Who Are We?

Prime Minister Albanese seems intent on negotiating a particularly Multicultural Australian Way through the churn and debris of the collapsing rules-based world order, ruled over by a dominant USA. This, despite the determined efforts of oppositional political forces in Australia to weaponise social division in the community based on ethno-religious differences, the rural-urban divide, and the challenges of transitioning to a post-fossil fuel based more sustainable industrial society.

A Pacific Middle Power

Caught between our military alliance with President Trump’s bellicose and belligerent USA and the importance of our trade with China and other Asian markets, PM Albanese, in his August address to the National Press club, was keen to lay down the markers of our difference.

No longer an outpost of the British Empire through the architecture of the White Australia Policy (1901-1972), we now declare ourselves an independent Middle Power of the Asia Pacific region. Part of the Pacific family.

I’ve been rewatching the 2018 Australian TV Series, Pine Gap, streaming on Netflix. These same themes were playing out back in 2018 during the bellicosity of the first Trump presidency. It is surprisingly contemporary. In 2025, during the first year of the second Trump presidency, the belligerence has ratcheted up several knots. And yet China has proved an impossible foe for the US to crack and Western Europe now regards the US as a potentially hostile and unreliable ally.

How should we be positioning ourselves—a loyal outpost of Britain and forever subservient friends to the US as the Coalition would have us, or something entirely other? The composer John Luther Adams, a cultural refugee in Australia from Trump’s second presidency, boldly suggests:

“As an affluent society with a relatively low population, vast expanses of wild lands inhabited by unique plants and animals, and the enduring presence of the world’s oldest cultures, Australia may be in a position to create a new model for a society of people living more in harmony with one another, with all other forms of life and with the Earth itself.”

Is this what we are searching for in the Australian Way?

Multiculturalism and Immigration

Unlike Trump’s war on immigrants and desperate attempt to position the US as a ‘white’ Christian nation, Albanese’s Australian Way sees us as a determinedly multicultural nation, predominantly of immigrants, but inclusive of Indigenous people.

The Indigenous Foundation

We might have failed the test of giving Indigenous Australians a constitutionally enshrined advisory Voice to the Australian parliament through the majority no vote on the Referendum, but reconciliation with our colonial past remains unfinished business. Truth Telling continues apace through academic research and the creative arts in literature, film, theatre, music and the visual arts. Treaty is being negotiated at the State level, led by the Victorian Government.

We no longer rest on the 250 years British legacy of settlement and colonisation, but on the cultural foundations of the world’s oldest and endurably adaptive living culture—that of the 250 language groups of Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples whose history dates back more than 65,000 years, well into the last Ice Age. Here in the Blue Mountains where I live, Gomeroi archeologist Wayne Brennan is currently engaged in archeological excavations of the Dharug Shelter, which was inhabited over 20,000 years ago—during the last ice age.

Ethnic Immigrant Mix

As an immigrant nation, while over 30% of Australia’s 28 million people were born overseas, despite the stated fears of the anti-immigration lobby, many are still from an Anglo-European cultural background and this ethnic group still dominates in business, politics and the media. Apart from the 4% who are Indigenous, only 21% of the population (2021 census) were of other non Anglo-European cultural backgrounds: predominantly Chinese, Indian, Pacifika and Middle Eastern.

However, the ethnic makeup of our national parliament is slowly changing. Following the 2025 elections, of the 230 members of parliament (House of Representatives and the Senate), 11 were of First Nations heritage, 5 Middle Eastern, 4 South Asian, 5 Southeast Asian, 5 from Eastern Europe, 2 Pacifika, 3 Jewish and 2 African. Of those of an Anglo-European background, 15 were from the Mediterranean (11 Italian and 4 Greek) previously dismissed as ‘Wogs’ – not quite ‘white’ enough by those of Anglo-Celtic background.

Does this embrace of multiculturalism show that our threads of inter-cultural connection can create a viable alternative to the triumphal Judeo-Christian Western civilisational impulse that forged European imperialism and its underbelly of exploitive colonialism, including the African slave trade— followed by the American century of global dominance?

