A story is being written, and it comes from a playbook that is neither new nor original. It is a story that has been running long enough, across countries, told by enough people who grasp for power more than they value human dignity. The only surprise left is the silence it is met with.
Donald Trump said immigrants were "poisoning the blood of our country." Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro called asylum seekers "the scum of the world." Santiago Abascal, leader of Spain's Vox party, declared that "multiculturalism is suicide." The UK’s Nigel Farage warned that immigrants "deny, absolutely, our Judeo-Christian culture." Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister of Italy, spoke of "an ethnic substitution"underway in Italy.
In Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, hundreds of White nationalists marched through the streets carrying torches. The chant left no room for confusion.
"You will not replace us."
In Christchurch in 2019, a young man from regional New South Wales walked into two mosques and killed fifty-one people. He had a manifesto and it cited the great replacement theory. The term was coined by a French novelist named Renaud Camus in 2011. His argument was that Black and Brown immigrants were being brought into Europe by shadowy elites to displace White populations. The idea had been circulating in various forms since the early twentieth century. Camus put a name to it, giving politicians and extremists a shared vocabulary.
This replacement idea migrated into parliaments, press conferences, and mainstream campaign platforms in Brazil, India, Israel, Russia, Hungary, the United Kingdom, the United States. The targets shifted depending on the country, the moment and the audience. Sometimes it was about ethnicity. Other times religion. Sometimes gender identity, sexuality, or the rights of First Nations peoples.
However, the narrative structure has not changed. Someone is going to be replaced, someone must be protected, and only one person can do the protecting.
Ibram X. Kendi, the National Book Award-winning historian of racism, Museum of African American History Living Legends award recipient and author of Chain of Ideas (2026), identifies the thread that connects the politicians to the violence, with the same precision he used to write his outstanding How to be an Anti-Racist.
“Great replacement theorists convince White people that they are under attack but distance themselves from great replacement soldiers who mass-murder to protect White people. It is like planting mines in society and refusing to take responsibility when they kill people.” (Chain of Ideas, 2026)
Plant the mine, walk away from the explosion. Repeat.
The playbook is old and has been regurgitated by many, and this week it was used again by Pauline Hanson as she addressed the National Press Club in Australia. She spoke as a nation watched, and told us that Australia cannot be a multicultural society. That "we must be monocultural." She called for immigration restrictions targeting countries "immersed in radical Islam." She described a "transgender insurgency" as a "militant force" that, like 'radical Islam' "seeks to redefine humanity."
She spoke how she would abolish the National Indigenous Australians Agency (NIAA) and dissolve its funding into consolidated revenue, treating every Australian "equally on an individual needs basis, not based on race." She would scrap SBS — the broadcaster that delivers Australian news in sixty languages — because the internet, she said, has replaced the need for it.
Nothing new.
Ideas lifted almost verbatim, from the same playbook that brought us Charlottesville, Christchurch, Cronulla, and the slow dismantling of democratic institutions around the world.
Hanson's position is mundane and unimaginative. It is one of the most road-tested political scripts of our era, dressed in community concerns and delivered with the confidence of someone who believes she alone has discovered it.
It is racism, and it must be dismantled.
Kendi wrote that "the heartbeat of racism is denial" (How to Be an Antiracist, 2019). In December 2005, a crowd of more than five thousand people descended on Cronulla Beach in Sydney, incited by shock jocks and text messages, chanting that they were there to "reclaim the beach from outsiders" — attacking anyone who looked Middle Eastern or non-Anglo. That could have been me, and quite possibly, you. A veiled woman was chased into sand dunes and had her headscarf ripped off. Men were dragged from pubs and beaten. The crowd moved from the beach into shopping centres, railway stations, and trains, continuing their attacks. Prime Minister John Howard's response was: "I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country."
Seventy-five per cent of Australians surveyed by the Sydney Morning Herald in the aftermath disagreed with him (ACNielsen/Sydney Morning Herald Poll, December 2005). Ten years later, Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr Tim Soutphommasane said what Howard couldn’t bring himself to say: "The Cronulla riot represented not the best, but the worst of national pride … Our diversity is an indivisible part of our national identity."
The narrative at its core is straightforward. Once you can make people believe they are losing out, that their culture, their safety, their very lives are under existential threat, you can present yourself as their protector. And once you are their protector, you can remove rights and freedoms in their name. No evidence needed because the anxiety you've just created is all the evidence you need.
Fear does the work.
Hanson is running this narrative within an Australian political moment, against a backdrop of genuine cost-of-living pressure that makes the whole thing so much easier to sell to marginalised and under-represented people in our communities who are facing real pressures. The explanation she offers is that cultural diversity, diversity of any kind, are the sources of these pressures.
Nothing new. Nothing substantive or creative. Just the oldest misdirection in authoritarianism.
60,000 years before Hanson uttered the word 'monoculture', there were more than 500 distinct nations on this island we call Australia. More than five hundred nations, with distinct languages, laws, customs, and countries, sustained across millennia.
Is this the land of monoculture Hanson is referring to?
