I have been checking out Kalgoorlie in the data. There are 225 properties for sale and 75 for rent according to realestate.com.au . Growth has been tapering even as Perth continued to go nuts:
https://www.yourinvestmentpropertymag.com.au/top-suburbs/wa/6430-kalgoorlie
(go to the bottom for links to the other kalgoorlie suburbs)
From ABS:
https://abs.gov.au/census/find-census-data/quickstats/2016/LGA54280
2016 population: 30,059
2021 population: 29,306
Like Port Augusta, any growth will come from investors and locals bidding against one another. However, Perth still going gangbusters, investor money has no reason to go to Kal, except for povo investors like your correspondent.
38.5% of households rented in 2016 compared to 36.7% in 2021. Over the same period, the percentage of households owning outright increased from 17% to 18.3%. Perhaps the 9% rental yields are enticing cash buyers.
Rental rates are much higher in Kal compare to the rest of WA so I suspect many people are only plan to be there for a little while so they rent rather than buy. It’s worth noting that Government employees housed there often get government housing at concessional rents. Given how affordable properties are, there is plenty of scope for home ownership to rise, but I’d have thought that would be led by investor participation.
The region is chock full of gold mines. I haven’t done a really deep dive, but you can get an idea from this map:
https://www.cmewa.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/DEMIRS-Major-Resource-Projects-WA-2024.png
Fears about a possible super pit closure having a dramatic impact on the local economy are therefore overblown.
I think MB may be right and that this time is different.
Mark my words. When iron ore buckles across 2026 and the budget is gutted as the AUD falls, LNG imports will deliver a huge energy shock just as unemployment jumps, cornering the RBA.
Australia’s mortgage economy will come apart like a smashed melon.https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2025/01/lng-imports-will-burst-the-aussie-housing-bubble
Global macro commentators I listen to predict downside for China and upside for the USA. This is bad for Australia.
The FIRE-immigration driven economy worked because it pushed existing infrastructure to capacity, a threshold which has probably now been crossed. This means that every new migrant comes with a greatly increased servicing requirement. The migration boom has resulted in massive infrastructure building which has meant that housing construction cannot proceed at the pace required for the number of arrivals. From this point any decrease in migration will result in lower house prices, and any increase will result in lower productivity and higher government debt from infrastructure spending, which in turn will crash the economy as the government takes over more and more.
While skills and economic complexity were hollowed out during the long migration boom, the China mining boom kept us prosperous even as overall productivity fell. With no more growth coming out of China, it’s hard to see this continuing.
I see a nominal GDP recession as immanent. Migration cannot be used to to offset it, and if they try it will make things worse.
As the AUD falls due to local weakness, Gold is going to do well. This is because the US will be looking to lower the USD. It needs to do this to make its local manufacturing more competitive and also to boost nominal GDP and inflation to reduce the overall debt burden. The means by which it will do this is to reduce the amount of foreign owned US treasuries. This is already happening as the petrol dollar system began its decline with Saudi selling to China for Yuan. That will be bullish for Gold (and other undollars), even more so in AUD terms.
This in turn could put a bid under a Kalgoorlie housing and wages even as the rest of Australia, falls away. Perth is dependent on Iron ore revenue which is likely to fall as Chinese demand dries up and Simandou opens. Hence, Perth real estate investors will look elsewhere for growth, especially Kal.
If RBA rates go up (after a dip) this might cause Kal rental yields to be less valuable, but given the entry to the market is priced at $200k, I can see cash buyers ignoring rates. Therefore the bottom end of the Kal market will therefore rise or hold on, but not fall.
There are many links in my chain of reason and much could go wrong with this thesis. I haven’t the inclination to do any more detailed quant work on this right now, so over to you. Please thoughtfully disagree and suggest further avenues for investigation.
Read your article and this came up in my scroll :
https://www.realestate.com.au/news/australias-cheapest-suburbs-where-to-buy-a-house-for-as-little-as-60000/
and what are your thoughts?
I don’t like property as an investment for a variety of reasons and may not be the best person to ask on this. My default position is that they are probably cheap for a reason, given how bonkers everything is going at the moment, why are these assets so cheap?
In regards to getting a clearer view of how the US is going to handle the dollar and their rebalancing of trade, it’s worth following https://x.com/SteveMiran and searching YouTube for recent interviews he has done. He definitely has Trump’s ear at the moment.
I just listened to Jordan Peterson interview Tommy Robinson. It’s a detailed account of how Muslim terrorists took over his town, Luton, with the cooperation of the Police and the judiciary.
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1824712004520620086
I am struck by the way that he got support.
I’ve now listened to all of it. He tells his life story. It’s a riveting expose of how corrupt the UK has become. Given that there’s no one like him in Australia (Avi Yemeni doesn’t count) I wonder how much is going on here.
Its a hard listen isn’t it?
I think JP took on the interview because his wife started to learn of the horror and how it was covered up by everybody – at every level in the UK.
I grew up working class in the UK and Tommys and the targeted girls story shows how they are so despised there.
Even 30 years ago it was clear that the white male was the enemy and my BIL who was police in Manchester was telling alarming stories about the pakistani community and young white girls back then.
The great thing is in the USA people are totally disgusted that the Brits as a race would betray their own to virtue signal and pretend mass immigration works. So the UK is a laughing stock now and I love it.