However the collapse of political bipartisanship in response to the recent Bondi mass shooting incident shows that Coalition political leaders, such as Julian Leeser, Josh Frydenberg, John Howard, Bridget McKenzie and Susan Ley, in their very personal attacks on the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, see opportunity in rejecting this national commitment to multiculturalism and social cohesion.

Instead, with an eye on the politics of division in the UK, US and Europe, and anxious about the rise of One Nations in stealing their votes, they seek opportunity in leveraging ethnic divisions and tensions.

McKenzie declares: “For too long, we’ve papered over that reality in some hope of, you know, this multicultural nirvana. But it has failed.” Political aspirant Andrew Hastie takes a similar line, looking to revive the sentiments of the White Australia Policy.

We now see a clear division opening up on the question of multiculturalism between the the ALP and the Coalition as the dominant political forces in Australian politics. But given the overwhelming majority of the ALP election win in 2025, and the socially progressive bent of the Greens and most Independents, the Coalition would seem to be embracing an ultimately defeatist strategy that speaks to an increasingly minority section of the population.

An angry and ageing minority, championed by the likes of Pauline Hanson and Andrew Hastie that would appear to no longer subscribe to the Australian values enshrined in our citizenship tests for new immigrants.

Australian Values

Can this multicultural Australian Way live up to our ‘fair go’ ideal, enshrined in the Australian Values Statement: a broad set of values that embrace mutual respect, tolerance, compassion for those in need and equality of opportunity for all, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin?

The Bondi Mass Shooting

Can our political leaders hold their nerve and provide the statesmanship that heals divisions, rather than uses them for political leverage?

Reaction to the mass shooting of Jewish people during their Hanukkah celebrations at Bondi in December by two lone shooters, inspired by ISIS propaganda against Israel, provides an interesting test case. 

With echoes of historic European antisemitism that resulted in the Nazi holocaust and industrialised killing of 6 million Jews during WWII, the death of 15 people in the recent Bondi mass shooting has drawn strong and emotional reactions.

The Coalition was quick to weaponise it against the Albanese government’s commitment to multicultural social harmony, attempting to hold the Prime Minister somehow personally responsible. The media climbed on board, including many political commentators claiming Albanese’s attempts to hold to social cohesion and lower the divisive tone is a sign of weakness, rather than quiet strength. Instead, the media champions NSW Premier Minns’ attempt to clamp down on political protest, such as the rallies critiquing the Israeli government for its genocidal actions in Gaza where over 60,000 civilians have been murdered and many more severely injured by bombs supplied by the US.

While Jewish Australians have the right to be angry and frightened by the ISIS inspired Bondi terror attack, Palestinian Australians have an equal right to be angry and frightened by the genocidal campaign against their families in Gaza and the West Bank. Part of being a multicultural society is that we are intimately linked to global events, endlessly playing out on our screens. When we criticise Trump’s US, we are not attacking all American citizens, only those who support his divisive and dangerous actions. Likewise, when we criticise Netanyahu’s Israel, we are not attacking Jewish people, only those who support his government’s genocidal actions.

As portrayed in the recent film, Nuremberg, the international human rights standards for the conduct of war, as it impacts civilians, are the result of the Nuremberg trials against Germany’s Nazi leadership for their ‘final solution’ to the Jewish ‘problem’.  Yet Israel’s Prime Minister was quick to blame the Australian Government’s assertion that Israel must be held accountable for its conduct in the Gaza war against these same standards, and blame Australia’s decision to join an international recognition of a Palestinian State. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

Once all the emotion and shock effect has died down and sober analysis prevails, it will be widely recognised that if anyone is to blame for the increase in antisemitism in Australia’s multicultural community, it is the Israeli government with their blatantly genocidal actions against the civilian Palestinians of Gaza and their continued violation of international law in the violent illegal expansion of their settlements on the West Bank. Along with this has been the failure of many prominent Jewish Australians to hold the Israeli government to account for such actions.

