In following with Angus Taylor’s announcement that immigration should be managed to ensure people who come within our country have “Australian values” it begs the question about what exactly constitutes Australian values. One can imagine that in the mind of Mr Taylor, it merely means you follow the law, pay your taxes, marry a consenting, non-blood related adult and don’t slaughter your neighbor with a machete!
Unfortunately for the cosmopolitan liberal, conservative elite – they are unable to or are unwilling to define what Australian values actually are as it compels them to draw upon the question about what an Australian actually is. The ANA has been contending for many years that Australian values are not those drawn from whole cloth out of thin air, but they are values that can only be understood and enumerated from within the context of the nation who gave birth to them.
The obvious starting point is that the Australian nation, and her values thereof, are at their first principles derived from their origin in the British Isles and Ireland. A Christian, North-west European civilisation which had adorned our first settlers with morality and values drawn from the well of the struggle of many generations. Values built upon the lessons hard learned by the lived experiences of the people that persevered through and were shaped by the Roman conquest of Britain, the Norman conquest and settlement, the war for the great charter, the English civil war, the glorious revolution and the act of settlement.
Our core values are those constituted from a wide edifice of Christian moral values interwoven with our social order that is framed upon the foundations of ethnic nationalism and a mean political constitution. Those foundational elements were placed in the new environment and conditions of Australia, on the far end of the earth, in conditions which prevailed over hundreds of years that required adaptation and development to suit the unique need, vision and destiny of the Australian settlers.
Bernhard Wise wrote in his 1909 book, The Australian Commonwealth, that:
“The Englishman who lives in England, rarely understands the “Englishman” who lives beneath the Southern Cross; and the latter, as a rule, is equally uncomprehending of the former. It follows that the Briton’s first visit to the Commonwealth is generally a series of surprises and bewilderments. The people whom he meets are at once the same as and different from those whom he knew “at home,” and their very likeness provokes a sense of irritation at the points of difference.
Their best qualities are in antagonism. The Briton’s reserve seems arrogance to the Australian, whose hearty, open manner becomes,—in excess,—perilously near to youthful self-assertiveness. But the difference between the two peoples is not only one of temperament, but also of standpoint.”
Any genuine review of primary sources around the mouth of the 20th century will acknowledge a two-fold truth, both that the Australian people considered themselves, on the whole, as “children” of the British isles, but simultaneously, as Australians of a unique type. It was in-fact one of the key driving spiritual forces of the ANA to be intentionally Australian, to celebrate and encourage the flowering of the youth of a new Nation under the southern cross, this however, without forgetting our old heritage from Europe.
Wise continues in his book:
“Perhaps the root of the latent antagonism which undoubtedly exists between the home and the over-sea Briton, is the change which has been effected in the former by his new environment. The creature of habit and tradition is changed into a new being, who finds nothing as it was at home and has ever to be relying on his own resources in unexpected emergencies. No social usages shelter him from competition, but every man has an equal chance in the race of life.
He who in England used to run between strings, in order not to jostle or be jostled, finds himself suddenly engaged in contests where everyone plays to win, and not for the mere pleasure of the game. The change has not been for the better in all points. Something has been lost, in the process, of that dignity and reserve, which comes of conscious strength, and has been replaced by the assertiveness of youth.”
The spirit of the new place, gave birth within the Australian settlers, adapted values. Chiefly among these, is this principle of mateship which people often refer to, but only on a very shallow basis. The great William Spence, founder of the Australian Workers Union noted in his 1909 book, Australia’s Awakening:
Unionism came to the Australian bushman as a religion. It came bringing salvation from years of tyranny. It had in it that feeling of mateship which he understood already, and which always characterised the action of one “white man” to another.
That racial and ethnic solidarity which Mr Spence spoke of reached a new feverish pitch in the Australian colonies. The combined effect of great distance from Europe and heterogeneity of closely related ethnic folks (English, Welsh, Scots and Irish) created a proud new optimism, unity and shared identity which even to this day is not to be found amongst the neighbourly states of the United Kingdom and Ireland as rightfully noted by Dr Benjamin Poulton, a prominent member of the Adelaide branch of the ANA who wrote in 1890:
In Australia, colonized as it has been and is by adults from all parts of the mother country, people of Scotch, Irish, or English origin or parentage mix and intermarry more freely than they would do in the old countries, and there is thus at once a certain mingling of races, and the production of children combining the various qualities of these three great nations and the foundation of a young race, the common offspring, not of Ireland or Scotland or England, but of Great Britain collectively. The admixture of colonists from Europe proper, notably Germany, has hitherto been comparatively but small, and has had no particular modifying influence, at any rate in the larger colonies.
