We Were Never Asked.
Multicultural Australia as a Case Study in Elite Theory
No referendum was held.
By the late 1970s, the Nation that Australians had built for themselves and their descendants was being sold for parts. It had been dismantled in ministerial offices and departmental meetings, through administrative decisions and quiet memoranda, far from public view. The people who built Australia were never consulted about who would inherit it. About who should inherit it.
Polls throughout the 1960s showed consistent public opposition to non-European immigration. The change happened anyway and, in the place of the only order Australians had ever known, the new ideology of “multiculturalism” was made doctrine.
What follows is not primarily an argument about whether that transformation was good or bad, but a case study in how deep political change actually occurs — and the answer has little to do with elections.