Democracy

Can our system of compulsory voting for every citizen over 18 years of age, the role of the independent Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), and our system of preferential voting to ensure that everyone’s vote counts, with second and third preferences often shifting the final vote count significantly, guard us against the sort of intensifying social divisions we see playing out in the US and across the UK and Europe?

Can our form of parliamentary democracy survive the stress test of the scourge of social media trolling, the inflamed passions of different ethnic communities reacting to the impact of foreign conflicts ‘back home’ on their loved ones and families, especially against those who seek to weaponise such ethnic tensions?

Aspiration

Prime Minister Albanese sums up his Australian Way as ‘no one held back; no one left behind’.

But here’s the rub.

While the great Australian dream might be more modest than those pursued in Silicon Valley, it nevertheless includes the idea of a prosperity built on home ownership and secure, well-paid employment. But the financialisation of housing as an asset class rather than a home, which followed the neo-liberal economic policy of the marketisation of everything, has put paid to that aspiration.

It is not only the ravages of unchecked climate change that haunts the dreams of our children. It is the fear of increasing economic precarity. A university degree no longer feels like a secure investment for one’s future. And AI looms not so much as an exciting boon to prosperity for all, but as the destruction of prosperity for the many at the mercy of the libertarian Silicon Valley Lords of the new techno-feudalism.

While asset wealth grows, wage increases are not keeping pace with inflation. The ‘cost of living’ crisis stubbornly persists, and with it a growing political divide and anger based on intergenerational wealth transfers. Talk of Australia becoming a global renewable energy superpower, creating the next wave of wealth for all, rings hollow. Especially when set beside the AI revolution and Its demands on water and energy. Its capacity for intrusive data mining via platform capitalism. The likely negative impact on employment and the cultural arts. Not to mention its impact on the very way we parse the truth of reality and our human relationships, mediated through ever new generations of AI companions seducing us with the allure of convenience, intimacy and self-affirmation.

Can the Australian Way negotiate these road bumps? Or must our aspirations attach themselves to a new vision, informed by ancient wisdoms anchored in the eco-spiritual laws of Australia’s oldest culture, rather than the techno-materialism of consumerist wealth and the human exceptionalism of Western civilisation?

Culture and Religion

Barry Jones notes that, “religion, especially the Christian religion, or what might be described as the Hellenistic–Judaeo–Christian tradition . . . has shaped Western civilisation so profoundly that our thinking, our language and our value systems cannot be seen in isolation.”

Today nearly 50 per cent of Australians report no affiliation to any formal religion, either drawn to the scientific materialism of secular liberal humanism, or in search of a spirituality that avoids the doctrinaire divisiveness of many formal religions—between believer and infidel, between true believer and apostate, between the righteous and the sinners. But religious fundamentalism of all persuasions runs counter to the spirit of our stated Australian Values. And this is recognised in the efforts of many religious leaders to actively engage in Inter-Faith dialogue, focusing on what unites us rather than what divides us.

While Christianity remains the dominant religion (44%), with other significant religious groups a tiny minority: Islam (3.2%). Hinduism (2.7%), Buddhism (2.4%), and Judaism (only 0.5%) —many Christians see the loss of their absolute majority status as a threat.

Security

As the recent national security survey by the ANU Security College revealed, the top security priority of Australians is a safe and harmonious community (64%) compared to just strengthening our defence security (15%). In a multicultural society, the only way to ensure ‘safe and harmonious’ communities is to pursue policies that support social cohesion, not ethno-religious division. No matter what the nature of provocation.

These are the stress points: whether in the form of the Bondi mass shooting by two lone actors and other acts of deliberate antisemitism, attacks on First Nations cultural gatherings in pursuance of Treaty and Truth Telling, or the sabre rattling of political campaigns against a supposed mass migration policy.