I don’t think white girls in Australia have such an issue as Indians are more Hindi and not the total grubs Pakis are. The mass rape cover up here is in indigenous communities.
When I see comments here about Indians I think folks are mixing up the two.
Of course Indians bring issues but are not the worst race in the world.
To see a nice take on what an awful place the UK is check out this Steve Bannon interview.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AoUO4Lx1JeU
Back in the early 2000s, Bilal Skaf and his scummy Muslim mates tried to start up an Islamic rape gang in western Sydney. After gang raping a number of white girls they were promptly nicked, given a fair trial and thrown in jail, where Skaf and others rot to this day, and will continue to do so for years to come. As far as I’m aware, there are no Muslim rape gangs operating in Australia today.
The contrast between the Australian response to this shit, and the UK response, where tens of thousands of girls were raped and murdered with official approval and facilitation is quite astonishing.
The UK, as a nation, is subject to eternal disgrace for allowing this to happen to their children.
Yeah, disgrace is the right word. I suppose you know about Musk tweeting about the issue which then got some coverage in the US MSM.
And god bless our dodgy crims who knocked Skaf on his arse in jail.
https://youtu.be/bgAqAuJOzfQ?si=gnmYTOAXh6N3wj-a
Buddy I remember those days. Couldn’t agree more.
My wife and I would go clubbing in Sydney and when I’d come back from a leak there would be a few Lebs gathered around her. Coming from Scotland I was happy to give them a good “fuck off!” and they weren’t as cocky back then.
I knew trouble was coming and when those rapes happened and with those sentences I said “Australia is the place for me – a decent juduciary? is it possible? ” Not like the bleeding hearts in the UK.
So I moved.
Now fast forward 25 years with appalling leadership for all of it and we’re a copycat of the UK and even try to outcompete them with pathetic virtue signaling.
You should know that skaf (pakistani of course) and gang are all out of prison now. 50 years became 20ish.
A few of Skaf’s skanky mates are out, but he’s still inside, as far as I’m aware. He had his sentence reduced from 40ish years to 33 with a non-parole of 28, so he’s got at least another 7 or 8 to go, and I can’t see him getting parole.
I’d just shoot him. And it’s quite possible that that’s that’ll happen when he does get out.
Overall my view is far simpler on Kalgoorlie:
1) can’t add more housing supply easily it is surrounded by mines, an explosives depot for the mines, future mines, native title land
2) has as you note a lot of gold but also lithium and other minerals within 100km of town in a abundance. Gold mostly only goes up in value supporting the mining industry of it.
3) is cheap for a town with a train to Perth, airport to Perth, university, and reasonable facilities.
a) roof for improvement lack of kids entertainment, retail business exposure off a town of 30k population should be better ie if Aldi, JB Hi Fi can’t be bothered that’s of note
4) can buy for far below replacement cost of housing
Ergo, prices will continue to rise.
Makes sense.
I didn’t know about the lithium. I thought that was mostly in the south west eg greenbushes. I didn’t mention the nickel since I was under the impression that a lot of that had shut down in 2023 due to chinese financed nickel mines opening in Indonesia. What other metals are there?
Good point about limited land.
Some additional reading slightly off topic
I have a mining map on my phone which is too large to upload here can’t find the URL
The nickel stuff has all collapsed the rest is mostly all there
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&opi=89978449&url=https://www.gedc.wa.gov.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Kalgoorlie-Boulder-Land-and-Housing-Position-Paper.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwi1o5aN3YKLAxXgcGwGHUF_OLAQFnoECA8QAQ&usg=AOvVaw0g3GcIK8mbq8lzOSZ0G_Cr
https://www.businessnews.com.au/article/Kalgoorlie-Boulder-economic-powerhouse-ri
pe-for-investment
Thanks heaps
Who the hell wants to invest in an isolated town, surrounded by desert, riven with race issues and dependant on piping water from over 500km away? This is the race to the bottom and desperation rolled into one. Come the interest rate rises we need to have and are likely to, the numbers backing this thought bubble vanish.
If Kal were dependent on anything other than gold mining I’d agree immediately. I think its population either gets large sums of government money (abs and gov employees) and the rest work in or on or around gold mines. Both will be impervious to the next recession. Plus a 9% rental yield means you’ve a decent amount of head room when rates rise. The pipes have been there for over a hundred years, so irrelevant. There’s no way prices at the bottom end fall below $200, which is already far below replacement.
Also, the lack of detail in your writing hints at possible trolling.
I agree the bottom end of the market has less further to fall. However, one of my beliefs is that I never bought anything I wouldn’t mind getting stuck with and Kal does not qualify. Not buying much of anything these days as I really get into minimalism. Water pipes that never need replacing is an interesting concept in an infrastructure constrained and warming world. If pushing a logical/contrarian view makes me a troll, I can handle that. More of an anarchist in reality. I wouldn’t be a landlord for quids. Most should be lynched come the revolution.
It’s not about the pipes themselves, it’s about the system that manages them. The Kal water system has worked for over 100 years. Throwaway lines about climate change are not persuasive. Dialectic without relevant data makes a troll in my book.
