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I'd just like to put it out there that I very much agree with everything you said, and would have tried to write a similar post had you not already said everything better than I would have. Particularly the idea that Australia has a very multicultural society; we don't. We have lots of immigrants, but very limited cultural clashing such as is seen in, eg, the US where they actually have to manage all the different cultures they keep incubated. Ironically the fact nearly everyone is first- or second - generation immigrant promotes somewhat homogeneous culture although that is a gross generalisation as all generalisations are.

That said, there is one other point that deserves to be kept in focus - why exactly does the Australian government need to classify the fact that they are killing unarmed men and children. That shouldn't be classified information; if someone is killing unarmed children on my behalf I'd like to know about it tyvm.

I'm curious about the monoculture point. I reflexively disagreed with your parent post when they said it but now that someone else has agreed I'm second guessing.

Where is your line for where a culture starts and stops? Do we really need to be managing some kind of clash/conflict between the Greek suburbs or communities of Melbourne and the Lebanese, Hispanic or Italian ones for their cultures to be considered different?

Because they drive on the left and follow Australian laws have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population?

These communities are speaking their own languages, importing/selling their own ingredients and products, cooking their own foods, watching their own style of entertainment, practicing their own religions, socialising at unique times and locations, listening to their own music and raising their children in a style informed by their community's historical norms.

If you (and GP) formed your opinions outside of the major eastern cities, or haven't really ventured into the outer suburbs I could see how you could arrive at monoculture, but otherwise I think by requiring a "clash" you may be setting too high a bar for your definition of culture.

If you visit Oakleigh (I think Melbourne is still the city with the highest concentration of Greek people outside of Greece) and see the same culture that you see in the Northern Beaches of Sydney, which has the same culture that you see in Mareeba I'd be very interested in hearing more.

> practicing their own religions

The freedom of religion is explicitly within a Western cultural and political framework.

For example, there is a long history of Islamic jurisprudence that also allows for freedom of religion - as long as Islam remains the 'established' religion, and other religions remain on a lesser footing. This is not obviously compatible with the level of separation of church and state in the West - but Muslim immigrants who might prefer a more theocratic system are obviously in the minority.

> have the Chinese population in Sunnybank abandoned their culture because they aren't clashing with the Anglo-australian population

Chinese civilization has had a markedly non-democratic political tradition for a couple thousand years, and many mainland immigrants lack a strong preference for democratic society. Similarly, Thailand has strong lese-majeste laws to protect the dignity of the king and royal family. These political traditions are pretty alien to the modern West, even though Westerners three hundred years ago would have found them utterly normal.

Culture is not just what you eat or where you worship, but encompass habits like 'How do we treat other groups?', 'How should we be ruled?', or even 'Is it morally acceptable to break laws (like evading taxes)?'

Immigrants are only allowed to act out certain cultural beliefs—the ones that don't threaten or conflict with the dominant culture.

I appreciate the comment, but I'm not sold at all. It's a stretch to say you can't have two cultures in a lawful society unless they have different laws or one of them is breaking them.

This is the first time I've really seen this argument, and it still feels like it depends on a particularly hard-line definition of culture if it asserts that a community has no culture if they aren't attempting to disrupt the equilibrium and establish their own nation-state.

While I can definitely see how political and legal structures can be informed by culture, necessarily including them as essential requirements is definitely not how culture or multicultural societies have been defined in any other interaction I've ever had.

Actually, the historical Millet system under the Ottoman empire went quite a bit further towards 'multiculturalism' under some dimensions, with different communities literally getting their own systems of laws.

But this strongly conflicted with the nascent notion of the unitary nation-state, much to the Ottoman (and Austrian) Empires' later detriment.

To be clear, I'm not claiming that there aren't multiple cultures in the West - just look at Amish or Hasidic communities as examples - just that they are still forced to abide by majority rules, which necessarily means that their cultures are somewhat abridged and shorn of their full representation. And note how small these communities are compared to the majority.

It's a rather different story in countries with multiple cultural groups with comparable demographic power, such as the former Yugoslavia, which was torn apart by these divisions.

Put under a different perspective, you can make a rather strong case that cities and rural areas are now different cultural zones in the US, and the intractable political conflicts over abortion, marriage, and even tax policy are byproducts.

