The story that held us together

One of the good things about a disrupter is that they force everyone else to pull their socks up.

It’s rarely comfortable. Almost never convenient. But healthy disruption compels us to revisit assumptions we’ve stopped questioning, sharpen arguments we’ve allowed to become dull, and ask whether the stories we’re telling still make sense.

In the marketplace of ideas, that’s how I’ve chosen to engage with Pauline Hanson and One Nation.

One of the ideas Senator Hanson raised recently is that Australia should be a monoculture.

Now, there is no such thing in practice, and I suspect the poll published after her National Press Club address demonstrates that. Australia has never been culturally uniform. We have always been shaped by different traditions, different peoples, different accents, different experiences. Even before Federation, the colonies looked remarkably different from one another. Add to that the oldest continuing cultures on earth in our First Nations peoples, successive waves of migration, and the reality becomes obvious: monoculture has never been Australia’s story.

But in raising the question, Hanson has inadvertently opened the door to a more important conversation.

If Australia wasn’t held together by a single culture, what did hold us together?

Having spent my entire life between politics and the Church, I’ve become convinced that every society lives inside a metanarrative. Politics has one. Theology certainly does.

A metanarrative is simply the big story that helps people understand where they’ve come from, who they are, and where they’re going. It gives meaning to institutions, laws, customs and shared sacrifice. It explains why we belong to one another.

In Christian theology, that story is beautifully simple and endlessly profound — creation, fall, redemption and restoration. That’s the biblical metanarrative from Genesis to Revelation.

Politics, at its best, tries to answer many of those same questions in public life. What kind of people are we? What do we owe one another? What is justice? What is freedom? What kind of nation are we trying to build?

For much of Australia’s history, those two stories weren’t competing. They were deeply intertwined.

The Australia that emerged after Federation wasn’t united because everyone looked the same, spoke the same language, earned the same income or came from the same ethnic background. They didn’t.

It was united because there existed a shared moral framework shaped overwhelmingly by the Christian faith.

That doesn’t mean every Australian attended church every Sunday. They didn’t.

Nor does it mean the nation was perfect. Far from it.

But the assumptions underpinning our public life were recognisably Judeo-Christian. Human dignity. The equal worth of every person. Personal responsibility. Compassion for the vulnerable. Forgiveness. Justice tempered with mercy. The importance of family, community and service.

These weren’t simply private religious beliefs. They became public virtues.

They informed the development of our legal system. They shaped our charitable institutions, hospitals and schools. They influenced industrial relations, notions of fairness in the workplace, and even our understanding of democracy itself. Many of the social and economic institutions we now take for granted grew from soil nourished by biblical ideas.

That shared moral imagination allowed extraordinary diversity to flourish.

People arrived from Greece, Italy, Malta, the Netherlands, Lebanon, Vietnam and countless other places. They brought their food, their language, their customs and their traditions. They remained proudly who they were.

Yet they also found a place within a larger Australian story.

Not because they abandoned their heritage.

Because there was already a common moral language into which they could integrate.

That’s quite different from monoculture.

Monoculture asks everyone to become the same.

A shared metanarrative allows people to remain different while belonging to something larger than themselves.

I wonder whether that is the conversation we should really be having.

The challenge facing Australia today isn’t simply increasing diversity. Diversity has always been part of our national experience.

The challenge is that we’ve gradually lost confidence in the story that once connected us across those differences.

As church attendance declined and public Christianity retreated, we didn’t replace the old metanarrative with a better one. We simply assumed shared values would somehow survive without the foundations that produced them.

Increasingly, they haven’t.

That’s why debates about identity, belonging and national purpose feel so unsettled. It’s not because we’ve become more multicultural. It’s because we’ve become less certain about the story into which multiculturalism fits.

Perhaps that’s the real opportunity hidden inside Hanson’s provocation.

Not to chase an impossible monoculture.

But to ask whether Australia needs to recover a richer, deeper and more compelling shared story.

One that doesn’t erase difference but gives it meaning.

One that reminds us that what binds a nation together is rarely race, language or culture alone.

It is the story people choose to live by together.

For generations, Australia’s story was profoundly shaped by the Christian faith. Not imposed by force, but woven quietly through institutions, communities and families. It gave us a common moral vocabulary despite our many differences.

Whether we choose to recover that story, reshape it or replace it altogether may prove to be one of the defining questions of our generation.