Designing an immigration policy in Australia in 2026 is undoubtedly a politically hazardous task. Huge numbers of immigrants have been allowed to settle in Australia since the end of the Covid pandemic. The Albanese Labor government has enthusiastically embraced a Big Australia policy. Such an immigration policy is not unlike a Ponzi scheme because its collapse would reveal the true extent of the perilous position of the Australian economy.
Of course, the Opposition, until recently, has tacitly supported this scheme, leading to claims that the Labor Party and the Coalition have morphed into a Uniparty which does not offer any credible alternative to the economic vandalism created by the Big Australia policy. This vandalism is visible in the acute housing shortage, energy depletion, stresses on infrastructure, such as hospitals and schools, and social welfare rorts, etc.
However, this collaboration between Labor and Coalition now seems to have been shattered by the Opposition Leader, Angus Taylor, when he recently announced his long-awaited immigration policy to a receptive audience in Melbourne on Tuesday, April 14. His speech was delivered in the Menzies Research Centre and Taylor theatrically intoned that a Liberal-led government will ‘not discriminate based on nationality, race, gender, or faith’. And that ‘for an immigration program to work in the national interest it must discriminate based on values’.
Taylor also pointed out that his policy was merely a first ‘part’ of the Coalition’s immigration policy. That admission is worrying because the devil is always in the details: how a policy is implemented is vital in maintaining its integrity. His audience was not told about the ideal number of immigrants, except that the present number is too high and the standards are too low. As for his talk about values, how do you establish the values of a person? How do you ensure that a person’s professed values are genuinely and sincerely held, rather than faked for the purpose of their immigration application?
In this opinion piece, we do not propose to dwell on the undeniable problems associated with the implementation of Taylor’s policy. Instead, we want to focus on Taylor’s confident assertion that a Liberal-led government will only discriminate on the ground of an applicant’s values.
The problem with Taylor approach is his failure to understand that discrimination on the ground of values necessarily involves discrimination on the ground of faith, i.e. religion. Moreover, values, for example, free speech, freedom of movement, freedom of association, the rule of law, among many others, are basically the external expressions of a nation’s culture.
Taylor’s speech thus failed to appreciate that a nation’s culture is a function of the religion of its people. Put simply, culture is determined by, and depends on, religion. ‘Culture’ is a concept inextricably linked to ‘religion’ because a country’s culture, and its constituent values, are rooted in and determined by its predominant religion. Essayist T.S. Eliot correctly reminded us of this elementary fact when informing his readers that ‘no culture can appear or develop except in relation to a religion’. Eliot is only one among a plethora of respectable scholars who have made this point. For example, Raymond Ibrahim made the following point:
‘All values traditionally prized by the modern West – religious freedom, tolerance, humanism, sexual equality – did not develop in a vacuum but rather are inextricably rooted to Christian principles which, over the course of some two thousand years, have had a profound influence on Western epistemology, society and, of course culture.’
So, consistent with this logic, immigrants with religions that traditionally have been Christianity-unfriendly, bring with them different cultural traditions, ‘distinct worldviews with their own unique sets of rights and wrongs, often rooted in a religion or philosophy’.
For example, especially due to multicultural policy, Muslims who migrate to Australia have little or no incentive to assimilate into the host society, particularly if they come to this country professing an all-encompassing way of life which is based on the undisputed sovereignty of Allah. There will be no desire or incentive for these new migrants to assimilate into the mainstream society, but instead an opportunity for them to relentlessly demand that ‘the host society must change in line with their beliefs or grant them separate rights and privileges’.
According to Dr Rex M. Rogers, formerly president of Cornerstone University in Michigan/IL (who also served as a faculty and/or administrator at The University of Cincinnati and The King’s College), religious views are the primary source of cultural values. Or, as he puts it, ‘culture is religion externalised. In other words, cultures, like people, are inescapably religious in nature’. And Dr Rogers adds by stating that what values a certain cultural group embrace, ‘Influences the inescapably religious enterprises of education, the law, business and economics, government, health care, the arts, and entertainment, and much more.’