Climate change concerns in themselves are persuasive. There is plenty of data here. The insurance actuaries are at the forefront of making people wake up via premium increases. My locale has the best water resources on the east coast and I live well above any flood in rural suburbia. My premium rose 30% last year. Just as firefighters or flood rescuers are frightened of one road in/out options, I’d be worried about one 500km long pipeline being my saviour. Vested interests in Kal are saying a version of “don’t look up”.
How will Kal’s water system get affected by climate change? The pipes and pumps are not going to disintegrate because they’re getting warmer. 50% of Perth water is already desal. More desal being built. Kal’s water will keep flowing.
The evidence and data doesn’t support your assertion though. Plenty of places that are crapholes to some have seen capital growth. Just because you don’t want to live there doesn’t mean others don’t, or in terms of work are required to live there.
Kremnos, I’m not sure about interest rises as such. But may well have a situation where US rates fall but local rates don’t fall as far. Have warned about this before.
May be closer to house deflation risk now than at any recent time.
I’ve written a number of times how Jews can’t help refer to magic numbers and how their biggest magic number is 6 million:
https://www.ezfka.com/2024/07/31/indian-student-enjoying-another-week-of-stealing-food-from-australian-charities/#comment-68474
I know it sounds stupid that people believe in numerology, and I remember trying to explain to closed minded fuckwits like Commentbot and Peachy many times that it wasn’t particularly surprising that a mercantilist culture obsessed with money would also be obsessed with numbers.
That retard Commentbot actually accused ME of believing in numerology, rather than the fact that I believed many Jews and Zionists believed in numerology.
Rather than be open minded to the possibility they of course accused my of antisemitism – as though disliking Jews and Judaism automatically prevented anyone from having any valid opinions or understanding about a people and culture that are dangerously obnoxious (can you imagine fighting WW2 and being told that your views on Germans are invalid because you don’t like Germans?)
Anyhow, once again a Jewish magazine running a story by a Jewish propaganda institue, that is favourable to Jewish interest and attacking the morals of the Goyim again uses their magic numbers:
https://www.thejc.com/news/uk/brits-uk-antisemitic-adl-survey-qhe5ao08
But to the likes of Peachy or Commentbot this is just coincidence rather than their beliefs and manipulations hiding in plain sight.
Nothing to do with numerology, but I saw this video recently on Talmudic Contraceptives For Minor Girls.
The Talmudic Jews are certainly a distasteful bunch.
I’ve been aware of their discussions on whether or not sex with a 3yr old was a sin, I hadn’t come across their discussions on contraceptives before.
As I’ve said many times, in any other sacred text those sort of passages would have been completely expunged, however Judaism is not a normal religion.
While in the UK they ignored the mass rape and torture of working class girls the zio media have given plenty of air to that middle class tart bonny blue (? i think) who has gained excessive news space for her line ups of unemployed losers who fuck her in balaclavas (apparently – not watched any of that tripe).
Why is this news?
Who cares?
Well…
This is perfect for the zio media to portray white women, especially blond, as being available and theirs to rape.
A pull factor for muslims and africans for sure.
Thus continuing to sow the seeds of civil war or the great replacement – either of which they are fine with.
Ha ha ha ha! I caught that story in some “news”, no doubt presenting this as “independent, strong and brave”. Didn’t finish the story though, but, being an engineer, did maths. Amounted to 40 seconds a pop.
Reminded me of Eddy Murphy’s “you have no dick control” bit.
I know discussion on jews here is verboten, but why in heck does the Daily Mail have a ‘story’ every week reminding us how evil the holocaust was and how evil the evil Germans were. There’s never anything new in the article (how could there be?) but apparently 80 years later, their readers need lengthy weekly reminders that we need to feel pity for jews.
I know the Mail needs to provide endless words and pictures about anything at all shocking, but obsessively pushing this particular aspect of this particular event is weird. There are many more events of WW2 they could endlessly blather about, but they choose only this one. One wonders why.
The mail??
Try every single MSM rag.
Once you notice it it cant be unseen
No doubt you’re right. The DM is the only one I can be bothered looking at.
Whilst we are talking about insane speculation on property in shit holes, I saw an article talking up the benefits of Lismore in the SMH today. NSW regional house prices: Lismore house prices rise as town recovers from Lismore floods
The author of this is often a travel writer and has another article in the same rag boasting of her many free accommodations whilst polluting the planet on a whim. As Lismore waits anxiously to be ruined again by another record-breaking flood, I am sure the homeless and near bankrupt in the town are impressed with her extolling of Lismore’s “virtues” to the next greater fool silly enough to buy in a town clearly built in the wrong place. I’d say the insurance costs alone mean only a cash buyer could make a deal work but a third massive disaster in 6 or 7 years may cripple even that level of delusion. Australia is full of traps for the unwary and they are being offloaded at pace because the savvy can see what’s coming for house prices and it isn’t a boom.
It’s hard to look past cheap 10x leverage into an asset that successive governments have explicitly guaranteed to keep appreciating in price.
Just because you can, does not mean you should. It’s an expensive game of pass the parcel. Pouring with rain here in the Nthn Rivers today.
That’s true. But it’s more the aggregate that they guarantee. Carnage in a small regional market probably wouldn’t bother them.
The most cynical property investment strategy would be to look up the investments of politicians (ignore minor parties) and RBA appointees, then buy in one of those streets using maximum leverage.
