Post-modernism has thrown up considerable challenges for Western societies. More and more it demands that minorities are given voices which is undoubtedly, usually, a good thing. But we continually have to mediate between listening to minorities and maintaining the welfare of the majority, for after all in a liberal democracy decisions should be made on the basis of what’s best for us overall.

Out of the moral quagmire that post-modernism has created has come an emphasis on diversity. But it is often unclear what do we mean by diversity, and if indeed diversity is a worthwhile goal, how should it be manifested?

Most importantly, we are confronted by the challenge of how to promote this desire for diversity without compromising our sense of unity.

So what sort of diversity should we champion?

The first basic category of diversity we are compelled to examine is gender diversity. To begin with let’s not dive into the myriad of forms of gender diversity that the more woke of us propagate, but look first at the basic gender division between male and female.

Political parties and company boards seem to be falling over themselves to ensure they have appropriate female representation. Women are now well represented in politics and many have performed very well. It seems however that despite great effort to increase female representation on boards the recruitment of female directors has somewhat stalled. This has led to the effect that women with reasonable board experience are greatly sought after. As a result it is not so much that we are getting more female directors but those that have put their hands up are getting more board positions.

But when it comes to setting gender targets we must, as Canadian psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson has warned us, be cognisant of the fact that men and women have inherently different interests which leads to the fact that when they pursue such interests they tend to gravitate to different roles and professions. As he points out, even in Scandinavian countries where there are the most liberal policies promoting women, when they have a choice they still opt for those preferred gender roles.

Peterson argues (and I agree) that what we should pursue is equality of opportunity, the ability of women (and men) to seek out the roles they prefer without impediment based on gender.

Setting quotas relating to gender seems often to be an exercise in trying to force square pegs into round holes. It is interesting that the British conservatives have again chosen as their leader a woman, Kemi Badenoch. She is now the third woman to lead the UK conservatives, despite the fact they have not set gender quotas, whereas Labour who do have quotas have never elevated a woman to be their leader.

There is no denying however, that in the past women were unduly restricted in the roles they could perform. In my own case when I married my wife she had been employed by the State Government in the Department of Housing. She was compelled to resign from her position when she married me because it was government policy not to employ married women! Fortunately that sort of discrimination can no longer be legally practiced.

Historically, of course, women were often discriminated against because of their gender and it is fitting that we have largely removed those injustices in the last half-century or more.  A democratic society cannot properly function when approximately 50% of its citizens are treated as second class.

A similar case prevails when we look at discrimination against homosexuals. Although they do not comprise a cohort that is nearly as large as heterosexual women, it is significant enough that their needs should be addressed. This is also facilitated by the fact that affording homosexuals the same status in our society as heterosexuals can be achieved with little impact on the rights of heterosexuals.

But catering for the needs of small minorities brings with it antidemocratic outcomes.

In recent years we have had to confront this quandary with the emergence of transgender politics. Here we have a miniscule number of people demanding to be allowed the right to choose their gender despite their biology. Here we have biological men with intact male genitalia wanting to be treated as women. Consequently they wish to avail themselves of women only spaces like toilets and bathrooms and even be allowed to compete in women’s sport. Some who have transgressed the law have even been allowed to be incarcerated in women’s prisons.

Now we need to ask would a rational democracy allow this. I would argue it shouldn’t. To do so would allow a miniscule portion of our citizens to curtail the rights of women who comprise approximately 5o% of our population. This doesn’t appear to be democratic at all to me!

So it seems to me that we can tolerate, and indeed welcome diversity in our society but not at the expense of our underlying democratic, liberal beliefs..

From this point of view let us look at other aspects of diversity. It is clear that the Albanese government is more interested in diversity than it is in democracy.

This has been demonstrated by the government’s approach to indigenous politics.

Just over twelve months ago Australians decisively voted to reject the Voice referendum.

The government seemed genuinely surprised at this result. That is of course because the government is out of touch with the electorate.

They believed that because the activists were supporting the Yes case, bolstered by the media and many “woke” corporates, the referendum was in the bag. As a result they seemed genuinely stunned and somewhat affronted when the clear public verdict was emphatically against the referendum’s recommendation.

Albanese, who obviously thought that a Yes vote for the referendum would cement his legacy as a celebrated “woke” Prime Minister went off and sulked and didn’t engage in indigenous issues for some time after. But the Labor state governments continued as though the referendum had never been held and pursued “treaty making” and “truth telling” unabatedly. Despite the fact the people had spoken, they determined to continue to push the indigenous agenda counter to the wishes of a majority of voters.

