a failed policy and asserting that Australians should live under “one cultural umbrella,” she touched a nerve that extends well beyond the fortunes of One Nation.  Her remarks’ significance lies not merely in what they reveal about immigration policy or cultural identity. Rather, they illuminate a broader transformation occurring within Australian public life: a growing tendency to understand society through increasingly rigid categories of belonging and exclusion.

 

The appeal of Hanson's message rests upon concerns that many Australians genuinely hold. Rising housing costs, pressure on infrastructure, economic insecurity and declining trust in political institutions have left many convinced that governments have lost control of events. Large scale immigration has become a focal point through which these anxieties are expressed.

 

Yet it does not follow that the solution lies in abandoning multiculturalism, nor in imagining that a country such as Australia can somehow be reduced to a single cultural identity. Australia has never possessed a monocultural reality. Even before post-war migration transformed the nation, it was a society shaped by regional, religious, class and ethnic differences. The remarkable achievement of modern Australia has been its ability to develop a civic framework capable of accommodating diversity while maintaining social cohesion. The question facing Australians is not whether diversity exists. It is whether that diversity will continue to be managed through democratic institutions, civic participation and mutual accommodation, or whether it will increasingly be interpreted through competing narratives of exclusion.

 

The growing attraction of One Nation, the tendency of sections of the activist left to interpret public life through rigid moral categories, the decline of the political centre and the erosion of trust in institutions are often analysed as separate phenomena. Viewed collectively, however, they suggest a profound transformation in how Australians understand politics, citizenship and one another. They are manifestations of a common disposition: declining faith in compromise and a growing attraction to worldviews that divide society into categories of virtue and culpability, belonging and exclusion. The vocabulary may differ, but the antagonisms remain strikingly familiar.

 

One Nation derives much of its appeal from the conviction that the concerns of ordinary Australians have been subordinated to the priorities of political, cultural and economic elites increasingly insulated from the consequences of their own decisions. Sections of the activist left are animated by an equally powerful conviction that entrenched structures of privilege continue to shape Australian society in ways that render conventional political remedies inadequate. While both identify genuine grievances, both have also contributed to a tendency to interpret political disagreement not as an inevitable feature of democratic life but as evidence of defective motives, suspect loyalties or moral deficiency. Under such circumstances, persuasion becomes increasingly difficult because opponents cease to be merely mistaken. They become enemies.

 

The resulting deterioration of civic culture is perhaps most evident in the declining credibility of the political centre. Across much of the democratic world, institutions that once possessed the capacity to mediate between competing interests appear increasingly incapable of commanding public confidence. Political parties struggle to inspire loyalty, public trust in government continues to erode, and social media rewards outrage while treating reflection as indecision and nuance as weakness. Consequently, citizens retreat into increasingly self-contained intellectual and cultural communities whose members consume different information, employ different vocabularies and often inhabit different conceptions of reality. Compromise, once regarded as an indispensable component of democratic life, is increasingly dismissed as evidence of moral cowardice or ideological surrender.

 

 

Greek-Australians should observe developments in Australia with particular unease, though not for the reasons usually advanced. Communal discourse remains fond of invoking the democratic inheritance of antiquity, as though the repeated evocation of Athens were sufficient proof of an enduring attachment to democratic culture. However the political tradition from which most migrants emerged was shaped less by the deliberative ethos of the Assembly than by a succession of internecine conflicts, rival legitimising narratives and ideological antagonisms that rendered compromise suspect and transformed political disagreement into hatred and destruction. Indeed, one of the enduring paradoxes of modern Greek history is that a people who celebrate democracy with almost liturgical devotion have repeatedly demonstrated a remarkable propensity to abandon the civic habits upon which democratic life ultimately depends.

 

That the modern Greek state emerged from civil conflict before independence had been secured is less paradoxical than it first appears. The tendency to divide political life into antagonistic camps accompanied the Greek state from its inception. The struggles of the War of Independence established patterns that would recur throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rivalry between Trikoupis and Deligiannis entrenched a political culture in which allegiance to personalities often superseded allegiance to institutions.

 

The National Schism elevated these tendencies to a principle of political organization: a disagreement concerning foreign policy and the role of the monarchy evolved into a comprehensive rupture that penetrated families, communities and institutions with an intensity difficult to comprehend from the vantage point of the present. Venizelists and Royalists increasingly inhabited different political universes. The coups of Pangalos and Kondylis, the Metaxas dictatorship and constitutional instability formed part of the same political culture.

 

Neither occupation nor liberation resolved these antagonisms. The Civil War represented perhaps the most devastating manifestation of a tendency already deeply embedded within Greek political life, namely the inclination to regard political opponents as existential threats whose exclusion became a prerequisite for national redemption, rather than as rivals within a shared civic framework. The dictatorship of 1967 emerged from a society already burdened by decades of ideological polarisation, mutual suspicion and institutional fragility. Every generation imagined itself capable of avoiding the mistakes of its predecessors, only to discover that historical memory offers remarkably little protection against the recurrence of familiar patterns.