An ex partner of mine lives in the hills on the edge of Lismore. Her sister thought it was a nice place so also moved up there. Didn’t have much money, so ended up buying a place on the edge of the flood zone.
This was a few years ago. The big floods came, and the sister and her dog ended up being rescued from the roof of her house in the middle of the night by a bloke in a tinnie. Another 30 minutes and she and the dog would’ve been washed away and drowned.
She’s been fucked in the head ever since. PTSD I suppose. Spends her days zonked on prescription meds and sinking piss. My ex and her don’t talk to each other any more.
Never buy a house in the Lismore flood zone, or anything remotely near it. The place is a shithole.
This is true. Lived there myself for a while in the 2000s.
Goonellabah and Lismore Heights is fine or anything else above the flood zones. Anything west of the hospital is asking to be underwater again within 5-10 years.
You had your chance back in 2020 to buy something but bottled it.
“bottled it”? Did he guv?
i believe your a soy boy but not an aussie.
my pom gaydar is beeping off the scale!!
Good piece, 2013. Kal certainly has its merits, as it is not just a mining town, but a mining services town. It is also a major transportation hub for WA. For the uninitiated, Kal is where 53.5m road trains break down into 36.5m road trains to travel down to Perth. Next break down point is Northam, to 27.5m, but prices there are in 400s and there are plans for road infrastructure improvements to allow 36.5m road trains to travel all the way down, but that’s another story.
An anecdote. Back in late 80s(?) United Group founded by 4 Italian fellows bought a small company in Kal going through receivership. Then one of four said fellows traded his share of United (later became known as UGL) for a 100% stake in this small company. UGL wound up bankrupt and sold off to Chinese, despite being an ASX 100 company in early 2010s. The small company is Monadelphous, and they got strong on the back of services, later branching out in construction etc.
I too read the LNG story on MB. I get their point about supply, but they don’t really address two other things: availability of carriers and unloading facilities. I have read various takes on both. Carriers are being built at enormous speed, something like 300 new platforms in the next 3 years. Unloading is a different story. The whole LNG game, in my opinion, is to make world markets depend on LNG game rather than pipelines. Nord Stream blowing up, recent attacks on Turkish Stream, Ukraine stopping gas transit to Europe all plays into this. The plan is to raise the price of gas to cripple economies of Europe and SK/Japan, making the US manufacturing stable and able to compete.
Gold will always shine. Problem with Kal, as others pointed out, is water being pumped from Perth, crime, lack of talent pool (hell, they are still flying skimpies in every week) and energy. I’d rather dump my savings into gold than into Kal property at this stage.
Other mining, nickel, copper, lithium all face the same issues. Lithium especially, there is a reason a lithium mine in Collie area got frozen (had a mate laid off with a notice period of 1 day). One needs cobalt to produce batteries, and that is the bottleneck. A lot of it comes from Africa, and that continent is coming under control of China and Russia. Another anecdote. Russia just secured the largest lithium deposit in Europe, in Ukraine, being developed by an Australian company, European Resources or some such, they are on ASX. In news, crickets.
All in all, I’d give Kal 5 to 10 years just on the back of gold mining. But that too is a risky proposition.
European Lithium, ASX EUR
If this gets off the ground could be interesting
https://www.kalgoorlienickel.com.au/
Believe all wymmins
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14298661/pennsylvania-woman-falsely-accusing-kidnap-rape-anjela-borisova-urumova.html?ito=native_share_article-nativemenubutton
I believe women who pull shit like that should receive the sentence the man would’ve received had he been falsely imprisoned.
Mark Steyn suggests that the reason the Pakistani rapists are so welcome in the UK is that most of the ruling elite are also fucking little boys.
https://www.steynonline.com/14917/it-paedos-all-the-way-down
So a senior Brit ex politician was regularly posting on Xitter about being fucked up his tight little hole by random rough trade, and all this was being followed and presumably read by many many current senior politicians…government ministers, FFS!
How do they explain that away?
For the tl;dr….the current Deputy PM of the UK, among others, was following the Xitter account of a bloke who was just nicked for child sex offences and who constantly Xeeted about rooting boys.
Its like the UK is currently ruled by Demonic Lizard Space Aliens who are intent on destroying the country. Anybody who has seen Starmer speak could only conclude that he’s a lizard in a skin suit, for sure.
So how do you think this will play out, LSWCHP?
I predicted civil war when I left there for here in 1998 … long before musk
It really depends how much the brits value their culture.
If they do a very bloody civil war.
If they dont? Then Sharia, more rape and Lebanisation.
There’s a huge divide on the right. You’d be fighting for boomer style people and their ‘ouse prices. Indians own more propadee than whites in London now. Lol. That’s probably a bigger enemy than the muzzies. If it’s anything like Sydney which I bet it is they are pretty easily avoided as long as you don’t live in or near their enclaves. Any time I see a muzzie it’s usually just some woman cloaked and walking slowly around keeping to themselves. Muzzies will never get the numbers to overtake any western countries.
I cant keep up with your initial ramble but the point about numbers is plainly wrong.
For australia there were almost 5 immigrants arrive to every baby born last year.
In the UK they will be a minority by 2035 where the rallying cry is “outbreed the kuffar”
i have heard it said to me in person by a muzzie in england on his 6th kid on benefits….these things stay with you.