Reworlding the Australian Way

To reworld is to decolonise, Indigenise and collectively imagine into action a “world worthy of its children” for the sake of all our future ancestors. At its core, the colonial legacy has been about severing and erasing relationships to land, language, culture, kin and one another (Centre for Reworlding). But this is not only true for First Nations people. It is true for all of us trapped in the intensifying and life denying maw of the modernity/coloniality project. Trump 2.0 has laid this dilemma bare for all to see, stripping away the delusional film of liberal humanism that has beguiled so many of us.

To go beyond the modernity/coloniality regime, the Australian Way must engage in the profound intercultural praxis of reworlding. To reclaim our identity as Earthlings in profound reciprocal kinship relations with the Earth and all who call this home.

Multicultural Capability

Beneath all the noise and colour of the dominant political conversations and the prognostications of our economic priesthood grabbing our attention, a new skillset is required for shaping the Australian Way in securing social cohesion in a multicultural/multi-ethno-religious society. This new skillset is cultural capability across three dimensions: being (ontology); knowing (epistemology); and doing (praxis – when theory meets practice).

The need for cultural capability for inter-cultural understanding is recognised in the role of the Special Broadcasting Service, the establishment of Indigenous-led media, and the establishment of the various multicultural advisory bodies to the Australian government, such as the recent Australian Multicultural Council which advises the Minister for Home Affairs. Similar bodies, which exist in most State Government jurisdictions, have played important mediating roles in dealing with inter-ethnic community conflict.

Guided by respect that Indigenous Australians are not the recent immigrants from non Anglo-European cultures, multiculturalism has been framed in a way that excludes Indigenous Australians. Yet their culture is perhaps the most challenging of all in the exercise of cultural capability and goes somewhat to explain their continued cultural marginalisation and the subject of continual and pervasive racial prejudice, both overt and unconscious, in everyday life.

Indigenous Cultural Capability

Dealing with deep historical divisions (based on long-held notions of ‘white’ cultural superiority) between the might and ‘authority’ of the British colonising population (via Australia’s institutions and legal structure) and that of the colonised Indigenous population, has proved intractable. The 2024 Referendum for a constitutional right of an advisory Voice to Parliament was predominantly framed as a way to improve socio-economic outcomes for First Nations peoples, within the ‘white’ socio-economic legal structure. Not as a way of recognising the significant ontological differences that lie at the root of this intractability, which are expressed in the traditional songlines that crisscross Australia, and which are embedded in ancient LAW, which the senior law men and law women guard to ensure the integrity of its knowledge system.

Thus while recognition of the unique ethno-cultural position of Indigenous Australians is not considered part of modern multiculturalism, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples clearly reflect a radically different eco-spiritual cultural heritage from the dominant scientific materialism and competitive individualism of the Anglo-Europeans who wrote our Constitution. Who have shaped our legal, political, economic and social institutions and belief systems.

This is what the reworlding of the Australian Way is yet to address.

Instead, modern Australia’s relationship with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people is usually framed as a matter of redressing historic social justice through the Closing the Gap strategy. The harsh reality is that these socio-economic targets: health, education, economic participation, and criminal justice system—reflect an essentially assimilationist ideology.

The Strategy takes a deficit approach—bringing Indigenous Australians up to the same measures of socio-economic status as the rest of non-Indigenous Australia, as if the culture and socio-economic system that produces that status is not itself problematic.

By contrast, a strengths-based approach emphasises the unique qualities that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultures offer to an Australia grappling with questions of climate adaptation, bushfire management, environmental repair and community cohesion. Despite the link between the intergenerational trauma of colonisation and cultural marginalisation and high rates of youth suicide and use of drugs (alcohol and illicit drugs) to manage feelings of hopelessness and despair, First Nations culture has proved highly adaptive over many thousands of years.

This is revealed in archaeological evidence, and in the extraordinary contribution that Indigenous people, who comprise less than 4% of the total population, to contemporary sport, music and the visual arts. And increasingly, through the contribution of university schools of Indigenous Knowledges, to the intellectual culture of Australia. It is also revealed in the way that Aboriginal people have indigenised Christianity: recognising where its values and symbols align with their ancient culture and continuing with elaborate funeral ceremonies that are informed by ancient rhythms.