So, in this context diversity goals were actively pursued even in the face of a majority decision of Australian voters. I suspect that this is not an isolated case but many diversity programmes are pursued without the consent of the majority in our democracy.

Western democratic ideals promote free speech, freedom of religion, and freedom from discrimination based on gender, race, religion and ethnicity. But proponents of various forms of identity politics based on diversity ideals often pursue their diversity desires at the expense of freedom of speech and democratic principles.

When the more extreme notions of diversity are promoted and people speak out in protest the normal response from the proponents is not to debate their cause but to label any criticism as “hate speech” and seek to shut down the discussion. This has been the underlying motivator of “cancel culture”. It essentially posits that if you don’t agree with my view (no matter how extreme) you must be somehow immoral and not deserving of an opportunity to voice your opposition.

In this way forums, including social media platforms, tend to be dominated by more extremist voices and ordinary people are often disenfranchised.

Democracy requires that all the people get to be heard. These cancel culture strategies prevent this. So when the public is directly interrogated, as per the voice referendum, the elites are suddenly surprised that the majority of the population don’t think like they do.

A further impediment we have to government’s ability to reflect the wishes of the citizenry is the so called left’s “march through the institutions”. The left has firmly established itself in our schools, universities, media organisations and government bureaucracies. And whilst governments might sometimes become conservative, their ability to promote a conservative agenda is greatly thwarted by the power of these institutions.

I recently saw an interview with Theresa May. As you might recall she served a very short stint as the conservative PM of the UK. When queried why she had achieved so little as PM, she replied that she greatly underestimated the power of the bureaucracy to thwart her political ambitions.

Our Australian experience seems to be similar. No conservative government would be assisted by the ABC, the various environmental agencies, Human Rights Commissioners, IR tribunals or University researchers and think tanks in progressing conservative ideals.

But when you weigh up the threats to Western democracy, one of the most potent is the infiltration of radical Islam into our societies. Let us examine some of the reasons why this is so.

To begin with fundamentalist Muslims have never ceded the separation of the Church and the State. Their governments are typically undemocratic theocracies. Some even aspire to the creation of an international Caliphate. Therefore fundamentalist Islam is by definition undemocratic.

Their lack of tolerance is manifest in other ways a well. For example they believe apostasy should be punishable by death – so much then for religious freedom when it is almost impossible for a fundamentalist to renounce their religion.

Similarly their treatment of women and homosexuals is appalling.

Events post the October 7 atrocity that was committed by Hamas against Israel last year indicate the presence of these people in our communities is having deleterious effects. One of the impacts has been a rise in anti-Semitism in Australia greater than we have seen for generations.

We must seek to counter the inroads these people have on our societies. So far the government has done little of consequence. Police have largely stood by whilst crowds fanned by the rhetoric of these extremists have demonstrated violently, occupied universities protesting against our Jewish population  and trashing and vandalising the offices of parliamentarians, Jewish schools and synagogues.

Contrast this with how active our governments were in shutting down those protesting about Covid restrictions or violating petty regulations about wearing masks or contravening lock-down provisions. The police, particularly in Victoria, enthusiastically took action against citizens they deemed might have infringed the draconian Covid regulations. Surely the actions of these fundamentalists Muslims were far more heinous and yet have largely gone unpunished.

Australia has always prided itself as a successful multicultural society, and that has been largely true. But in the past most of our immigrants have settled well into our communities and, whilst adding a little more colour to our culture, never really presented a threat to our underlying democracy or our traditional values. Unfortunately these fundamental Islamists are questioning the very fabric of our democracy.

In Europe they have posed even a greater threat and many countries have deliberately modified their democracies to accommodate them.

As a result we see the traditional cultures being eroded and democracy itself and the rule of law being watered down. It is alarming to see traditional Western values and longstanding cultural practices being sacrificed to accommodate these extremist Muslim minorities.

It is the role of government to ensure our freedom and security is protected. And there is no doubt that these fundamentalist Islamists pose a threat to both our democracy and security. Then, we might reasonably ask, why is the government so reluctant to take meaningful action to ensure these people don’t impinge on our democracy and our security? The reason is that senior figures in the Albanese government are ensconced in electorates that have large numbers of Muslim constituents.

Furthermore we observed the Australian Government facilitate the arrival of large numbers of refugees from Gaza with little effective screening when their closest Arab neighbours have allowed no such entrants into their own countries. It seems a recipe for disaster. Moreover the Albanese Government have proved to be mostly ineffectual in managing such refugees once they enter Australia even if they prove to be criminals.