Do you rely on the BBC for your information?
Micks outbred proddys how’d that work out. Not really that micky is it.
“eh oop me dook… ast mashed?”
Hello, my dear, have you made the tea?
(Derbyshire)
Me moom still got kitchenware made in bongland innit. From the late 60s. UK retail culture. Are you being served.
Ow’s ya moom.
Lorenzo Warby has written a great piece about (among other things) how membership of the elites requires one to not notice uncomfortable things.
https://substack.com/@lorenzofromoz/p-155156791
One signals ones virtue by refusing to notice the tens of thousands of young girls being murdered and raped every year. What’s far worse than those rapes and murders is noticing them and discussing them.
That has been plain with Elon Musk’s intervention in the rape gang issue. The UK elites are more pissed off with him noticing the rapes than the rapes themselves.
I think now, and Trump’s election is a factor in this, the lower classes in the UK have had enough, and they’re not going to play the elites games any more.
The latest UK uproar is how the stabber of little girls was treated, and much of the detail about him was deliberately hidden (ie extreme not noticing). This has reached the point where Starmer is going to address the nation about it.
So more and more, the people of the UK are expressing their fury about this elite bullshit, particularly as more and more paedophilia and corruption is exposed each passing day, and there is less chance that the current system will continue. The people have had enough.
Great comment and so true
leaving the Uk you realise anyone with any get up and go has “got up and gone “. This means they are so dumb they’ll have to be hit , and hit, and hit again before they stir. They may actually not. But if they do… hopefully a French Revolution will ensue.
I think MB may be right and that this time is different.
haha. Being right at the wrong time is also known as being wrong. They’ve been wrong for so so long.
But finally I do feel that iron ore might be ready to come off now.
Not really convinced on energy prices though – that “issue” has political solutions. Ones that are viable in a world where Mr Trump is president.
Sorry for being dumb but what political solutions are you talking about?
Mandated minimums for the domestic market would be one idea
Yeah bears will never be right. They will be the wrongest people of the millenium. You could write a book about how wrong they are. Someone should really as a service to humanity.
Speaking of Kal…
Armed home invader‘s mother (of Irish descent, no less) offered this piece of advice:
No charges were laid against the homeowner.
At last, the right decision.
Answers and justice have already been served.
The entitlement! If I wear a balaclava and come into your house with a machete with the obvious intent to steal or cause harm, I deserve anything and everything coming my way including forfeiting my life.
The sons mother can fuck off and perform some deep reflecting over her failure as a parent.
Self-reflection is beyond her. That’s why they are the way they are.
The ski mask was because he had just come from the Kalgoorlie Alps and forgot to take it off and it was a ceremonial machete he was on his way to a $3000 per appearance Welcome to Country representing the booji wooji mob.
Paging Stewie…
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/jan/22/paid-actors-antisemitic-attacks-australia-pm-anthony-albanese-police-afp-ntwnfb
I’m surprised the question is being asked publicly. But they will not countenance the idea that jews are behind it. You’re not even allowed to think it, let alone say it. #thoughtcrime
As I’ve said from nearly the outset of the outbreak in these suppposed anti-Semitic crimes, they are either the work of imported browns or imho the work of Zionist provocateurs.
With information filtering through that they are apparently being paid in crypto I am now nearly 100% certain that these crimes are the work of Zionists… that they ‘spontaneously’ started occurring just as Mark Leibler started upping the anti on hate speech laws and internet access rules is an interesting observation.
Could this press conference be the ALP signaling ahead of the election? “Don’t try any of your tricks, we know what you are up to?”
Paging Stewie
I think the article brushes over still the exact tipping point and doesn’t address enough why politicians in the 70s wanted to change to appeal to migrants.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/gough-whitlams-multiculturalism-experiment-has-failed-australia/news-story/a315d3b549b4f777301a0832b4098084
Alas – I don’t subscribe to the Australian (if you’d like to do a copy and paste I don’t think Murdoch will find out).
Gough and Al Grasby were the front men or catspaws for the real drivers – I’m sure I’ve linked this before, but the Occidental Observer’s 5 part article really delvs into who they were (anti-white Zionist scum bags like Andrew Marcus for example):
I particularly recommend Part2 and Part3
When you read and understand both what they got up to AND the real animosity and motivations behind their actions, then you can understand the so called ‘racist’ and ‘antisemitic’ actions that drove WAP politicians to work so hard to keep them out of our country…. sadly they failed and we are all the poorer for it today.
Part 1
The anti-Semitic violence that has marred Australian life since Hamas’s attack on Israel in October 2023 highlights the collapse of the multicultural project the Whitlam government launched five decades ago. That project aimed at promoting diversity without undermining social cohesion.
Now, as social cohesion buckles under an outpouring of toxicity and intimidation, it is increasingly hard to argue that its benefits outweigh its costs.
The complex of policies referred to as multiculturalism did not come in the wake of failure.
On the contrary, the approach it replaced, which stressed integration and assimilation, oversaw Australia’s spectacular post-war success in absorbing wave after wave of new arrivals.
During that period, which stretched from 1947 to 1972, the key political imperatives of defence and economic growth drove one of the proportionately highest levels of annual migrant intake anywhere in the world.
