Andrew L. Urban
Is it self censoring or a naive analytical blind spot that prompts the following: “(Angus) Taylor’s remarks were a distraction from a more important issue. The Coalition’s Australian Values Migration Plan treats migration as a problem of selection. Vet harder. Screen social media. Establish a Safe Country List. Make an Australian Values Statement a binding visa condition. Cancel visas and deport those who breach it. The premise running through the policy is that the integrity of Australian society is determined at the border.
“It is not, and most Australian migrants know that it is not. This includes this author, who migrated with his family from the former Soviet Union in the 1970s.”
The author here is Dimitri Burshtein, a highly respected columnist I always read, writing this in The Australian (13/5/2026). I argue that both Angus Taylor and Burshtein miss – or avoid stating – the most obvious aspect of why Australian immigration policy over the years has made a difference to Australian society in a negative way, clearly exhibited in the Judeophobic demonstrations and violence most virulently exhibited in the post-October 7 era. Which is why the Coalition is proposing changes to the vetting process, albeit with the wrong framework. More on that shortly.
Burshtein also calls the issue “the integrity of Australia society” when he surely means the cultural cohesion of Australian society. It is the conflict of cultures that creates the friction that creates the ‘heat’. (It is sometimes mis-labelled as ‘social cohesion’, as in the Royal Commission context.) I also take issue with his view that it is not at the border that society can determine its (what he calls) integrity. It most obviously is. You don’t open your home to those you suspect of smashing your glassware, in the hope they conform to your house rules once inside.
He argues that “Practices incompatible with Australian democratic life, such as clan vendettas, corruption as ordinary commercial practice, sectarian hatreds and contempt for women’s autonomy tended to wither across generations. They withered not through coercion nor values statements, but through the quiet pressure of shared civic expectation.” Yet some endured, notably hatred of Jews.
“Children of migrants,” he continues, “learned in classrooms what it meant to be Australian and brought it home at the end of the day to parents who learned Australian values, in part, through their own children. The eight-year-old reciting the rules of fair play at the dinner table; the teenager pushing back on a grandfather’s casual prejudice; the daughter explaining to her father why his joke was not funny. This was assimilation, generation by generation.” That is true…but with profound exceptions. Child brides for older men, female genital mutilation and the urge to adopt Sharia law for all …
As for Taylor, while he describes it as a problem of selection, he mis-diagnoses this cultural conflict as a case of Australian values. Sure, values more broadly, but among those values are the ones that can be more accurately defined for the purposes of immigration vetting than Taylor suggests. It is not about countries that should be identified, but cultures. The Australian ‘value’ to which he refers is the Judeo-Christian culture. Judeophobic culture obviously conflicts with that and we have plenty of evidence to support that view in the ISIS inspired violence recorded against Jews, for a start.
In 1966, when I arrived as a migrant, the Muslim population was very small, a few thousand at most; under 0.1% of the population, which was then 11.5 million.
By the time of the October 7 massacre of Jews in Israel in 2023, the Muslim population of Australia had grown to approximately 850,000–950,000, roughly 3.2–3.5% of the much larger population of almost 27 million, making Islam the second largest religion after Christianity. Post-2021 estimates for 2023–2026 often project continued growth toward or beyond 900,000 –1 million by the mid-2020s, consistent with inter-census trends.
Muslims are now a growing political force, with a party of their own: “The Muslim Vote is dedicated to empowering Australian Muslims in the electoral process.” So much for the “integrity of Australian society” being determined at the border.
But Burshtein does get to state what he thinks is the “more important issue”. He writes: “It is harder than it used to be for an immigrant to distinguish between the positive and negative norms they carry, because the receiving society no longer presents them with a clear standard against which to measure.”
This is observably incorrect; they face very clear standards (as long as you ignore the Labor and Greens parties).
“This is the real failure of Australia’s current immigration policy and what the Coalition’s plan fails to address. You can refuse a visa to a radical and you can deport a person who breaches the Australian Values Statement. But you cannot, with a visa condition, make a confident citizen out of someone whose new country has lost confidence in itself, and you cannot enshrine, by statute, the institutional ecosystem that once made those values transmissible without a values statement at all.”
So even if we accept this argument entirely, we have to ask how and why visas were not refused to radicals and why they weren’t deported? There are about 128,000 Muslims who self identify as “Political Islamist” or “Militant” (“I am a committed Muslim who believes an Islamic political order and shariah should be implemented by force if necessary”). These are the closest proxies to “extremist” orientations, according to the 2019 “Islam in Australia” National Survey by Griffith University. It is highly probable that the numbers of political and extremist Muslims has grown since October 7, 2023.
And they are making a difference. One of the best examples is the Labor government’s foreign policy towards Israel being twisted as part of its pandering to Labor held seats with significant Muslim voters. Another, of course, is the gutless response to violent anti-Jewish demonstrations and violence since October 7.
The only political party clearly articulating this threat to ‘social cohesion’ is One Nation. And look how voters are flocking to them.