> Where is your line for where a culture starts and stops?

In my view, culture is pretty fundamental, and when we run across a culture alien to us, it's quite disconcerting. And so a monoculture is one where you never run across any truly "alien" ideas.

You can have kebab shops and Thai restaurants, and churches and mosques and synagogues, and people speaking different languages, but as long as everyone agrees on the fundamental underpinnings of society, it's still a monoculture.

Australian culture is very open to everyone, so long as they are fundamentally Western in terms of their views on democracy, criminal justice, religious tolerance, women's rights, corruption, LGBT rights. That's so ingrained that when you point this out, there's usually a pause, and then an incredulous "well, yeah, both those are the only correct opinions!", or sometimes even a confused query as to whether any other ideas even exist in the modern world. I have the same gut reaction (I mean, obviously democracy is good, right?), but I also know that there are cultures out there with different views.

If Oakleigh has a lot of Greek people in it, you can probably get some rocking moussaka, but that doesn't mean it shares the same culture as modern Greece does. Consider, for example, the large difference in corruption between Greece (and much of the rest of southern Europe) and Australia (and much of northern Europe): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index If that survey was done on Melbourne suburbs, do you think they'd be fairly uniform, or would it look more like the map of Europe?

So can you name a multicultural city according to your definition?

I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture, so what is multicultural just feels normal to you. Krakow and Vienna are very different compared to Berlin and London to name examples.

> So can you name a multicultural city according to your definition?

Dubai perhaps. The clash between the rich, western expat communities, the rich native communities, and the poor mostly Asian labourer communities is severe, and there are actual disagreements about basic norms.

> I get the feeling your sentiment comes from never having lived in an actual monoculture

I have absolutely lived in what you are calling monocultures. I've lived in small rural farming towns with a populations of less than 800.

Where we disagree is in the meaning of culture. Adding a chinese restaurant to a small town doesn't make it more multicultural or diverse in my view.

> Dubai perhaps. The clash between the rich, western expat communities, the rich native communities, and the poor mostly Asian labourer communities is severe, and there are actual disagreements about basic norms.

Except those groups never interact with each other. The implicit statement in a city being multicultural, is that as an inhabitant you will interact with these different cultures. I've never been to Dubai, but I strongly doubt you are going to get close with any Arabs or Asian labourers if you live there. I know someone who moved to Jerusalem, I was thinking maybe you would pick that city as an example, but I've heard that again the different communities live very separate lives, and they actively avoid interacting with each other.

Why do you say that the ABC intentionally misreported the situation? An ABC journalist live-tweeted the execution of the search warrant and claimed that he was the first to live-tweet an AFP 'raid' [1], which I think is valuable public interest journalism. I thought the reporting was accurate, although the journalist's commentary does presume that the media deserves special treatment, because of its role in our democracy and the potential chilling effect of the law as written on whistleblowers. This is a fair assumption and it's obviously popular with journalists, but I think the ABC would publish a contrary view if a credible writer wanted to put it forward.

[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/about/backstory/investigative-jo...

Well, for one, it's not a raid. The fact that it has been presented as such is incredibly misleading. Then they tried to suggest that it was linked to the Australian government, spreading conspiracy theories about the timing - asking why it happened after the election and not before[0].

The AFP didn't wake up one day and send armed men to storm a building. After two year's worth of investigation, they gathered enough evidence to request a search warrant for a single ABC office which was granted. They then notified the ABC that they were on their way and entered without conflict to find and collect the data they wanted to take. Nobody was arrested, nobody was beaten, nobody was threatened. Nobody was even insulted during the process. The Australian Federal Police are not even allowed to access the data until ABC's lawyers have reviewed the entire process within a two week window.

I'm not sure how much more democratic that can be.

It's difficult for me to comment on this because I feel like I'm coming across as if I support an overreaching government. I support an extremely small government but one thing that catches me out is national security. The only role a federal government should play, in my view, is national security and I don't see a problem when they're doing exactly that in a way that dots all the i's and crosses all the t's.

[0] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-05/abc-raided-by-austral...

National security is important, but so is whistleblowing, and the ability for journalists to protect their sources. There’s a trade off here between, and it’s worth looking at this from all angles to ensure that the AFP have the right intentions.

