Foreign affairs minister and first Asian-Australian to serve in federal cabinet to use Lowy Institute address to criticise politicians stoking racial divisions
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Labor has escalated its pushback on One Nation’s surging political support, with the foreign affairs minister, Penny Wong, labelling Pauline Hanson’s push for a monoculture a “melancholic fantasy” that would harm national security.
Wong, the first Asian-Australian to serve in federal cabinet, will use a major address at The Lowy Institute on Friday to criticise politicians stoking racial divisions, insisting the country’s multicultural success remains a national asset.
“The call for a monoculture is a call for Australia to curtail our choices and cut off our connections,” Wong will say, according to a preview of the speech.
“To look inwards, to have no friends to work with, no partners to trade with, no opportunities to grow from. To be lonely in a dangerous world.”
Hanson said in June that Australia must exist as a “monocultural society”, blaming high levels of overseas migration for a loss of national identity and values. In a speech criticised across the political spectrum, the One Nation leader conceded modern Australia was multiracial, adding that only one “cultural umbrella” should exist.
In one of the strongest rebuttals yet from Labor, Wong argues Hanson risks damaging the national interest and badly undermining social cohesion.
“But well before we could ever realise this melancholic fantasy of monoculture, there is a lot of damage that can be done,” she will say.
“Because Australians would be turned against each other. Australia would be a more hostile place. Harder to be family, harder to be a friend, colleague or neighbour.”
Warning forces within the country and overseas are seeking to divide Australians, Wong warns against politicians seeking to pit different sections of the community against others.
“Turning Australians against each other is the opposite of patriotism. Our resilience starts with how we choose to live together.”
Wong’s intervention comes as record support for One Nation reshapes the political landscape. In last month’s Guardian Essential poll the party attracted 25% of the primary vote, behind Labor on 31% but ahead of the Coalition’s 22%.
Her address – in an annual lecture named for diplomat and intelligence boss Allan Gyngell – includes a re-ordering of Australia’s foreign policy priorities to put the Indo-Pacific region first.
In response to a speech by Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, in January, in which he lamented the decline of the post second world war, rules-based order and called for middle powers to act together more strategically, Wong says Australia has been at work on the task since Labor’s 2022 election victory.