This sense of ethnic solidarity and the genesis of a distinctly Australian people was further solidified in the fierce racial competition on the Australian goldfields, the sugar plantations and the furniture manufactories. It was this combined fear of competition and the sense of shared kinship in Australia that led to the development of an egalitarian attitude between members of the same race. Where capital-holding wealth would be seen wearing jeans and button-up shirts, where a member of the working classes would have the audacity to look a gentleman in the eyes, shake his hand and share a drink with him. The static class hierarchy of the old world came tumbling down in the Australian commonwealth as Henry B. Higgins (Fmr High Court Justice) notes in his 1902 essay Australian Ideals
“Titles give a false weight to one’s acts and utterances. We listen, we repeat their words, not
because of their merit, but because they proceed from a man with a title. Titles are really devices for creating distinctions in name where there is no distinction in fact — for putting men in a false perspective — a means of gaining deference for persons whose personalities would not necessarily gain deference otherwise.
It is moral superiority which is the only true basis of distinction. George Washington, William Ewart Gladstone, Michael Davitt, John Burns, George Higinbotham, Abraham Lincoln — these men are raised to eminence and distinction in the hearts of their contemporaries, and of posterity, by their acts and their principles, not by the artificial advantage of having themselves styled ‘ Sir’ This or ‘ Lord ‘ That”
These echoing the words of the great orator and Goulburn lawyer Daniel Deniehy in 1853:
Fellow-citizens, there is an aristocracy worthy of our respect and of our admiration; wherever human skill and brain are eminent, wherever glorious manhood asserts its elevation, there is an aristocracy that confers eternal honour upon the land that possesses it. That is God’s aristocracy, gentlemen ; that is an aristocracy that will bloom and expand under free institutions, and for ever bless the clime where it takes root.
The troops of weary pilgrims from foreign despotism which would ere long be flocking to these shores in search of a more congenial home, and let them now give their most earnest and determined assurance that the domineering clique which made up the Wentworth party were not, and should never be, regarded as the representatives of the manliness, the spirit, and the intelligence of the freemen of New South Wales.
It is for these reasons, among others that B. R Wise further notes in his Australian Commonwealth that:
“For no man is hindered from advancement in Australia by barriers of class distinctions. Commerce, the professions and politics are an open field to all, and there is literally no position in the Commonwealth, to which a man of enterprise and character may not attain.
It has been truly said that “The Australian workman fully appreciates these possibilities and the absence of class distinction which they imply, and shows appreciation by an independence of conduct which is very noticeable. It cannot justly be said that this independence is allied to any discourtesy of bearing, but he knows his own value, and is also fully alive to the importance of the political power he wields….
In no other English-speaking country is there less of the snobbery of dollar-worship. No one is thought worse of for his want of means, provided that his poverty does not affront the proprieties. Nowhere else, indeed, does poverty less cut off the young people of a family from social pleasures; while economies are not the dreary series of privations which they are apt to be in an English town.”
When It comes to matters of religion, the matured ANA branch in Hobart submitted in 1908 that:
“With regard to religion, it may be safely said that while Australia is one of the most truly moral countries in the world, yet it is the one where differences of sect are the least bitterly regarded, and where the popular attitude of the native-born is most in favour of perfect liberty on the part of every man to mix as freely as he chooses with all of his fellow-citizens, in or out of their churches, and at the same time to claim that he shall not be censured by anyone for doing so.
The Australian claims that he is friendly to all, though bound to none but his own, if any, and that whosoever shall say that a man must allow himself to be classed as tied in all things to this or that sect is an enemy to the greatest hopes for a noble and generous national spirit for our wide and glorious Australia. Some evidence this spirit by avoidance and some by a friendly recognition of all imported predilections alike, reserving their pledged faith and love for their native land.”
Dr Benjamin Poulton, further writes:
The Australian, then, lives in a fertile rich country, with a fine, if not temperate climate. He has free and easy occupation of the land and has no former occupier to fight. He is descended from a vigorous and active race; inherits all that is good in the constitution and laws of his forefathers. He has escaped much of the dire influences of some of the worst physical and mental diseases of the older civilizations and is free from many of the social and political abuses still rampant in the old world.
Owing to the sparsity of the population for the territory occupied, the race for life is not so keen, poverty is almost unknown, the hours of work are short, holidays are numerous… His stature; perhaps rather greater than his father’s, a general spareness of form, a good muscular development, a pale or even sallow complexion, and his voice with its slight nasal twang and drawl.
