Diversity not division. But Australia is headed the other way. When six former prime ministers joined to warn that Australia’s successful emergence from the internal religious and racial hatred and violence generated by the Hamas terrorist attacks ‘depends on us not allowing conflict overseas to turn Australians against each other’, they inadvertently pointed to a risk that their own immigration policies helped to create – policies that have changed the very nature of Australia without ever being referred to the Australian people for endorsement. And the current government’s record immigration program ignores John Howard’s wise warning of a quarter of a century ago (for which he was ludicrously accused of racism) that immigration (at that time heavily from Asia) should be ‘slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb [would be] greater’. Pushing immigration beyond community acceptance is a formula for division.

Already, Australia is pushing the boundaries. With a record high since federation of 30 per cent of its 26 million population born overseas, it has by far the world’s biggest proportion (with the exception of the Middle East’s oil states); the US, for example, has only 15 per cent. And this peak is set to be exceeded as a result of the record volume in the current government’s immigration program (715,000 over the current two years).

It is not just the volume that has the potential to breed dissent. In recent years there has been heavy concentration within the migrant intake on individual ethnic or religious groups, particularly those that are less keen to integrate into the Australian culture than to sustain their separateness (for example, some Muslim groups are campaigning to have Sharia law replace Australian law within their communities). This is not only testing that ‘capacity to absorb’ but actually generating serious internal division. Australia has coped in the past with frequent divisive threats and has succeeded in retaining its cohesive Australian ethos.

The heightened nature of the current risk is evident from the official statistics of the composition of the migrant intake over the last decade. Half of the 3.47 million increase in Australia’s population has come from the arrival of people born overseas who now total 7.7 million. Almost a quarter of these 1.7-million foreign-born newcomers are Muslims, with their countries of birth being mainly Pakistan, Afghanistan, India and Bangladesh – and representing a change from the previous dominance of North African and Middle Eastern (particularly Lebanese) Sunnis. This has resulted, along with a higher than average local birth rate, in a 70 per cent rise to 813,392 in the number of Muslims in Australia. They now make up 3.2 per cent of the population compared with only 2.2 per cent a decade ago and are heavily concentrated in western Sydney Labor-held parliamentary seats.

But Islam in Australia has never been a monolithic community and recent changes in its racial composition have made it even more diverse with sectarian divisions on top of differing cultures, languages, traditions and national characteristics. In addition, there is now a new dynamic in the ethnic and religious composition of non-Muslims in Australia’s foreign-born 7.7 million population. Migrants from India, particularly Hindus, have taken over from Muslims as the dominant newcomers to Australia. According to the  recent census, over the last decade the population of Hindus here has risen by a quarter of a million, exceeding the Muslim increase of 209,150 and generating mounting anti-Indian sentiment from Islamic community leaders. The Alliance of Australian Muslims has publicly expressed its concern about the local Hindu diaspora being exposed to ‘Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hate being espoused from India [that is] affecting social cohesion and community harmony in Australia’. And the Indian-born mayor of Parramatta was recently criticised for endorsing an Indian migrant group accused by the Muslim Alliance of supporting the growth of ‘far-right Hindu nationalism, online hate speech, religious vilification, social discord, and violent extremism in Australia’. Oh, the joys of multiculturalism!

But Hindu migrants are only minor targets for local imams; the Jews and Israel remain the main objective. In addition to the widely reported hate speeches by a collection of Islamic clerics, the Australian Muslim Times is a source of propaganda, presenting a distorted view of events in Gaza aimed at stirring up local militants. A recent issue justified Hamas’ 7 October massacre of 1,400 Jews and the taking of 240 hostages in these terms: ‘On Saturday 7 October, Hamas and other resistant fighters attacked, decimating Israeli border forces, but allegedly killed some civilians. Israel “amplified” the numbers. Many Israeli civilians were actually killed by Israeli military themselves….They lied to us that this war began on 7 October, even though Israel has been massacring, torturing, imprisoning, dispossessing the Palestinians for 75 years.’

There is, however, another dimension,  with Pew Research forecasting that Islam, with 2.76 billion, will be the world’s biggest religion by 2050 (of which 1.5 billion will be in our region, with consequential diplomatic and trade connotations). The expectation that Australia’s Muslim population will jump by almost 70 per cent from its current 832,00 to 1.4 million indicates the potential for a united local Islamic voice to have significant political impact. In any event, there are diplomatic concerns that our neighbouring Islamic nations Indonesia (with the world’s largest Muslim population) and Malaysia recently joined in what is, in effect, support for Hamas. Indonesia’s President Jokowi recently attended a joint summit of Arab and Muslim leaders in Riyadh that condemned Israel and called for a ceasefire before telling US President Biden in a private meeting in the White House that ‘Indonesia appeals to the US to do more to stop the atrocities in Gaza’ while Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim is reported to have maintained his support for Palestinian resistance against Israel in support of Palestine, in defiance of Western pressure, saying: ‘As Palestine is colonised through apartheid, ethnic cleansing and now genocide, whatever happened is the legitimate right and struggle of the Palestinian people.’

Now that the activist political left, the Greens and the union movement have joined the pro-Hamas anti-Israel and clearly anti-semitic campaign (with members of the NSW Teachers Federation and the National Tertiary Education Union breaching their trust by encouraging their students to become anti-Israel activists), with its calls for governments and police in Australia to ‘facilitate further demonstrations and protests in support of Palestine’, there is no prospect of achieving the objective of our six former prime ministers of ‘not allowing conflict overseas to turn Australians against each other’. This conflict, seen by some as a preliminary skirmish in the coming war for the defence of Western democracy, has already done so.