Labor immigration minister Arthur Calwell coined the slogan “populate or perish” in the 1940s when warning Australians they had, at best, 20 years to prepare for the next global conflict. With World War III likely by 1970, the nation needed a substantially increased population along with a large industrial base capable of supporting prolonged mobilisation.
Soon enough, the recent arrivals and their families began leaving their original inner-city enclaves, providing new European leavening to the British-Australian dough of the great Australian suburbs.
Not only were they working, drinking and socialising alongside ordinary Australians, their children, as they grew into adulthood, began intermarrying. In their actions, the migrants, and the “Anglomorph” host society they had joined, ensured Calwell’s term “New Australians” was no empty signifier. Moreover, rather than moving to one locale only, they percolated everywhere.
Even as they continued to nurture the close ties any new migrant community requires, energetically forming their own ethnic clubs and associations, they also took advantage in their day-to-day life of one of the most distinctive features of Australian society – its remarkably open, egalitarian character.
Here status distinctions were fluid, class distinctions minimal to non-existent, and the social code of interaction placed a premium on low-key, easygoing acceptance.
It was, for sure, no utopia. The migrant’s journey is ineluctably difficult, even more so in a country that was resolutely monolingual. Yes, Australians were generally accepting, but there was often a lack of warmth. Tolerance could be counted on, but not a great deal more. It took considerable strength of will and adaptiveness, along with a modicum of good fortune, to realise one’s dreams.
But the strikingly high degree of success – measured by basic socio-economic indicators of home ownership, employment progress and long-term integration into the host nation – the migrants enjoyed clearly says something about the country in which they had arrived and forged their future.
This was an extraordinary achievement for a nation whose sense of identity was so bound up with its Britishness. The Irish trauma had certainly left its scars, but there was widespread pride in the institutions and practices Australia inherited from Britain.
David Malouf put it best, writing about his father, who was born in Brisbane to Melkite (Greek Catholic) parents from Lebanon. “He was passionately Australian,” writes Malouf, “but his patriotism included strong feelings for England, a place he had no connexion with and had never seen. He would have said, I think, that England represented all the things in the world he had grown up in that he most admired and lived by: fair play, decency, manliness, concern for the weak and helpless, a belief that life, in the end, was serious.”
Malouf’s father was scarcely unusual. Neither were his attitudes imposed on him by any constraining government policies, aimed at cramming “Australianness” down the throats of reluctant arrivals.
Rather, they were the outcome of a policy framework whose salient characteristic was, as academic, author and political thinker Frank Knopfelmacher observed, its stance of “benign neglect”.
Far from vigorously enforcing conformism, as later revisionists claimed, it did what an open society does best. Consistent with liberal principles, which hold people free to form their own associations, their own groups, their own culture and way of life, the policy left new arrivals largely to their own devices, leaving it to the slow gravity of acculturation to work its magic.
The attitudes of the old Australians helped that magic work. As long as the new arrivals didn’t import any “old world” grievances or political hostilities into their new home, Australians were more than willing to accommodate them within the wider circle of what historian and social commentator John Hirst called a “democracy of manners”.
Central to that “democracy of manners” was the unwritten rule that topics likely to produce heated division (most obviously politics and religion) should be studiously avoided, leaving the common fare of daily life as the central topic of neighbourly conversation. That was not, as later critics also claimed, because cultural, political or religious differences were dismissed as unimportant or as a secondary feature of individuals’ sense of self.
The precise opposite is true: it was because they could be so important as to prove explosive, shattering a society acutely conscious of the fragility that accompanied constant change.
It was this way of dealing with difference that, Hirst argued, provided “the social foundation of the peacefulness of Australian democracy”. One of the deepest and most ingrained habits of Australian life, it took shape, he shows, in the decades after European settlement in 1788.
The settlers arriving in those early years found they not only had to navigate an alien, often inhospitable, environment. They also had to confront, just as immediately, the alarming fact that ethnic and religious groups that for centuries had known little of each other but war and mutual loathing – Irish, Scots, English – now had no choice but to form a new society where no one ethnic group enjoyed overwhelming dominance.
This continued throughout the 19th century as convict transportation, gold rush migration booms and assisted migration schemes continued to feed new streams from these divergent groups into the one place.
Here the template that was so successfully followed in the post-war decades was devised under the aegis of shared “Britishness”, a unifying term little used in the United Kingdom. After Federation its qualities were increasingly considered distinctively Australian and actively celebrated.
But the 1970s brought two momentous changes.
The first was a profound recasting of the past. Previously, Australian cultural elites, while rarely hiding from our history’s often grim realities, viewed the building of Australia with pride – a pride that underpinned a strong, distinctive and unifying sense of national identity.
Now they framed a new imaginary history in which the Australia of the past was, according to Whitlam acolyte Phillip Adams, “the most remote, ethnocentric, inward-looking and changeless society on earth”, a barren, empty and grey wasteland, punctuated only by the craven fawning of British imperialists and the genocidal dislocation of the continent’s first inhabitants.
At the same time, as the previous national identity was derided, the ideal of a unifying culture was scorned with it. Australia’s strength, the revisionists argued, lay not in an encompassing sense of being Australian; rather, what was to be highlighted and encouraged was cultural difference, as if difference was a good in itself.
