The Monoculture Myth: Loud Words, No Policy, and a Bill Your Business Pays

Digging Deeper

Where the monoculture talk came from

On 17 June 2026, Senator Pauline Hanson told the National Press Club that Australia cannot be multicultural and “must be monocultural”. She said immigration had driven the country into a state of crisis. The Prime Minister responded the same day that diversity is a strength of modern Australia. The Opposition Leader said he supported a version of multiculturalism, and several Liberal MPs said their party remained committed to it.

Then came the retreat. In the Senate a week later, Senator Hanson said little would change under her policy. She compared her monoculture to the Socceroos: people of many backgrounds wearing green and gold under one flag. Observers told the ABC it was unclear how she proposed to make Australia monocultural at all. The ABC’s political analysis called it a familiar three-step playbook, and noted that within days “monoculture” had been redefined as a football team.

In August, footage surfaced from a conservative Christian conference held in June. It showed One Nation Senator Malcolm Roberts saying he was in “two minds” about whether gay people should have equal rights. The question was about his own party’s director, who is gay. He offered no policy, only uncertainty.

That is the pattern worth noticing. Strong words arrive first. Detail rarely follows. The monoculture myth is loud on the way in and vague on the way out.

There is nothing to go back to

The monoculture myth needs a golden age. Australian history refuses to supply one.

Before 1788, this continent held more than 250 Indigenous languages and around 800 dialects, each tied to a place and a people. The 2021 Census still recorded 167 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages used at home. Arnhem Land, the Western Desert and the Torres Strait were, and are, different worlds.

The monoculture myth also needs a single “British” culture, and there was not one. The 1707 Act of Union kept Scotland’s separate legal system and its Presbyterian church. Wales, Scotland and Ireland kept their languages. The latest censuses counted 538,300 Welsh speakers, 2.4 million people with Scots language skills and 1.9 million Irish speakers.

Around 36,000 of Australia’s 163,000 convicts were Irish, and most were Catholic. Catholic and Protestant Australians then fought bitterly for more than a century. As late as 1960, Irish names were rare at the top of banking, insurance and the armed forces.

Go back further and the layers keep coming. The Romans invaded Britain in 43 CE and fused the Celtic goddess Sulis with their own Minerva at Bath. Roman gods were themselves borrowed from Greece: Jupiter from Zeus, Venus from Aphrodite. Christianity later replaced them all.

Christianity is no monoculture either. Researchers count around 50,000 Christian denominations worldwide in 2025, up from 2,000 in 1900. In Australia, 43.9% of people identified as Christian in 2021 and 38.9% reported no religion. Among migrants who arrived after 2017, fewer than three in ten were Christian.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam worship the God of Abraham. The Catholic Church has taught this officially since 1965. Same God, three very different cultures. Strip away the slogans and the myth of monoculture describes a country that has not existed.

Anger is the product. Policy is missing.

Ask what a monoculture policy would do and the answer changes by the day. First it was an end to multiculturalism. Then it was the Socceroos. On equal rights, it was “two minds”.

Why speak this way? Because division works as marketing. Anger travels faster than detail. It wins airtime, fills fundraising emails and separates a party from its rivals. Vague words also carry no cost, because nobody can hold you to a plan you have not written. The monoculture myth is a marketing product, and a well-tested one.

Whatever the intent, the effect is the same. The speaker gains attention. The listener gains nothing they can use. You cannot build a business plan on a slogan, and voters cannot build a country on one. The monoculture myth is sold to the anxious, and the bill is paid by everyone else.

That bill lands close to home. Every time a public figure casts a group as a threat, someone in your crew, your customer list or your supplier network hears it. Businesses then pay in staff who leave, customers who go quiet, and suburbs that trust each other a little less.

Follow the money

Ask who pays for the noise, and the answer is on the public record. In April 2026 a company owned by Gina Rinehart, Australia’s richest person, gave One Nation a new $1 million aircraft. A Hancock Prospecting spokesman confirmed the gift. The same week the party banked $2 million more from three donors. Two of them hold senior roles in Rinehart companies.

Senator Hanson’s interests register lists flights provided by Hancock Prospecting and S. Kidman & Co, including a trip to Florida. Those declarations followed months of questions about undeclared travel on Ms Rinehart’s private jet. The day after the Press Club speech, the two women shared a stage at a News Corp summit in Townsville. Ms Rinehart opened by thanking Senator Hanson by name, told the crowd she gave Australians hope, and handed her a toy bulldozer.

The policy attached to that endorsement is not about culture. Ms Rinehart’s published speech calls for closing every federal department that overlaps with a state one, cutting taxes, cutting regulation and leaving the Paris climate agreement. She has attacked net zero and renewable energy for years. Her fortune, $39 billion on the 2026 Rich List, comes from iron ore and other mining. Cutting tax and environmental rules helps a mining house far more than it helps a plumber.

So who gains from a divided country? Here is the evidence, stated carefully. Australia’s wealth gap is wide and widening. The richest 10% of households hold 46% of all wealth. Their average wealth grew 84% between 2003 and 2022, to $5.2 million, while the lowest 60% grew 55%, to $343,000. Nearly half of all wealth created in that time went to the top tenth. The 200 richest Australians now hold $707 billion.

Division protects that gap. Economists Alberto Alesina, Edward Glaeser and Bruce Sacerdote found the main reason the United States redistributes far less than Europe is racial division, not economics. When voters see the poor as “other”, they vote for less public spending and lower taxes. The people with the most to keep gain the most. The OECD adds the other half of the picture: rising inequality cut growth in 19 rich countries by 4.7 percentage points over two decades. A bigger gap means a smaller pie for everyone else, including small business.

It would be too much to say the rich are the only winners. Politicians win attention and votes. Some media win an audience. Ms Rinehart would say lower taxes and less red tape bring investment to regional Australia, and plenty of small business owners would welcome less red tape too. But the culture war is the wrapper, not the policy. Strip it away and what remains is a tax and regulation agenda that pays a mining fortune far more than it pays you. The monoculture myth is cheap for the wealthy and expensive for everyone else.