What is the reason for the rise of One Nation, and the decline in Australian politics and society? Well, according to the Prime Minister, “it’s the economy, stupid”.
Indeed, PM Anthony Albanese invoked the Clinton-era maxim last week as a catch-all explanation for the deterioration of the country. As the expression implies, the core idea is that all our current discontent will be solved by improvements in the economy. Get inflation down and employment up and all will return to normal in this best of all possible worlds.
This is wrong. As on any number of fronts, the problems afflicting Australia and other Western societies are demographic in nature and not economic – with Australia, like other western states, now up to a third foreign-born.
To take the most obvious recent examples, parts of the UK have been literally aflame these last few weeks in the wake of horrendous crimes committed by men of foreign origin.
Belfast was set ablaze last week after a Scottish man in his 40s was pinned down in the street and nearly beheaded by a 30-year-old Sudanese refugee. The week prior Southampton erupted in violence after the release of harrowing police footage showing the stabbing death of British teen Henry Nowak by a Sikh named Vickrum Digwa and the horrendous “two-tier” response.
These are just the latest in a series of horrific incidents committed in the UK by offenders of non-British background. In 2024, three girls were savagely murdered at a dance class in Southport by Axel Rudakubana, a British-born youth of Rwandan migrant parents. In 2023, three people were fatally stabbed in Nottingham by Afro-Portuguese killer Valdo Calocane. In 2017, 22 people were killed in a suicide-bombing at a pop concert in Manchester by a British citizen of Libyan descent named Salman Abedi.
These are plainly not incidents attributable to economics. No amount of interest rate cuts or improvements in real wages would have prevented these tragedies from occurring.
Australia, too, has similar trends. Indeed, many of our most serious crimes have occurred in recent years, and have been committed by offenders of foreign origin.
Last year’s Bondi massacre, in which 15 people were killed on our most famous beach, was committed by father-and-son duo Sajid and Naveed Akram, with Akram senior moving to Australia from India on a student visa in the 1990s. A decade before Bondi, Sydney also experienced the Lindt Café siege in which two people lost their lives in an Islamist attack perpetrated by Iranian-born refugee Man Haron Monis.
Similar yet lower-level criminal patterns persist across the country. In Victoria, the Sudanese community are overrepresented in the state’s crime statistics to a remarkable degree. As per the 2015 data, Sudanese-born youth made up 0.11 per cent of the population but were “responsible for 7.44 per cent of home invasions, 5.65 per cent of car thefts and 13.9 per cent of aggravated robberies”. In other words, they were “nearly 70 times more likely … to commit a home invasion” than the Australian-born.
These trends continue to this day. Victoria remains afflicted by African gangs and a wider crime crisis, with a 2024 study showing that around 50% of the youth in custody in the state were of African ethnic origin. Much the same is seen in other states, with the fatal 2024 stabbing of Queensland grandmother Vyleen White by a Sudanese refugee for her Hyundai Getz perhaps the most callous and tragic example.
Yet the impact of demographic change is not restricted to crime. It is also seen in a number of other social shifts that are usually not credited to demographics.
Take smoking. A large part of the reason Australia is seeing an increase in nicotine use for the first time in decades is because of our new demography. This is not merely conjecture either. Western Australian Premier Roger Cook confirmed as much when he said last year that the rise in smoking in his state was due to “people coming to Western Australia from overseas, in record numbers”, with smoking rates in WA increasing last year for the first time in three decades.
Or take drinking. Aside from the cost, much of the reason why Australia’s alcohol consumption rates have fallen is due to demographics. As a variety of sources have shown, Zoomers and younger Australians are drinking alcohol at much lower rates than prior generations.
This is a positive outcome from a health perspective. Yet a key reason for it is not that today’s young have magically become more enlightened than their forebears, it is simply that they are much more demographically diverse. Indeed, over half this group were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was – with many coming from cultures that rarely or never drink.
One of these cultures is, of course, Islamic. Australia’s Muslim population has exploded from around 300,000 in the year 2000 to over one million (or 4% of the population) today, with this proportion almost double amongst the young. This explains why alcohol consumption is down, but nicotine use is up. Contra the usual liberal commentary, our youth have not become more moderate, their vices have simply shifted in line with the demographics.
The increase in our Islamic population also explains a range of other phenomena. It obviously explains the growth in Ramadan festivals around Australia, with a major Ramadan event inaugurated in Melbourne last year, and the famed Sydney festival attracting over a million visitors annually. It also explains the introduction of Sharia-linked loan programs in Australian banks, and the fact there are now “halal pies” in our convenience stores.
That is not all. This Islamic demographic increase also explains changes in education, with Islamic schools among the fastest-growing in Australia. It also explains the persistently large Pro-Palestine protests seen in our cities, and why Australia provided the highest per-capita figure of foreign fighters to the Islamic State.
It also explains Australia’s increasing antipathy towards Israel. This shift is not solely the result of masses of Australians revolting against what they see as a rogue Levantine state; it is more the result of the rise in our Islamic and overall migrant populations, with many among these groups viewing Israel as another “White colonial state” and opposing it on an ethnocentric basis.
As proof, this exact phenomenon is seen overseas. In New York, that former centre of American Judaism, support for Israel has plummeted as the city has become more diverse and Islamic. Indeed, the Muslim population in New York has risen to around one million or 10% of the population, with the city recently electing its first Muslim mayor in the form of Zohran Mamdani. Similar trends are seen across Western Europe, London and the wider UK.
Indeed, demographic shifts across Australia and the West are the cause of any number of social and political trends – yet they are never reported as such.
Why, for example, is Australia seeing highly skewed birth ratios with an unprecedented number of boys being born as compared to girls? The answer is, again, demographic, with certain cohorts aborting their daughters in favour of sons. Australia’s Indian and Chinese communities, for instance, have birth ratios of up to 133 boys born for every 100 girls. An outcome that researchers have attributed to “prenatal sex determination followed by [the] selective abortion of females”.
Why has the UK had an explosion in babies born with birth defects? Again, the answer is demographic. Groups in Britain such as the Pakistani community have cousin-marriage rates of around 50%, and the consequent increase in consanguineous medical issues, with rates of Down syndrome and related birth defects in these communities often double the national average.
Why does the political left in Australia control a majority of our state and territory governments, including the federal government and our two most populous states? The answer is once again demographic, with Labor-aligned pollster Kos Samaras confirming last year that 85% of Australia’s Indian community – now our largest migrant source – vote for the left-wing ALP.
Indeed, without an awareness of demographic shifts, much of what is now happening in Australia and the West appears unintelligible, unexpected or insane. Why is there an epidemic of honour killings and abuse in Western societies? Demographics. Why is there a wave of child spanking? Demographics. Why has the UK had its worst ever gang rape crisis? Demographics.
To quote the great Canadian writer Mark Steyn, whose own article inspired this one, the demographic shift now happening in the West is “the biggest story of our time” yet our “leaders still can’t talk about it [and] not honestly”.
Well, if Western civilisation is to survive, perhaps we should start discussing such facts as legally and honestly as we can.
Header image: Anthony Albanese making his economy comments (YouTube).
