The shenanigans continue here in the Great Southern Land.
This time someone lobbed an improvised explosive device into an Invasion Day protest in Perth. Invasion Day, of course, marks the moment in 1788 when British ships unloaded convicts onto a shore already inhabited — to the horror of the Indigenous population watching a foreign world land on top of their own.
The device didn’t explode, which is probably why the story didn’t dominate the news cycle. No bodies, no spectacle, no rolling outrage. Still, the familiar calls came: tougher laws, harsher penalties, louder policing. There was also anger that this incident received less attention than the Bondi attack on the Jewish community — as if tragedy is a competition, as if context doesn’t matter.
But step back far enough and a pattern appears. Our politicians no longer govern — they react. When governing becomes difficult, rules replace thinking. And almost no one asks the only question that matters: what is actually breaking down?
Most extremism doesn’t come from too much freedom. It comes from voices that no longer believe they are heard.
Culture gets tossed around in these debates like a slogan. All cultures are equal. All must be respected. We must be multicultural. But rarely does anyone ask what culture actually does. Why every human group has one. Why we keep building rituals, stories, dances, uniforms, songs.
The answer is simple and ancient: culture creates cohesion.
I once watched a documentary about an Indigenous African community. At dusk, people gathered. Food was shared. Torches were lit. Young men danced to drums while young women watched in a circle. An elder told an ancestral story — a lesson about sacrifice, duty, survival. Tradition reaching back thousands of years. The future reaching forward. The tribe reminding itself who it is.
In Western societies, we do the same thing — just louder and with better lighting. Nightclubs. Stadiums. Concerts. Social media. Entertainment. Different forms, same function.
Where multicultural societies struggle is not difference. It’s rules.
If every team in a soccer match plays by different rules, the game collapses. A diverse society only works if everyone agrees to the same framework — while remaining free to eat, dress, worship, dance, and love as they choose.
This is where that old Cold War film keeps coming back to me.
A lawyer agrees to defend a Soviet spy — not because he likes him, not because he trusts him, but because the law demands it. The country turns on him. His house is vandalised. The FBI follows him. Patriotism becomes a weapon.
In one scene, he sits across from an FBI agent in a bar. He asks the agent’s surname. German. He notes his own is British. Then he asks the question that cuts to the bone:
What makes either of us American?
And he answers it himself.
Not blood. Not fear. Not loyalty tests.
What makes them American is a shared commitment to rules — the Constitution — even when it protects someone you despise. Especially then. Because the moment the rules bend to panic, the system is already lost.
Societies don’t hold together because people agree.
They hold together because they agree on how to disagree — and because the rules survive fear.
Australia has never finished that work.
Our Constitution was written when colonies federated into a single self-governing outpost, not a fully independent nation. It still carries that unfinished identity. It enshrines hierarchy. It excludes citizens from becoming head of state. It tells us how power works, but not who we are.
A child born here cannot dream of leading their own country — while a child in the UK one day will.
We argue endlessly about culture, identity, belonging, and extremism, but we’ve never done the hardest, most boring, most necessary thing: agree on the rules that bind us. Agree on the values we expect of ourselves. Agree on what being Australian actually means.
Until we do, we’ll keep mistaking tougher laws for stronger communities.
We’ll keep responding to fractures with force instead of repair.
And we’ll keep lurching from crisis to crisis, wondering why cohesion feels like something we’ve lost — when in truth, we never finished building it.