With One Nation now polling at or above Labor and the Liberal-National Coalition a distant third, Australia appears to be experiencing a populist revolt. The latest Newspoll put One Nation as high as 36 per cent in Queensland and, significantly, ahead of Anthony Albanese as preferred prime minister. The poll was conducted on September 27-28, 2026.

The responses are familiar. One is horror that ignorance has prevailed. The other, more salutary, sees in the shift a seismic movement of the kind already visible in Europe and the United States, a society finally exhausted by the technocratic elite, its internationalism and its embrace of mass migration. On this account, multiculturalism is depicted as a top-down cultural project, advanced by political and intellectual elites lacking popular legitimacy.

There is something profoundly incomplete about this interpretation. The cultural project of multiculturalism was arguably possible only because of an older Australian egalitarian hostility to Englishness, particularly the English class system, present from the earliest colonial societies. After the second world war, and especially during the 1970s, this hostility extended from social hierarchy to cultural authority itself.

The irony is that a project now associated with cosmopolitan elites owes much of its legitimacy to one of Australia’s oldest impulses: egalitarianism. Multiculturalism required not simply the arrival of migrants, but an Australia in which England’s cultural authority had already eroded and a longstanding suspicion of English hierarchy had discredited the old Anglo-Saxon order.

The Paradox of Multiculturalism

Australia did not simply embrace multiculturalism by adding Greeks, Italians, Lebanese, and East Asians to an otherwise harmonious British culture. The old Australia inherited not merely the English language and Westminster institutions, but a highly differentiated culture of class, manners, accent, education, religion, and social inheritance. Its British inheritance was itself anything but harmonious. English, Scottish, Irish, and other traditions carried their own antagonisms, while class and sectarian divisions ran through colonial society.

To reject that inheritance was therefore not merely to reject racism or the White Australia policy. It was also to reject the idea that English culture, and the social distinctions connected with it, possessed any special cultural authority.

This is the paradox. Australian multiculturalism has an egalitarian origin. It became easier to say that many cultures could belong equally to Australia once the cultural authority of Anglo-Australia had itself been levelled. The same egalitarian instinct that mocked the English gentleman, the public-school accent, and inherited status could eventually turn against the very idea of cultural distinction altogether.

Much of this rested on a caricature of England and English culture, increasingly detached from the England that had itself undergone profound social levelling. Modern Britain also embarked upon its own multicultural experiment, but for rather different historical reasons, in the aftermath of empire and decolonisation. Australia’s path was different – its multiculturalism emerged partly from an aversion to its own British inheritance.

Class and Culture

But once cultural authority and inherited distinctions are levelled, a further question arises. Culture is a way of life transmitted through families, communities, institutions, and generations, and class has always shaped the means by which that transmission occurs. The relationship between cultural continuity and social differentiation is therefore one of the neglected questions of modern egalitarianism. A society may abolish formal class distinctions, but it cannot dismantle the structures through which culture is transmitted without also changing the culture itself.

This is where T. S. Eliot remains particularly relevant. In his Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), culture is not an abstract collection of aesthetic or literary accomplishments, but an organic condition of life, sustained through families, communities, institutions and generations. Eliot understood that culture requires particularity and differentiation. It has a local and parochial dimension as well as a wider national one. It cannot simply be manufactured from above, nor reduced to a collection of interchangeable preferences.

The English class system was certainly capable of cruelty and snobbery. But it was not merely a mechanism of oppression. It also sustained institutions, manners, traditions, and forms of cultural inheritance. Moreover, differentiation is precisely what sustains culture, both in its particular and its wider sense. The paradox of Australian multiculturalism is therefore that it did not arise simply from the triumph of cosmopolitanism over an older conservative Australia. It was made possible, in significant part, by the much older Australian revolt against hierarchy. It is only through this project of class-levelling that multiculturalism became possible, from the rejection of Anglo culture and its place in the hierarchy to an increasing ambivalence towards class and cultural distinctions themselves.

The Dialectic of Mass Society: Populism and Elitism

The dissolution of class also helps explain the current opposition between populism and meritocratic elitism. As older class distinctions and inherited forms of authority weakened, society became increasingly organised as a mass. In The Revolt of the Masses (1930), Ortega y Gasset understood the mass not simply as a revolt against elites, but as the product of the erosion of the social structures that had previously ordered society. Populism expressed this new equality politically, asserting the mass against established elites; technocracy emerged as its meritocratic counterpart, claiming authority through expertise rather than inheritance. They were therefore not simply opposites, but competing responses to the dissolution of the social order that had produced them.

The same logic extended from class to culture. Australia first diminished British cultural authority from within: in a colony populated largely by peoples of the British Isles, Englishness could claim no unquestioned supremacy. What began as a rejection of English hierarchy was extended outward, until even cultures most distant from the British inheritance were taken as equal in status to those closest to it. Multiculturalism was thus not simply the arrival of diversity, but the culmination of a distinctly Australian movement from social hierarchy towards cultural equality.

Alas, Australia’s revolt against English hierarchy did not stop at class. It eventually reached culture itself, sweeping away the old hierarchy and leaving the principle that all cultures are equal.