Now John Howard was right to proclaim, “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” Howard, however, would have given far larger weight when making such decisions to the welfare of all Australians and not merely electoral fortunes of Labor seats in Western Sydney!

So this reflects the main thesis of my essay. When minorities, under the guise of diversity have undue influence our democracy is compromised.

We have seen quite convincingly in recent years how the political elites of the left have become disconnected from ordinary people. Four or five decades ago the left prided itself as being representative of the working class.

John Howard skilfully took advantage of the widening schism between the left and the working class and successfully recruited “Howard’s Battler’s” to help him win elections. Donald Trump has now adopted the same tactic to win the US Presidential Election.

The progressive elites, distracted by diversity and other “woke” causes, have grown to be disdainful of the masses. Hillary Clinton called them “a basket of deplorables” and Joe Biden called them “garbage”. Alienating this large cohort of voters doesn’t seem to be particularly smart. Yet these elites persist in asserting their moral superiority and lecturing us on what we should believe.

Former ALP senator Graham Richardson epitomised Labor thinking of the past when he wrote, “I have always held the view that no matter how smart you think you are, the electorate is always smarter. The mob will always work you out.”

This sentiment seems to have been confirmed by the US election. Consequently an old white male billionaire with obvious character flaws trounced his “woke” opponent who ticked the right identity politics boxes of being both female and coloured. He seemed better able to connect to the average voter on issues that mattered to them – whereas she, on the other hand, was vacuous and unable to articulate any policy position of interest to those working class voters.

The problem, in general that we have, is that the liberal elites live in echo chambers which reinforce their thinking and they come to believe that they are the sole purveyors of wisdom. We witnessed something similar with the voice referendum. (And even well before with Brexit.) Despite the conventional wisdom that the referendum would pass in favour of the voice to parliament, a significant majority voted otherwise. Now when that happened many of the voice proponents reacted by asserting that just showed that Australians were basically racist. They complained that voters had been misled by misinformation and disinformation. This was just another way of saying that voters were dumb and when left to their own devices couldn’t make a rational decision. They would have been wise to listen to Graham Richardson!

The left have inculcated a sense of self-loathing in Western societies. They maintain that our European history has tainted us with colonialisation, paternalism, slavery and a multitude of sins that should make us ashamed of our heritage. But we are the products of our history and not the creators of it. And instead of being ashamed we should rejoice in a history that evolved liberal democracies to the huge benefit of us all.

The result of our historical endeavours has seen us beneficiaries of the freest and most prosperous societies in the history of the world. We would have had no capacity to advance social agendas without the wealth that this democratic, capitalist movement created.

But today the Western world seems to have become more obsessed with the promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion than creating an economic and political base that underpins these social ideals.

Moreover, as we saw above, the promotion of such diversity ideals can have severe, deleterious effects on the culture of countries that have allowed themselves to be inveigled by the more extreme leftist ambitions.

As I write news reports are coming in describing violent confrontations between Islamists and Jews in Amsterdam where Israeli soccer fans who came to see their team play have been hunted down and violently assaulted by pro-Palestinian mobs.

All this had been predicted by Douglas Murray in his prescient book The Strange Death of Europe which he published in 2017.

In the last decade or so there has again been a vast movement of Jews out of Europe because of this changing dynamic.

When we look at Western democracies, they are often defined by their cultures and traditions. These institutions provide a sense of continuity and identity. In recent decades the vast migration of Muslims into European countries is threatening to bring (and in many cases already has brought) about substantial change to those cultures. Mostly this has happened surreptitiously without the conscious assent of the indigenous inhabitants.

Recent events in Australia suggest this is happening to us as well.

In contrast to what the left are promulgating, Australians need not be ashamed of their history. But beyond that there are aspects of the Australian identity that are worth defending.

We didn’t reject the voice referendum because we are racist; we rejected it because we are egalitarian. The Australian constitution should treat us all equally.

If we decide not to take more fundamentalist Islamic refugees it is not because we are Islamophobic, it is because we value our democracy and our security. We are already a very generous host to refugees, but let us just be discerning enough not to import people who threaten our basic values.

John Howard was right. “We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.” And one of the circumstances we should give proper credence to is whether or not they present a threat to the Australian culture and underlying values.

By all means let us pursue diversity but not at the expense of our democracy and unique Australian culture,