Modern Australia is the liberal elite’s preferred name for the ostensibly advanced state the country finds itself in. It is both what Australia now is, and what it will only further become.
At the core of this new conception of the nation are high rates of diversity and urbanisation occurring alongside a supposed shared love of multiculturalism and social liberalism: think permanent Diwali, Lunar New Year and multi-faith festivals, all accompanied by foreign food and LGBT parades.
In Modern Australia, you will be able to do yoga in the morning, watch women’s footy in the afternoon, and attend your local Ramadan night market for dinner.
Anyone not on board with this progressive program will inevitably be smeared, shunned or excluded as the irredeemable deplorable they most assuredly are.
Yet the main problem facing proponents of Modern Australia is the fact that Australians don’t actually want to live in it.
Indeed, there is mounting evidence to suggest that for all the positive promotion and outright propaganda launched by Australia’s elites to get the public to go along with this cosmopolitan campaign, many Aussies are avoiding or escaping it.
The most obvious proof of this is the current exodus from urban Australia. A recent report revealed that as Australia’s cities become more diverse – with Melbourne set to soon become a “majority-minority” city – many of the people already living there are leaving for rural Australia.
The data shows that the first quarter of this year had the highest rate of urban escape on record, with capital city residents moving to rural and regional areas at a rate 29.7% higher than those moving in the other direction. In other words, for every three Aussies who moved to the city there were four leaving to live in the country. This first-quarter figure was around 5% higher than the year prior and is part of a longer-term urban exodus that has been running since 2018.
If people aren’t physically fleeing Modern Australia, many are escaping psychologically. Millions of Australians obviously remain in the cities, but a vast number of them have checked-out mentally and spiritually. Rates of volunteering and community engagement, for instance, are in rapid decline, as is trust in government and our institutions. Other relevant metrics like a record rate of illicit drug use and an overall sense of nihilism and apathy are also increasingly apparent.
Many Aussie men, meanwhile, have retreated inward and given up on society entirely. This can be seen in the high rates of unemployment and welfare-dependency among Gen Z men, and in the emergence of phenomena such as “incels” (involuntary celibates) and NEETS – those not in education, employment or training.
It is further reflected in Australia’s anaemic fertility and marriage rates, and in the formation of a local hikikomori class of hermits and social isolates akin to that of Japan. The suicide rate among Australian men, meanwhile, has increased more than 50% over the last two decades to stand at some 2,500 deaths per annum.
All this is consistent with what has been seen in “modern” (i.e. diverse) societies overseas. The most famous example is provided by Harvard’s Robert Putnam in his studies of racial and cultural diversity in America. “Immigration and ethnic diversity”, Putnam wrote, were deleterious to communal cohesion as they tend to “reduce social solidarity and social capital”.
Among the many negative effects Putnam found were that people who lived in diverse settings “volunteer less, donate less to charity, vote less, and engage less in community life overall”. About the only thing that grew alongside increased diversity was the amount of time people spent watching the TV and other types of screen.
This was not solely applicable to relations between White and non-White Americans. Putnam found that in ethnically diverse areas residents of all races tended to “hunker down” and avoid interaction. In diverse settings, Putnam noted, “trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer [and] friends fewer”. In fact, neighbours in America’s most diverse communities trusted “one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings”.
Put simply, the chief lesson of Putnam’s study was that “virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings”. It is this that of course explains the currently baleful state Australia is now in, and the constant efforts by our ruling class to find technocratic fixes for the fractured society they have brought into being.
It is our rapidly declining civic health that is forcing our managerial elites to talk ceaselessly about “social cohesion“. Their rejection of Putnam’s lesson is why we now have a raft of new grants, schemes and initiatives to support multiculturalism and social cohesion, as well as new envoys for anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Conversely, it is also why we now have a quarter of the population supporting Pauline Hanson and One Nation, and the implosion of the old two-party system.
Aside from political fracture and increasing anomie, perhaps the most pressing reason why people are fleeing Modern Australia is crime.
Indeed, only the other week in Melbourne – surely the capital of Modern Australia – another young man was killed in a gang-like attack that has become completely commonplace in the city. In this case 15-year-old Darweish Mohamed was fatally stabbed in a carpark in Craigieburn in the city’s north, with three teens charged with his murder.
Yet this is just one in a string of recent crimes involving knives in the state, with dozen of Victorians killed, stabbed or slashed over the last few years in an unprecedented knife-crime crisis. Sadly, it is also a mere drop in a broader crime wave that has engulfed Victoria and Australia, with both the Garden State and the nation now seeing some of the highest crime rates on record.
Another usually tacit and politically inconvenient reason for the escape from Modern Australia is the simple desire for homogeneity. For as hard as our elites try to get the public to go along with their latest social-engineering scheme, the revealed preference of Australians is to flee it.
The current exodus to rural Australia is not purely a desire for healthy living, of course. It is a deliberate decision by urban Australians to escape to areas that are far less diverse and much more homogenous than the cities, with the rate of foreign-born residents in rural Australia half of what it is in the city.
All this is seen overseas. In the UK, as London became a “majority-minority” locale, many old-stock Londoners left for other places. The city’s famous working-class Cockney community, for instance, is essentially no more, with almost all of the old Cockneys having long left London for rural areas such as the nearby Home Counties.
In America, similar instances of mass demographic shifts are almost too numerous to mention. Names such as Baltimore and Detroit are now global bywords for dramatic urban decline driven by demographic transformation, with the sad fate of those “left behind in Rosedale” chronicled at the margins in books like this one by Scott Cummings.
All this has been confirmed in the academy. To take one example, Canadian academic Eric Kaufmann has tracked what is pejoratively termed “White flight”, but is really just a universal human desire for familiarity and homogeneity, in the US and the UK.
Unsurprisingly, Kaufmann uncovered similar ethnocentric trends to those found by Putnam. Among other findings, Kaufmann’s study revealed that “White Britons [were] more likely to move to whiter wards than other ethnic groups”, and that in America “Whites, as expected, moved toward whiter areas than minorities originating in similarly diverse places.”
These trends have returned to stark prominence in the work of British-based academic David Betz. As Betz, a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, has warned in a series of recent essays and podcast appearances, “civil war is likely to dominate the military and strategic affairs of the West in the coming years”.
This, Betz notes, is due to the failure of Western elites and the obvious fact that Western societies are exhibiting most if not all of the theoretical signs of impending civil war.
“It is not simply that the conditions [for civil conflict] are present in the West; it is, rather, that the conditions are nearing the ideal. The relative wealth, social stability and related lack of demographic factionalism…that once made the West seem immune to civil war are now no longer valid,” he writes.
As Betz adds, central to these coming tensions will be urban-rural fracture, formed almost exclusively along ethnic lines. As Betz sees it, Whites will flee the West’s forthcoming “feral” cities for rural and regional areas as their cities descend into chaos and become home to the vast non-Western populations.
As Betz writes, due to the “distinctively observable urban-rural dimension” of immigrant settlement patterns in Western countries, Western cities “are radically more heterogeneous than the countryside”. This will logically lead towards “civil wars in the West that burn across ethnic cleavages” and which “will have a distinctively rural vs. urban character”.
This is obviously what appears to be happening in Australia now with the physical and mental exodus from Modern Australia.
Ultimately, it also resolves our initial question: who will live in Modern Australia? Absent some radical change, the answer will be the Betzian one.
Header image: A crowded train platform in Melbourne’s west this week (Venkat Ram Upparlapalle – Facebook).
The post No one actually wants to live in ‘Modern Australia’ first appeared on The Noticer.
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