 

For all the ritual invocations of Pericles that accompany communal discourse, and despite the almost sacerdotal reverence with which the democratic achievements of antiquity are frequently recalled, the political inheritance carried to Australia by much of the migrant generation was not shaped by the deliberative culture of ancient Athens but rather the accumulated traumas of the abovementioned fraternal strife. Alongside the remarkable achievements of the Greek communities in this country, sits a parallel history of schisms, rival organisations, ecclesiastical disputes, contested elections and grievances ofgreat longevity. The Greek-Australian capacity for organisational proliferation has often been exceeded only by its talent for preserving antagonisms whose original causes have long since passed into obscurity.

 

As Vrasidas Karalis observed almost three decades ago, much of Greek-Australian communal discourse has remained trapped within grand narratives of continuity, nostalgia and cultural self-affirmation. The migrant experience was often understood through nostalgia for Greece and repeated assertions of Hellenic uniqueness rather than new symbols capable of expressing life in Australia. While not extremist in themselves, such habits encouraged an understanding of identity through belonging and exclusion rather than citizenship and participation.

 

It is within this context that the attraction of One Nation among some Greek-Australians becomes particularly revealing. Another dynamic is also at work. Organised Greek-Australian life often devoted more attention to developments in Greece than to civic questions confronting Australia. Issues such as Cyprus, Macedonia and domestic Greek politics frequently dominated communal debate. The consequence was a politics of identification rather than participation. Successful integration can leave communities unexpectedly invested in the existence of newer outsiders, whose presence confirms that they themselves now belong. The former outsider becomes a gatekeeper and descendants of migrants espouse positions and rhetoric once levelled against their own people.

 

There is nothing uniquely Greek about this development, which reflects a broader human tendency to confuse belonging with exclusion and acceptance with hierarchy. It is difficult, however, to avoid the conclusion that a community whose own history contains so many examples of the consequences of factionalism, exclusion and political tribalism might reasonably have been expected to display greater resistance to such temptations.

 

Greeks are thus uniquely positioned to understand what occurs when civic culture deteriorates and political opponents cease recognising one another as legitimate participants in public life. This is why the contemporary fragmentation of Australian public life should concern Greek-Australians more than most. We do not approach these developments as detached observers but bring to them a historical memory replete with examples of what occurs when grievance eclipses persuasion, when political identity becomes tribal and when civic culture yields to factionalism.

 

The appropriate response is neither complacency nor hysteria. It is certainly not the abandonment of the institutions that have underpinned Australia's remarkable success as a multicultural democracy. These institutions and the civic culture sustaining them allowed Greek-Australians to establish schools, churches, organisations and businesses while preserving their language, traditions and distinctiveness.

 

For a community such as ours, whose historical experience contains so many examples of political absolutism, institutional failure and social division, the defence of those institutions is an expression of historical memory. Defending institutions does not require uncritical acceptance of their shortcomings. Reform, however, differs fundamentally from destruction and Greek-Australians should be particularly wary of movements that derive their energy from delegitimising opponents and dismantling institutions before considering what might replace them.

 

There is another reason why Greek-Australians should resist the temptations of political tribalism. The success of our community was not achieved through withdrawal or suspicion. Our story is one of engagement, of a community confident enough to share its language, traditions, faith and culture while learning from Australian society. We thrived in Australia because we turned outward rather than inward, contributing to broader society and, in turn, allowing ourselves to be shaped by it, without surrendering our distinctiveness. Periods marked by suspicion, exclusion and factionalism have rarely been periods of renewal. Communities flourish when they possess sufficient confidence to engage with the world around them. They decline when they become preoccupied with policing boundaries, preserving grievances and defining themselves primarily in opposition to others.

 

The challenge confronting Greek-Australians is both political and cultural. For generations, communal life has often oscillated between nostalgia for a homeland left behind and celebration of an inherited past. Both possess value, yet neither is sufficient as a foundation for civic participation in contemporary Australia. A mature Greek-Australian identity cannot be sustained solely through appeals to ancient glory, historical suffering, ethnic continuity and isoltation. It must also be capable of producing citizens who understand themselves as active participants in the common life of the country they inhabit. Communal confidence is measured by the ease with which it contributes to a shared civic culture without fearing the loss of itself.

 

The unfinished task of Greek-Australian public life is therefore not the preservation of identity for its own sake, but the cultivation of citizens capable of engaging critically without becoming tribal, pursuing reform without cultivating contempt for institutions and defending the democratic and multicultural framework that made our own success possible while remaining honest about its shortcomings. If Greek history teaches anything, it is that the abandonment of these habits rarely ends well. If our own Australian experience teaches anything, it is that openness has served us better than suspicion, engagement better than withdrawal and reform better than destruction. It would be a profound irony if a community whose success was built upon confidence, engagement and openness were now to embrace the very habits of exclusion, grievance and factionalism that have so frequently diminished both Greece and its diaspora communities.

 

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 27 June 2026