If the Australian Way is to be authentic, it must address not only the inclusion of immigrant non-European ethnicities and their spiritual beliefs and religious expression, but also include the unique culture of Indigenous Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people that is encapsulated in ‘Caring for Country’: their obligatory reciprocal relationship with Country and all its creatures. For First Nations cultures, Country has spiritual agency in its own right. It is not merely landscape or ‘nature’. It is kin. It is family.

I spent a year working with the Yankunyitjara Elder, Uncle Bob Randall, an inter-cultural educator who tried to explain the essence of this way of thinking through his Kanyini system of unconditional love and reciprocal responsibility, sustained through the interrelationships of Tjuukurpa, Kurunpa, Walytja and Ngura, as illustrated symbolically below

Uncle Bob used to say to me that we needed to be like the spider. Through the vibrations in his web he can tell what is good for him (food) and what is danger, what to avoid. He said all of us can learn to develop that sensibility—to be able to feel the invisible vibrations of interdependence in the world around us. For Aboriginal people this is expressed in their widespread capacity for prescience (foreknowledge): the ability to sense events of importance, even long distances away, beyond any known physical means of communication.

We modern western people even recognise this in the idea of ‘feeling the vibe’ when talking about the atmosphere of a party, but we don’t give it the more serious attention it requires. We don’t develop the interior capacity of intuition that tunes into these vibrations. Instead we get lost in the distractions of endless thinking, or the external noises of the world. Headphones tuned into endless streamed music, podcasts or eyes grabbed by texts and social media trolling.

The Ecological Challenge

Today we can understand the spiritual agency of Country in the language of science, in the inexorable logic of ecological systems interdependence by which Country talks back to us. The impact of climate change and environmental pollution and degradation have exposed the facile logic of past science-informed activity to extract more and productivity from Country in the name of prosperity and wealth creation.

This has left a legacy of destruction: plastic and chemical pollution of waterways, loss of biodiversity and soil quality through land clearing for agriculture, bleaching of coral reefs through ocean warming and acidification, drying up and salination of inland river systems and the intensification of floods and fires resulting from global warming.

Progressing the Australian Way is caught in the tension between the old system of extractive capitalism and a new evolving system of regenerative economics, which will play out in the performance of the new Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation (EPBC) Act 2025, and its yet to be developed regulations. This Act seeks to balance the needs of Nature with the needs of industry for more efficient and timely systems of regulation when approving major mining, agriculture and land development projects, such as for housing.

This is a battle between existing rapacious extractive mining, industrialised agriculture (chemical fertilisers, land clearing, mono-cropping, irrigation), the industrialised animal husbandry of factory farming, industrialised factory fishing, and more ecologically informed practices and more ecologically sensitive regenerative practices. A battle between the logic of profit and the respect for protecting ancient sacred sites. The extractive economics of throwaway consumerism against the ‘use and renew’ philosophy of circular economics, of regenerative farming, and of marine conservation zones.

New green shoots of this shift can be found everywhere.  From increasing interest in home and community gardens in suburban lots, apartment balconies and footpath verges, producing food not just decorate flowers. It informs the growing rewilding movement and its links to community self reliance.

Rewilding and Survivalism

The worldwide rewilding movement involves communities seeking to re-introduce biodiversity to their landscapes, including predators such as wolves and dingoes, along with ancient environmental ‘workers’ such as beavers. This rewilding is often also teamed with the survivalist movement, the desire of many people to be more self-sufficient at a community level to deal with more frequent and destructive floods and fires arising from climate change.

For example, Holly Robertson’s Australian Bush Survival School, a mobile business travelling all over Australia, runs everything from children’s workshops to corporate retreats, teaching skills such as trapping, tracking, spear throwing, knot-tying, skin tanning, friction fires, water purification and basic navigation. Similarly Gina Chick, building on her win of the first Alone Australia competition, has created a whole movement focused on personal psychological ‘rewilding’ as a way of rebuilding our relationship with the natural world.

