Division, discord, the importing of foreign wars and hatreds – these were not what governments (of both persuasions) promised us would emerge from the multiculturalism that backed the broad-sweeping post-war immigration program that was claimed to be needed to make Australia grow and prosper.

More than half of us have a vested interest in immigration; we were either born overseas (32 per cent) or have a parent from overseas (another 20 per cent). As one of the latter, I’m sick of the murderous Hamas-substitute Palestinian flag being waved at disruptive demos, of the antisemitic chanting, synagogue-defacing, pro-terrorist placard-bearing, demeaners of national symbols like the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Opera House and burners of our Australian flag who make up the tiny minority (with big media coverage) that give immigration a bad name.

For many years the Australian immigration formula worked well. There were occasional potholes on the road to migrant  assimilation into the Australian way of life as gradualism (immigration at a rate that the society could comfortably absorb) meant few sudden shocks. There was, nevertheless, some intrusion of foreign conflicts; anyone who, like me, was a soccer football referee, became well aware that Serbs and Croats were at serious odds, as were Turks and Armenians, while Melbourne’s big Greek community strongly expressed their views, one way or another, on recognising Macedonia.

But the current seriously divisive problems, emerging largely from ill-considered migrant sources and volumes, cannot erase the enormous benefits of the great bulk of Australia’s immigration program. As former prime minister John Howard told a large and  enthusiastically supportive crowd last weekend as he officially opened a substantial shopping centre in rapidly growing outer-Sydney’s regional Silverdale (50 years ago as part of my Macarthur electorate it could barely support a tiny school, church, petrol station and horse-knackery), the event ‘represented an acknowledgement of the extraordinary contribution that Italian migration has made to modern Australia’.

Having left school at 12 to work in his family’s struggling Calabrian farm, 40 years ago, and aged only 16, Bruno Lopreiato joined his older siblings to seek a better life in Australia. Sixteen years later, and by then married to fellow Italian migrant Maria, they had saved enough to buy a business – a small service station in Cabramatta – before taking on a larger and riskier business in Silverdale in 1986 in the hope, now realised, that Sydney’s westward population push would be to their benefit. Hard work, determination and an entrepreneurial spirit have resulted in the Lopreiatos now owning a multi-million dollar Woolworths-anchored shopping centre in what has become a thriving community

But Howard’s point was not just that, like so many Italian migrants, their hard work had contributed to Australia’s prosperity. It was that the Lopreiatos epitomise what immigration can and should bring to a vibrant and cohesive nation – and what has been missing in some migrant groups. ‘They didn’t stop loving Italy… but they didn’t bring overseas fights and arguments with them; we don’t want arguments between people who come here and bring their fights with them.’

This was Howard’s objection to the current wave of divisive public lawlessness where activist migrants (supported by habitual dial-a-demonstrator trouble-makers) have taken advantage of freedoms generally not available in their countries of origin, to use foreign conflict as the justification for local disputation.

This is in keeping with the concerns Howard  expressed in his book Lazarus Rising. ‘I had never felt comfortable with the [Whitlam-initiated] policy of multiculturalism…. Australia’s post-World War II immigration policy had been built on the principle of assimilation…. people [came] from many cultures but when they came here they would become Australians.’

But the increased potential for differences is evidenced by the latest official statistics which show not only that the overseas-born population has been growing at a faster rate than the Australian-born (lifting the percentage of foreign-born Australians by one-third over the 20 years to 2024 from 24 per cent to 32 per cent – almost double the UK’s ‘crisis’ rate of 17 per cent) but also revealed significant changes in the origins of Australia’s foreign-born.

The Italian migration that Howard welcomed has now been overwhelmed by other sources, with Italy dropping out of Australia’s top ten countries of birth for the first time since Federation in 1901, as the number of Australians born in Italy has fallen over the past decade by 44,000, enabling Sri Lanka, with its 50-per-cent rise over the past decade to 172,800, to replace Italy.

The biggest increase over these ten years was India’s more than half-a-million addition with just under one million Australians born there, only a few thousand less than historic leader England, whose numbers declined by 47,000 – and whose median age of over 60 indicates further declines (unless the Starmer Labour government’s mismanagement  prompts an exodus to Australia!) China provided more than a quarter of a million extra to lift its total to 700,000, the Philippines added 164,000 to almost 400,000 and, incredibly, little Nepal upped by 155,000 to 197,000. The remaining major sources did not include any of the Middle-Eastern trouble-spots, (with the more than doubling of the Muslim proportion of Australia’s population from 1.5 percent to 3.2 percent – from 282,000 to 813,000 – due mainly to Asian Muslims significantly diminishing what had been for years a Lebanese dominance). The other top ten sources of foreign-born Australians, New Zealand, Vietnam, South Africa and Malaysia, all increased their numbers.

So the nature and composition of the population of Australia is now undergoing yet another revolutionary change, without reference to the wishes of Australians (where are the Swiss policy referendum arrangements when we need them?) who, opinion polls indicate, are largely anti-immigration.

This is not a racist issue; the current problem does not relate to race or skin colour. It’s all about culture. Australia’s immigration programme was a remarkable success when migrants came from cultures that were compatible with ours – or at least not in conflict. But bringing in hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose objective is not to assimilate but to promote difference, who clearly came to Australia for other reasons than to become Australians while benefitting from what Australia could offer, has inevitably led to the current negativity towards immigration that has brought such great benefits to Australia

And the same goes for Britain, where The Spectator’s outspoken Rod Liddle recently pointed to anti-immigration opinion polling and accused successive governments of ‘lying, or obfuscation about immigration that has included withholding crime figures from us…. If the police released the ethnicity of the suspect every time a serious crime was committed, the public would be even more averse to continued mass immigration from cultures dissimilar to our own’. Similarly for Australia, where, additionally, an evident reluctance by the police (and the judiciary) to take action against clear law-breaking was a factor in the mounting unpunished burst of antisemitic crime. Time will tell whether this new focus on our region for immigrants will improve national cohesion; at least the reduced dominance of Middle-East radical Islamists in our migrant intake will be welcome.