Once here, they can cause a lot of trouble

By JOHN PASQUARELLI in The Australian

February 19, 2011 12:00AM

IN 1978, Malcolm Fraser established the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, which had Petro Georgiou as its director for 1980-85. In the blink of an eye, the multicultural die had been cast and, while ordinary Australians didn't know it then, their once stable and ordered society would never be the same again.

Those Liberals and Nationals who supported Fraser share the responsibility and the shame for selling out mainstream Australia, betraying those whose safety and security is supposedly the chief priority of all politicians.

Between 1975 and 1982 Fraser oversaw 200,000 migrants arriving from Asian countries, including nearly 56,000 Vietnamese refugees as well as 2059 boatpeople also from Vietnam, who arrived without permission and without documents. Fraser gave us the double whammy when, in 1976, his government allowed thousands of Lebanese Muslims in despite his own immigration department warning against this.

In a short time, Labor's immigration minister Al Grassby and then Fraser, striking at the heart of the core Australian society of Anglo-European heritage and the First Australians, laid the foundations for a multicultural industry. It quickly attracted a vast circus of academics, students, politicians, journalists and the chattering classes with its departments, committees, boards and faculties.

Hot on their heels were the self-appointed spokesmen for ethnic groups, cunning enough to understand the rush for the ethnic vote by MPs and the taxpayer-funded hand-outs that accompanied this disgraceful direction in politics.

The Labor Party was quickly out of the starting gates with its branch-stacking of Muslims in Sydney's west, exposed by Paul Keating's revocation of Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali's deportation order.

Multiculturalism spread like wildfire. Ordinary Australians were denied any opportunity to debate the policy that would change their nation irreversibly. Just to question multiculturalism brought accusations of racism from practically every politician and journalist in the land.

In 1996, Pauline Hanson arrived on the scene and said what she thought about issues such as multiculturalism, foreign aid and the then Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. Hanson gave the mainstream a voice.

John Howard dropped the multicultural portfolio, nervously confirmed by Labor after last year's election but Chris Bowen dropped a bombshell a few days ago when he announced the restoration of the portfolio and full-on multiculturalism, including anti-racism strategies and other mechanisms that will require taxpayer dollars. Politicians and the media live mainly in safe, leafy suburbs, away from dangerous ethnic ghettoes that were once white working-class suburbs. Who cares for those who have been killed by ethnic criminals who are the direct product of multiculturalism?

Australians now face a new era of uncertainty, and who will defend them against those who are determined to destabilise more than 200 years of cultural history? Labor is in tatters, but would an Abbott government be any better given the multicultural apologists that abound in the Coalition?

John Pasquarelli is a former Papua New Guinea territorial MP and an adviser to Pauline Hanson.