The Australian People’s Survival League promotes itself as supporting mutual assistance groups, survival and emergency preparedness to help yourself and the community in providing a civil defence service for major disasters and crises. Its call to action declares: don’t be afraid to step up, there is a role for everyone, regardless of race, gender, disability, cultural background, ability or gender, because never in recent history has it been more important to protect society and learn how to protect yourself and your loved ones when uncertain times arrive. In this mission statement it is keen to distinguish itself from the libertarian doomsday prepper and sovereign citizen movements, which are individualistic in orientation, prone to conspiracy thinking and rejecting of the legitimacy of all government—the endpoint of the individualism and alienation of modernity’s consumer individualistic competitive capitalism and the enduring legacy of evolution as the survival of the fittest, rather than the ecologically most fitting.

From Western Enlightenment to Global Enlivenment

The Traps of the Western Enlightenment

Western civilisation, which now has a global footprint through the legacy of imperialism and global capitalism, draws its inspiration from the European Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, which traces its ancient roots to Greek philosophy. This ‘Age of Reason’ sought to upend the ‘Dark Ages’ of medieval Europe’s reliance on religious doctrine for ‘truth’—the Inquisition against apostasy in the Christian Church, the notorious witchcraft trials that targeted women’s traditional healing knowledges.

The Enlightenment emerged from and built upon the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, which had established new methods of empirical inquiry through the work of figures such as Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, Christiaan Huygens and Isaac Newton with his Principia Mathematica.

Philosophical foundations were laid by thinkers including René Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke, whose ideas about reason, natural rights, and empirical knowledge became central to Enlightenment thought. Descartes’ Discourse on the Method in 1637, establishing his method of systematically disbelieving everything unless there was a well-founded reason for accepting it, and featuring his dictum, Cogito, ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’) became the foundation of what we know as the modern mindset.

Scientism

Unfortunately, so powerful did this way of thinking become, as it expressed itself in the wonders of technological innovation harnessed to the new economics of industrial capitalism, that it obliterated the possibility of other ways of knowing that lay beyond the materialism of empiricism. Thus, it descended into ‘scientism’, the ideological insistence that only scientific materialism could establish ‘truth’ as ‘facts’, a philosophical position associated with logical positivism.

This scientism influenced the way in which the new disciplines of economics, psychology and sociology all sought to prove themselves as ‘scientific’ through the application of ‘universal’ mathematical models, objectivised behavioural observation and statistical analysis—to distinguish themselves from the traditional humanities: philosophy, literature and the dramatic arts.

In the process, we children of modernity and scientific materialism found ourselves more and more objects of the scientific gaze, alienated from our own subjectivity, unable to access to the more liminal world of poetic sensibility.

Enlivenment

For this reason, biologists such as Andreas Weber suggests we need a paradigm shift from enlightenment to the poetic biology of enlivenment, from ‘techné’ to ‘poiesie’. We need to rethink ourselves from ‘workers’ on the treadmill of wealth creation to ‘eliveners’ reclaiming our ancient eco-spiritual relationship with the Earth.

In alignment with Indigenous relational ways of being, thinking and doing, Weber sees Enlivenment as an upgrade of the deficient categories of Enlightenment thought – a way to move beyond our modern metaphysics of ‘dead matter’ and acknowledge the deeply creative and intelligent processes embodied in all living organisms. Science itself, from the songs of whales and birds to the intricacies of the mycelium fungal world, has increasingly discovered that organisms are sentient, more-than-physical creatures that have subjective experiences and engaged in intelligent conversations within and across species of all descriptions. There are many languages, not just those of the human tongue.

This is the new paradigm which informs the work of the Enlivenment Network, and which is required to help shape the evolution of an Australian Way that is fit for our times. It is a paradigm that squares the circle.

Join us as fellow Eliveners on this challenging and heartening journey to Reworld the Australian Way.