I accept that the word 'raid' isn't ideal, but I don't think it's 'incredibly misleading' when accompanied by photos that make it quite clear there are no armed men storming the building. What word would you suggest? 'Search'?

I don't think it's fair to characterise the reporting as 'spreading conspiracy theories' either, just for quoting a media spokesperson who 'described the raids as "disturbing" considering they have taken place so soon after a federal election.' This attributed comment was followed by quotes from the AFP and the relevant minister asserting their independence.

>Neither libel nor slander is protected under the American first amendment.

No but...

Valid defenses include: the statement is true. The statement is the speaker's opinion. And even if those fail, it must proven that it was spoken with malice. So defamation in the US is close to unenforceable.

I rather have it thus, than the opposite way.

> Valid defenses include: the statement is true

Also a defence under Australian law.

> The statement is the speaker's opinion.

Also a defence under Australian law, as long as the speech falls under the concept of "fair comment and criticism", which is the same rule the US follows (albeit interpreted quite differently).

> it must proven that it was spoken with malice

NOT a defence under US law, unless the plaintiff is a public figure, which is a category defined quite narrowly in the US.

> So defamation in the US is close to unenforceable.

There are a lot of libel suits in the US, many of them are won by the plaintiffs.

The difference in law is less than you seem to think, and what differences exist are mainly on the extent that opinions ("I think Joe is an asshole") should be protected; both countries agree that factual claims ("Joe murdered his wife") are not. And offhand, it's hardly clear that Australia had drawn the line in the right place.

See, eg:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/05/opinion/australia-defamat...

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/nov/30/your-right-to-...

https://www.smh.com.au/national/australia-s-defamation-laws-...

Many, many western / European countries would find a “raid” on a journalistic organization to reveal a source a massive, massive journalistic rights issue. It would cause mass protests here in Germany...

Australians don't share the same political will and motivation as the Germans. By large we are a politically apathetic country with no strong leadership or vision for the future. We don't value personal liberties and personal freedom because we don't understand what it means not to have them. We would rather be bubble wrapped and protected by the state than exercise personal responsibility.

I have lived in both countries long enough to see this.

Yeah if the last election result wasn’t a perfect demonstration of voter apathy and disengagement I don’t know what would be. Having said that, that’s just the majority - the rest of us are very engaged I promise! Just uselessly, impotently quiet.

The succinctly fits with almost every conversation I've had with Australians I've run into while traveling around Asia.

As an American I've immediately been thrown off with "why are you/they allowed to do that" or "there aught to be a law" or "I have nothing to hide-type conversations.

It's just a flat out different personal liberty viewpoint than I have. That's not atypical, but the quickness I find myself disagreeing is.

Right to unconditional source confidentiality is very much a journalistic rights issue.

I'd like to preface this by saying that I don't consider threats to national security to be something that is a journalistic rights issue.

That said, in this case we haven't had a magistrate order a journalist to reveal who their source was, so journalistic source confidentiality hasn't been breached. Instead we saw a portion of a slow, deliberate and year-long investigation by the federal police with no pressure placed on the journalists themselves - either in the form of arrests or coercion to reveal secrets. So this still wouldn't be a journalistic rights issue.

I think most journalists would argue that they should have the right not to have their email searched by police to discover a source's identity, even if, as a matter of law, they don't.

The problem is the misuse of classifications to keep the public from finding out things which are in the public interest but embarrasing to the government.

The raids are the furtherance of the suppression of public interest material being made public through the media, so that is absolutely a free speech and journalistic rights issue.

I don't follow - why do you think this is not a journalistic rights issue?

> Australia has a very mono-cultural society.

I have to disagree with you here... Sydney & Melbourne have the world's 3rd and 4th largest foreign born populations.

45% of people living in Sydney weren't born in Australia... Melbourne 41%.

Agree that outside Syd & Melb though, it's very mono cultural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_born#Metropolitan_and_...

Understand that this disagreement is over definitions/interpretations, not statistics.

The question is whether the populations are separated into heterogeneous cultural communities, or rather are integrated into a more homogenous society.

In my experience (having spent effectively all of my >40 years living in Melbourne) is that it's a bit of both, but that cultural disharmony is not a problem.