In its origins, the ambitions of this new multiculturalist approach were reasonably modest. Trusting implicitly in the continuance of the social code of tolerance built up over the decades, it assumed that code was so strong that it didn’t require protecting. Its primary focus was on supplementing the processes of ongoing migrant integration with some largely harmless commitments to maintaining cultural diversity via language programs and greater appreciation of European culture.
Al Grassby, the immigration minister in the Whitlam government, invoked the “family of the nation” metaphor when first announcing multiculturalism as a new policy in 1973. The Fraser government’s Galbally report – tabled in 10 languages to parliament in 1978 and definitively establishing the full panoply of multicultural policy and its trappings – went even further. It emphasised that multiculturalism was efficacious “provided that ethnic identity is not stressed at the expense of society at large, but is interwoven into the fabric of our nationhood”. Despite this, multiculturalism rapidly developed a momentum of its own that came to approximate a cultural revolution rather than continuance and improvement.
The term itself had originated in Canada in the mid-’60s and was soon adopted by prime minister Pierre Trudeau. The appeal for Trudeau was obvious as he struggled to cope with separatist pressures in Quebec while remaining cognisant of Anglophone Canadian views. The idea of multiculturalism shifted the focus from two to many, potentially easing the head-to-head confrontation between Quebec and the rest.
Its immediate use value for the more singular culture of Australia, where there were no separatist tensions, was less apparent. But it rapidly acquired great political appeal.
Nowhere was that appeal greater than in the ALP. Since 1901 the Labor Party had been more deeply invested in the White Australia Policy than any other major political movement.
In the opinion of its greatest speechwriter, Graham Freudenberg, it was the policy that had proved its most reliable source of voter support.
But the generation of party leaders who began emerging in the early ’60s – Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Bill Hayden, Don Dunstan and others – fought a long battle to remove the policy of racial exclusion from the party platform and replace it with the principle of non-discrimination.
Simultaneously, Labor’s previous heartland of support, blue-collar workers, chiefly located in the manufacturing industries, was beginning to dwindle and disintegrate. It was to be replaced with a new coalition of disparate groups, attracted by subsidies, public recognition and promises of social justice – and it did not take long for non-British migrants to be identified as one of the groups that could be wooed through lashings of financial and symbolic largesse.
The Liberal side of politics also had reasons to embrace the change. Early post-war waves of migrants, coming predominantly from Britain and the Balkan and eastern European nations caught on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, tended to support the anti-communist Coalition.
By the mid-’60s however, those sources had dried up. Large-scale arrivals from Italy, Greece and, after 1967, Turkey and Lebanon skewed more in Labor’s direction, despite the Liberals’ record of encouraging migration, ending the White Australia Policy in 1966 and initiating a policy that focused solely on would-be migrants’ ability to integrate into their new nation. The Liberal Party’s unpopularity with increasing swathes of migrant voters in the ’70s was a key reason for its 1975 conversion to multiculturalism and the dramatic abandonment of the previous commitment to integration.
But what was most striking about the adoption of multiculturalism was the almost total absence of initial advocacy from the group directly affected, the migrants themselves.
Obviously, providing government resources to preserve ethnic cultures couldn’t help but appeal, most especially to ethnic community leaders, who enjoyed a sudden, startling accession to significant degrees of power, influence and status. This was, however, a response to policy initiated by successive governments, not a longed-for reform migrants had been pushing for themselves.
As author Raymond Sestito pointed out, “Australia’s political parties have been the initiators of multiculturalism, rather than responding to group pressure.” Historian Mark Lopez concluded similarly that multiculturalism “was developed and advanced in the name of ethnic groups, organisations and leaders, not by them”.
For the politicians’ part, the bidding war for migrant allegiance proved a trap from which it was almost impossible to escape. With organisations and ethnic community representatives created to facilitate the new policy, the electoral punishment any significant policy reversal would subsequently entail was feared, perhaps unjustifiably, to be severe.
But even more than the politicians, the group for whom multiculturalism became a sacred cause was the new elite class emerging to dominance in Australia from the ’70s. As with Indigenous self-determination, to question the policy soon became the secular equivalent of blasphemy. Under the threat of excommunication the policy, even if privately questioned, was almost universally publicly accepted. That was at least partly because there really wasn’t much reason to assail it.
In effect the consequences, however deleterious, for long proved relatively containable, a handicap rather than a cancer on the body politic. Disparaged though they may have been, the values of Australian life for which multiculturalism claimed credit but that actually predated it – tolerance and egalitarian openness – maintained an essential robustness, mitigating its harms.
However, new developments in more recent years and decades have dramatically increased the dangers that the policy’s original flaws always threatened.
The rise of virtual worlds, immersive media, social and otherwise, with global reach, now means it is possible to live at Lakemba in western Sydney while being for all intents and purposes in, say, Beirut.
As the Productivity Commission warned in 2016, “the ease of communicating with family and friends in the immigrant’s country of origin, and access to news and other media in their home language through the internet, has made it much easier for people who do not feel capable or have no desire to integrate”.
“To the extent that immigrants’ intent to integrate is decreasing,” the commission continued, that “raises an important issue about whether this provides scope for separatism that conflicts with, and/or has the ability to undermine, key norms and longstanding understandings that are important to the functioning of Australian society”.
