The Thing About Monoculture.
Who decides?
I’ve been trying to work out why I can’t just mock her. It would be so much easier.
There’s plenty to work with.
The trembling indignation.
The thirty years of the same speech, reupholstered.
She stood at the National Press Club to tell us she speaks for the forgotten people.
Many are genuinely hurting. And many are not buying what she is selling.
She refused a Welcome to Country at the Press Club. Didn’t want to acknowledge, she said, a divisive gesture.
Yet she has worn an Israeli flag as a scarf on the floor of our Senate. She wears an Israeli lapel pin. She calls for Australia to align itself fully with a foreign nation’s cause.
One flag. Just not ours.
I keep asking myself the question she hasn’t answered: how is that patriotic? How do you claim to speak for all Australians while ignoring the oldest culture on this continent—and draping yourself in the colours of another country entirely?
She says monoculture. She means one Australia, one identity, one story.
But whose story? And who decided she gets to tell it?
She says she speaks what others are afraid to say. That she gives voice to the silent majority.
I used to run a workshop activity that went something like this.
“Everyone thinks this,” someone would say.
Everyone? Well, the people in this room.
All of them? Well, our group.
The whole group? Well, me and three others.
All three? I was talking with someone last week and we both agreed.
Both of you? Well.
Me.
It always got a laugh. But it also always landed. Because we all do it—speak our own certainty as though it belongs to the crowd. The question is what happens when that habit walks into the Senate. Or the National Press Club. And calls itself a mandate.
She said there are no good Muslims. Not some. Not a few. None.
I keep turning that over.
What if someone said there are no good redheads?
In Australia we’d laugh. Because we all know a redhead. We know they’re not a category. They’re a person. If we wanted to be unkind, we’d call them a ranga—maybe mutter something about tempers that react rather than respond. See how that works? A grain of observation, stretched into a verdict on an entire group.
That’s the thing about collective blame.
It only works on people you’ve never actually met.
What if someone said there are no good Jews. No good Christians. We’d have a word for that. Several, actually. These days it might even break a law.
She later offered an apology—conditional on the recipient not believing in Sharia law, multiple marriages, or support for Gaza. An apology with seventeen conditions isn’t an apology. It’s the original statement wearing a hat.
Then she went further. Islam, she said, is not a religion. It is a violent ideology.
This is what othering looks like when it gets comfortable. You don’t attack a person. You erase the category. You don’t say some—you say all.
No leader worth the name has ever made their people smaller to make themselves bigger. We’ve always known that here. It’s not a woke idea. It’s not even a kind idea. It’s just what leadership actually looks like.
The leaders she admires don’t seem to share that view.
Neither do her backers.
She rails against government spending. Against waste. Against handouts to people who should be standing on their own two feet.
Yet her closest backer has reportedly floated gifting Queensland land—Australian land—to establish an Israeli enclave. Not for people to simply live. To build things that harm. The same backer has ideas about gifting resources to Elon Musk. Taxpayer-adjacent generosity, it turns out, depends entirely on who’s receiving it.
She calls spending on First Nations people an industry. A rort. Millions wasted.
But those millions are mostly services. Health. Housing. Education. The same services the rest of us receive as a matter of course—just delivered across vast remote distances to communities that happen to be mostly Aboriginal. The geography makes it expensive. The racism makes it suspicious.
Public money is only wasteful, it seems, when it flows toward people she has already erased.
So where does that leave those of us who are exhausted by the noise but unwilling to look away?
I don’t think the answer is to mock her. I’ve tried that in my head, and it feels like shouting into a wind that just carries your words back at you.
I think the answer is to keep asking the questions she can’t answer. Not about flags or faith or who belongs. But the quieter ones.
What are you actually frightened of?
Who stopped listening to you, and when?
Because those are real questions.
They deserve real answers.
She isn’t providing them.
Not in fury. In curiosity. Because curiosity is hard to dismiss than rage. And the people who are genuinely hurting—the ones she claims to speak for—deserve curiosity more than they deserve contempt.
Brené Brown says clear is kind. Unclear is unkind.
So, here’s what I keep coming back to.
Where is the clarity in what she is proposing?
What exactly is this monoculture?
Who does it include?
Who does it protect?
Who decides?
Because thirty years of grievance dressed as policy isn’t clarity. It’s noise with a microphone.
Kindness isn’t soft. Often, it’s the sharpest tool in the room.
And sometimes the kindest thing you can do is ask the question nobody wants to answer.