The fact that he attains maturity at an earlier age than the inhabitant of Great Britain may account for his alleged precocity. He is self-confident, self-reliant, takes generally a hopeful view of things, is not notable for his ambition, as he is certainly for his want of reverence both at home and abroad. He is temperate in his use of spirituous liquors, intemperate in his consumption of meat and tea, hospitable and trustful to strangers, careless of small things even to the fault of thriftlessness, possesses marked powers of self-control, and has a tendency to repress his emotions.He is not demonstrative: he is critical, cautious rather than enthusiastic, candid, fearlessly truthful. He has not, so far as I know, developed any remarkable virtues or special vices.
Shall any more need be said? Having only scratched across the top of the surface of Australia’s values, one cannot deny that they are not drawn from whole cloth, not things that can merely be “affirmed” by any alien to our country. They are deep-rooted in time and place; they have carriage in both our blood and our circumstance.
Most problematic of them all to Mr Taylor and any other cosmopolitans, is the expressly racial foundation to our national values. It was by no coincidence or mistake that our founding fathers embedded the White Australia Policy into the fabric of all our national institutions, whether it was the first bill through parliament, the first plank of the Labor Party, the Australian Workers Union or the Returned Services League : right at the heart of all of our values is an egalitarian spirit of kinship, trust and compassion for our fellow brothers with whom we share blood, heritage and destiny.
Mr Kretser, the President of the Human Rights Commission recently suggested that “human rights” and “equality” are foundational Australian values. Our first prime minister, another proud ANA man, Edmund Barton, correctly noted in the debate for the Immigration Restriction Bill in 1901:
“The doctrine of the equality of man was never intended to apply to the equality of the Englishman and the Chinaman. There is a deep-set difference, and we see no prospect and no promise of its ever being effaced. Nothing in this world can put these two races upon an equality. Nothing we can do by cultivation, by refinement, or by anything else will make some races equal to others.” (Thursday, 26 September 1901, Parliamentary Hansard, Page: 5222)
Although it is true, that where aliens were lawfully within our country, they were given sound and fair legal rights and were treated charitably in good candor – there was never an assumption of racial equality, or even an entitlement for aliens to enter upon our country. The great ANA man, and high court Justice Isaac Isaacs noted in the matter of Williamson v Ah [1926] HCA 46
“The importance of this case is not easily measurable, and the issues need to be plainly stated. On its decision, as the position presents itself to me, depends the power of the National Parliament to give any effective force to what is known as the White Australia policy, or to any policy of controlling undesirable immigration, As to immigration, experience and well-known circumstances have compelled not only America, but also the self-governing communities of the Empire, as Canada, South Africa, New Zealand, as well as Australia, both before and since federation, to enact stringent substantive laws in order to safeguard the ethnic, social and industrial conditions of the people of the land and maintain their standards of living.
In my opinion, no mere length of time, and no apparent assimilation with the general population, if secured by successful evasion of the law, can confer on the offender any moral or legal right to claim this country as his patria. An intruder he was from the first, and an intruder he remains. “
The enemies of our Commonwealth insist that “welcoming in the whole world with open arms” is an Australian value. They insist that selfish, materialistic self-indulgent hedonism “the pursuit of pleasure” is an Australian value. We insist these are Hollywood values; a sharp knife pointed at the heart of hundreds of years of development in this country. It is the death-knell of our special and beautiful heritage. These are values imposed, they have no organic roots and are alien to the heritage of the ordinary people of Australia.
We conclude with the 1903 Prime Ministers’ election speech of the great ANA ambassador Alfred Deakin:
A white Australia does not by any means mean only the preservation of the complexion of the people of this country. It means the multiplying of their homes, so that we may be able to occupy, use and defend every part of our continent; it means the maintenance of conditions of life fit for white men and white women; it means equal laws and opportunities for all; it means protection against the underpaid labor of other lands; it means social justice so far as we can establish it, including just trading and the payment of fair wages.
A white Australia means a civilisation whose foundations are built upon healthy lives, lived in honest toil, under circumstances which imply no degradation. Fiscally a white Australia means protection. We protect ourselves against armed aggression, why not against aggression by commercial means. We protect ourselves against undesirable colored aliens, why not against the products of the undesirable alien labor? A white Australia is not a surface, but it is a reasoned policy which goes down to the roots of national life, and by which the whole of our social, industrial, and political organisations is governed.
M. K. Grant
National Governor
April 2026