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30% of our population are first generation immigrants. At what proportion does the racial strife start? 40%? 50%?
I also find the implication that Europeans don't do ethnic strife to be deeply amusing.
Usually it starts around when their children begin taking political office at greater rates and assuming positions of power in media, civil society and corporate hierarchies, which are avenues that their parents generally avoided or did not have the capacity for. Like I said, you are still very new to all this.
Europeans do a lot of ethnic strife, it's why they sorted themselves out into ethnostates defined by the predominance of particular ethnic groups. Australia is like America in that as much it pretends otherwise, its culture is based around a Northern-Western European core that other European ethnic groups assimilated into because they didn't have the baggage of looking so different from the people who founded the country, or of bearing a sense of racial revanchism from being a descendant of a Third World colony that was ruled by people who looked like the founders of the country. Often the children of immigrants react to their deracination from their roots by clinging to an idealized image and history of their ancestral culture and weaponizing it against the culture they live in.
Around what percentage of the government being non-British descended would you expect to see problems?
I don't think the issue is being of British descent; Greeks, Italians, Germans and the like do not carry the "white man humiliated my forefathers and now here I am, powerful in his space" chip that the Western-born kids of Third World immigrants carry on their shoulder. A cursory Google search tells me your federal parliament is still over 90% white, which I found remarkable given how Australian libs rave about their multiculturalism. Talk to me when 20-25% of your parliament is non-white, to say nothing of the tens of thousands of positions in the bureaucracy that don't attract headlines.
Well, that's interesting. Just a moment ago you were saying
But now apparently that's not a problem. We can have the Irish and English put aside their centuries of grievance. The Serbs and the Croatians can join hands as brothers. The Germans and Italians who we fought the bloodiest war in history against can be our countrymen and our comrades in arms.
Tell me, how did we do it? How are we able to look past all these different ancestries, languages, cultures, and histories to create peace and harmony between these different groups? And why does it stop working when someone is brown?
Given that the same thing happens in Canada, the US, and even most of Europe, I don't think the variable doing the work here is "Australia". Certain cultures, among them the Europeans you have mentioned, produce adaptable emigrants. Australia has a well-established, well-integrated Lebanese population not because they are Australians, but because the Lebanese seem to do well wherever they go. The Cantonese do well in Britain because the Cantonese do well everywhere.
Market-dominant minorities, westernized elites from the Commonwealth, and immigrants from first world countries integrate well in all western countries.
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Because it's very easy to blend into a new culture when you already look like that culture. How is this difficult to understand? You will never have to be confronted by the skin and eyes and hair of people in history books and portraits and statues, and be reminded at every turn that this country was not built by people who look like you. The only way to stop being reminded of that is to resent and fulminate against the history books and statues, or to mangle them to soothe the beholder's sense of alienation.
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