June Oscar, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, spoke with an authority that no politician can match in her opening comment in the Australian Government’s Multicultural Framework Review, Towards Fairness.
"Australia's identity as a nation-state is inherently multicultural. Our nation is founded on, formed by, and will continue to grow through, a diversity of cultures, languages, global heritages, religions, spiritualities and faiths."
June Oscar argued that this truth is too little recognised in our writings on Australian history. That we consistently fail to elevate the multicultural lives and stories that are, in her words, "the binding agent of our social cohesiveness." And she is unambiguous about where that multiculturalism begins.
"At heart, the concept of multiculturalism is not foreign to this great and expansive land. For 60,000 years and counting, since time immemorial, this continent has held the sovereignty of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language and kin groups emanating from hundreds of specific Countries."
The Australia taking shape around us all, makes Pauline Hanson’s position impossible.
Since the turn of the millennium, net overseas migration has accounted for 57% of Australia's population growth (McCrindle, 2022). Australia already has twice as many overseas-born residents as the United Kingdom or the United States when looking at the proportion of the population (ABS). Projections by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) have the population reaching between 37 and 40 million by 2050, growth driven overwhelmingly by migration from Asia, South Asia, and Africa (ABS Population Projections, 2022–2071).
Is this the monoculture Hanson is describing? Or is it something else? Something uniform, singular, or as one leader once paraphrased to me, from the same playbook, "Judeo-Christian in its foundations and Anglo in its instincts."
What Hanson described in her National Press Club address, is not a country that exists, nor is it coming. It is a country that has never existed, and never will.
I have spent most of my working life sitting across from people whose stories the mainstream has avoided. I've often worked alongside First Nations leaders and communities across remote Australia, with newly arrived people and families with intersectional, multicultural and gender-diverse identities, navigating systems designed without them in mind — my own family included. I've worked with young people from multicultural backgrounds who aren’t able to see themselves reflected in the leadership of the institutions that shape their lives.
Each time, in each moment, what strikes me is not how different their experiences are but how quickly we can all recognise something in one another's story. Whether we are descendants of convicts, settler colonialists, pre or post-war migrants, refugees; or if we are descendants from a long line of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, from the longest surviving culture of peoples to have ever existed.
We are all here and we will never be a monoculture.
The great civil rights leader, author and educator, James Baldwin, spent much of his life writing about the cost of a country that could not see itself clearly, afraid to look at itself in the mirror. He wrote of a country that had constructed a story of itself so narrow and so defended that the truth of its own people kept breaking through as an interruption to a story, a threat, as a crime. The work of confronting that, he wrote, was not comfortable but necessary. It was the only work that mattered, because a society that cannot hold the truth of its own complexity cannot govern it.
There is no neutral position when it comes to these regurgitated great replacement ideas. We must realise that every policy either moves us all towards equity or far away from it. Defunding Indigenous-specific programs, abolishing institutions such as SBS, requiring English before citizenship, ending multicultural policy; do not move us towards a kinder, safer, more equitable society.
They are simply ideas to stoke fear, and we have to realise that they exist with someone's personal self interest at the heart of them.
It is said that 'hope lives in collective resistance.'
Where we put our time, our money, our attention and our votes are decisions to help build a society where our children can celebrate their differences, their uniqueness, their multicultural, intersectional identities without fear or persecution.
There are organisations around the world and across Australia doing this work. They are taking action for an Australia that is kinder, safer, and more equitable than the one Hanson described. Organisations that start from a place of radical empathy and collective resistance to authoritarianism.
The Asylum Seeker Resource Centre with the wonderful Kon Karapanagiotidis OAM , Welcoming Australia, Refugee Council of Australia, Human Rights Law Centre, Centre for Multicultural Youthwhere I serve as a board director, and there are many others.
Support these organisations, attend their events. Donate and volunteer if you can. Share their work. Show up and raise everyone in our community and by doing so, you’ll be helping shape a more equitable future for all Australians.
Australia will never be a monoculture. It never has been and never will be. However, we must ask ourselves if we are courageous enough to build a future worthy of that truth.
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Dimitri Antonopoulos is the CEO of Tank, a research, strategy and human-centred design consultancy; and a Non-Executive Director of Centre for Multicultural Youth.
Dimitri writes The Weekly Journal of Creative Leadership.
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References:
Australian Bureau of Statistics. Population Projections, Australia, 2022 (base) – 2071. ABS, 2023. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. First Australians. Baldwin, James. Notes of a Native Son. Beacon Press, 1955. Camus, Renaud. Le Grand Remplacement. David Reinharc, 2011. Hanson, Pauline. Address to the National Press Club, Canberra, June 2026. Kendi, Ibram X. Chain of Ideas: Great Replacement Theory and the Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. Bodley Head, 2026. Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. One World, 2019. McCrindle Research. Australia's Future Demographic Identity. McCrindle, 2022. Museum of Australia, Cronulla Race Riots, 2005. Department of Home Affairs,Towards Fairness, Australian Government Multicultural Framework Review. Posters by Peter Drew Arts.