Hence, as ‘values’ are inherently linked to, and intertwined with, ‘religion’, Taylor’s claim that Australia should not discriminate on the ground of faith is wrong.
Take for instance legal and extra-legal factors that facilitate the realisation of the rule of law. This concept of legality depends as much on religious-cultural values as on the law itself, and their interactions. In other words, the realisation of the rule of law depends upon a religious-cultural milieu that simply cannot subsist without the proper assistance of a sociological context of respect for individual rights and freedoms. However, there are some cultures (and religions) that certainly do not favour the realisation of the rule of law.
To explain why the rule of law is not just a matter of legal-institutional design but requires a cultural/religious context of commitment to the values it necessarily entails, such as the protection of individual rights, John Stuart Mill once commented that some cultures/religions simply do not acknowledge the value of the rule of law. As Mill pointed out, it is simply false or erroneous to believe that every culture/religion necessarily agrees with the Western values of the rule of law, or that certain cultures/religions will not inevitably create ‘insurmountable obstacles’ for its realisation, including the legal protection of individual rights and freedoms.
In this sense, the late Harvard political science professor, Samuel Huntington, dared to predict in the late 1990s that, if popular elections were held in some countries of the Middle East, chances are that these elections would facilitate the coming to power of extreme religious individuals. Endowed with a direct appeal to indigenous ethnic and religious loyalties, once elected to positions of power these religious extremists would most likely undermine fundamental human rights, especially the basic rights of women and minority groups. Huntington thus contended that the realisation of the rule of law requires far more than democratic elections, but rather socio-political values that are deemed intolerable to certain cultural/religious groups not accustomed to live according to them.
Subject to the validity of this sobering argument, it is perfectly legitimate for a country, like Australia, to compile a list of countries the citizens of which should be banned from emigrating to Australia. This is because these countries are inherently dominated by a religious worldview that harbours values which are inherently alien to the predominant values of Australia. Such a list, on several occasions, has been released by the United States. In its latest iteration, it includes Afghanistan, Yemen, Sudan, and Libya.
We would like, therefore, the Coalition to display the same courage and release its own list of banned countries. This may sound an extreme position, but it is basic common sense. Here, it is worth reminding the words of the late Sir Harry Gibbs, formerly Chief Justice of the High Court of Australia:
‘A state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society, or at least to ensure that persons of that kind do not enter the country in such numbers that they will be likely to form a distinct and alien section of society, with the resulting problems that we have seen in the United Kingdom.’
Of course, we already hear a philosophical objection to the preparation of such a list, namely that it would be a textbook example of stereotyping, namely the attribution of characteristics to people based on their religious adherence. According to this view, individual vetting of applicants should occur to avoid the distorted result which might come from an application of a broad-brush stereotypical approach.
There is certainly some validity to this objection because, even granted that most people from banned countries could or would not embrace Australian-friendly values, surely there are some individuals who would be eligible for immigration if their applications were vetted properly and individually. But, as a society, we need to examine whether the benefits of an individual approach with its expensive and time-consuming vetting procedures, outweigh the benefits of a blanket ban. Indeed, from an administrative point of view, a ban, even if it were described as a stereotypical approach, is simply superior to a tortuous individual approach. Quite simply, selecting the country of origin would enable our immigration authorities to better arrive at the right decision, at least in most cases.
Hence, Taylor’s much heralded and welcomed immigration statement does not quite promise a turnaround in the immigration debate in Australia. It may in fact be the beginning of a conversation on the merits of Australian culture.
Gabriël A. Moens AM is an emeritus professor of law at the University of Queensland and served as pro vice-chancellor and dean at Murdoch University.
Augusto Zimmermann is foundation dean and professor of law at Alphacrucis University College. He served as associate dean at Murdoch University. He is also a former commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia.
Moens & Zimmermann are the authors of The Battle for the Soul of Western Civilisation (Connor Court Publishing, 2026).