To make things worse, the changes the Productivity Commission pointed to coincided with the spread of Islamic fundamentalism, which – in the name of maintaining religious purity – elevates separatism into an overriding religious obligation.
There were, and are, many Australian Muslims who are anything but Islamists and entirely reject separatism. Successfully integrated into the wider community, their contribution is there for all to see. But it would be foolish to deny that Islamist separatism presents threats on an entirely new scale.
That there were also intense ethno-sectarian pressures in the Irish Catholicism of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is undoubtedly true. The priestly champions of Irish Catholicism in Australia pursued and insisted on a religious separation, demanding (with mixed success) that all Catholic parents eschew schools not devoted to an explicitly Catholic curriculum. Social, economic and political separatism was, however, largely non-existent. There was no ghettoisation, intermarriage rates were high, and the Labor Party and the unions provided membership alongside the wider Australian populace in mass movements that insisted, as best they could, on ignoring religious identity.
Additionally and crucially, even the most strident advocates of Catholic schooling never promoted a hatred of Protestants, much less a desire for their extermination. But, in contrast, it has become an integral part of Islamist preaching that, in the words of an Islamic text widely available in Australia, “vileness and depravity are inherent to Jewish nature”, accompanying “the Jew” just as “the shadow accompanies a man”.
The overall result is not just a separatism that tears at social cohesion; it is an active hostility to, and incessant attack on, the Australian community. And far from impeding those tendencies, the multicultural project legitimises them and bestows funding and authority on their promoters.
As those developments loomed, the Productivity Commission urged the government to “monitor social cohesion and integration trends” and take remedial action “if the proportion of the immigrant population not wishing to integrate rises”.
In reality, little was done by either side of politics – and Labor’s reliance on the Muslim vote made reform even more difficult.
Already in 1986, acting in the name of multiculturalism and mindful, according to a report in this paper, of “pressure from the growing local Muslim community”, Paul Keating was instrumental in blocking the deportation of Taj Din al-Hilali despite the latter’s viciously anti-Semitic statements. Subsequently acquiring citizenship, Hilali, one of the nation’s most senior Muslim clerics, unsurprisingly continued in the same vein, setting a trend that was subsequently copied in myriad mosques and prayer halls.
Keating’s decision as acting prime minister in Bob Hawke’s absence to grant permanent residency to Hilali in 1990 cemented a turning point. From this point the political die was cast and a policy whose risks were steadily materialising became untouchable.
Now it is time for it to be junked. Different cultures must be respectfully considered, not uncritically embraced. The illusion that diversity will bring unity, or even allow basic civility to survive, is as hollow as it is damaging.
Geoffrey Blainey put it well: “People need to feel they belong to their country.” As he said: “The multicultural policy and its emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority, gnaws at that sense of solidarity that many people crave.”
The Hawke government’s own FitzGerald report on immigration echoed these conclusions. Recommending that even the term multiculturalism be abandoned, it emphasised that “it is the Australian identity that matters most in Australia”. Unless the balance shifted from enshrining difference to promoting a unifying national identity, it was only a matter of time before the centrifugal forces that could tear Australia apart proved overwhelming.
The FitzGerald report shocked Hawke. He repudiated it and buried it in punishment for failing to provide his government with what it expected to hear. The news still may be unwanted. But this much is clearer than ever: closing our eyes and ears to multiculturalism’s failures is a luxury Australia can no longer afford.
Thanks just copy pasted. It’s verbose. I’m still a little surprised it was allowed to be published in the Australian.
It does of course go to great lengths to discuss the subject and consider culturally slaying the head of the hydra whilst never truly getting to the body…
Great read. Thank you.
All good
Yes I thought so also.
Essentially the TLDR is that multiculturalism is a slippery slope and has gone too far continually shifting up a gear each decade, and now so obviously for the worse for the host population.
What I don’t quite believe is this reasoning:
“As author Raymond Sestito pointed out, “Australia’s political parties have been the initiators of multiculturalism, rather than responding to group pressure.” Historian Mark Lopez concluded similarly that multiculturalism “was developed and advanced in the name of ethnic groups, organisations and leaders, not by them”.”
So much of politics is responding to group pressure! So then you have to consider which group..
Hi 90KB – thanks for the C&P.
There is a lot I agree with in the article, and also agree with your comments above in that not all the blame for initiating the adoption of MultiCult as a policy was with the political duopoly – I don’t need to restate where I think much of the social agitation came from…. cough, cough Leibler & Lipmann.
The main surprising thing about the article was again what you observed – that it was even printed in the first place!
Anyhow, thanks again for posting the story, interesting to see tentative signs of a change in direction to one of the most toxic social policies to have been imposed on us.
No problems. Yes as soon as I read the article I thought this is perhaps the most pointed criticism of multicult I’ve seen in the mainstream Australian media probably ever.
But you can still tell it’s been cached as a
smokescreen to drum up support for the Jews and other first generation 1945-1970 era migrant groups, and to kick down on the primarily Islamic more recent blow ins. Silent on the hordes of south Asian and Chinese immigrants which since in sheer numbers are a whole other problem.
Ie the backdrop for this article still feels it’s pro Israel/anti Palestine.
I do wonder with Trump back in, it green lights and paves the way for a much needed shift to the right and a national right in Australia.
You can set your watch to Dutton getting the job later this year but let’s see what if anything actually happens.