Don’t Blame Arabs. Blame Your Liberal Democracy
How liberal democracy was transformed from a system of governance into a moral religion—and in the process quietly dismantled the country it claimed to protect.
After the Bondi attack, many asked what happened to the Australia they grew up in. The answer is not immigration, ethnicity, or sudden cultural rupture. It is the long, polite hollowing-out of nationhood itself—carried out in the name of progress, enforced through procedure, and justified by a liberal democratic ideology that forgot it was meant to govern a country, not replace it.
This is not a story about Arabs, migrants, or ethnicity. It is about an idea—specifically, the way liberal democracy was elevated from a system of governance into a totalising moral authority, and in doing so quietly dismantled the country it claimed to protect.
In the wake of the Bondi attack, a familiar line returned to public speech: “What happened to the country I grew up in?” The question is evasive. Nothing happened to the country. It was not ambushed or stolen. It was demoted—slowly, politely, and with the approval of those who believed that process could replace substance.
Liberal democracy was never designed to be a civilisation. It was a mechanism for managing power, restraining authority, and resolving disputes without bloodshed. Over time, however, it ceased to see itself as a tool and began to behave like a creed. In that transition, the nation itself became morally suspect.
Nationhood—once understood as a shared inheritance of history, culture, obligation, and restraint—was reframed as a danger. Borders became rude. Cultural confidence became threatening. Continuity became reactionary. The country was no longer something to belong to; it was something to apologise for.
What replaced it were abstractions: values without content, rights without duties, diversity without shared life, and progress without limits. None of these are meaningless. But none of them can sustain a country.
No one stopped to question the dogmatic resurgence of feminism—or, more plainly, the moral exclusion of half the population.
No one paused to examine what it meant when husbands, fathers, and sons were recast as a social problem to be managed rather than citizens to be represented. Australian men were condemned as “toxic,” not for what they did, but for what they were presumed to be.
Nor did anyone seriously question the universal redefining of biology, when elected politicians casually undermined womanhood itself in the name of abstraction. Sex became negotiable. Language became compulsory. Reality became something to be voted on.
Any criticism of this transformation was not debated; it was punished.
Dissent was met with castigation, professional risk, and moral accusation. Public celebration of fashionable sexual identities was ritualised and treated as civic virtue.
Public affirmation of Christianity—the moral framework that once underpinned law, restraint, forgiveness, and obligation—was ridiculed as backward or faintly sinister.
This asymmetry was not accidental. In a system that worships progress, nothing is sacred if it stands in the way of the next moral upgrade. Tradition becomes prejudice. Continuity becomes oppression. Restraint becomes harm.
So we are told to look forward, never back. To accept change, never judge it. But progress is not self-validating. It is a claim, not a proof.
So let’s look at progress.
Over the last fifty years, Australia has not collapsed in a single dramatic moment. It has thinned. The family was not abolished; it was rendered optional. Marriage was not outlawed; it was postponed until it no longer functioned as a foundation.
Children were not rejected; they were deferred until fertility quietly fell below replacement and the future began shrinking without comment.
What was once understood as a moral obligation to continuity was reframed as a lifestyle choice, and then quietly deprioritised altogether. Progress did not smash the family. It hollowed it out and moved on.
At the same time, trust in institutions did not vanish overnight. It eroded gradually, as governing elites learned to speak fluently in the language of values while acting transparently in the language of self-protection.
Politics became performative. Bureaucracy became unaccountable. Media became interpretive rather than descriptive. Citizens did not grow cynical because they became ignorant; they became cynical because they were told one story and lived another.
A liberal democracy cannot survive without trust, and yet it trained an entire class of administrators to treat public belief as something to be managed rather than earned.
Shared life followed the same path. Diversity was elevated as an unquestionable good, while the idea of a common moral life was treated as either automatic or unnecessary.
The country was told it shared “values,” but was never permitted to define them.
Cultural confidence was pathologised.
Moral boundaries were enforced, but never named.
The result was not unity, but brittleness—a society increasingly unsure of what binds it together, yet intensely aware of what it is forbidden to say.
This is not pluralism. It is a country drifting without a centre.
Violence, predictably, became harder to interpret. Australia remains a relatively safe country by global measures, and that fact is endlessly cited to shut down discomfort. But public order is not measured only by homicide rates.
It is measured by whether violence feels exceptional or ambient, whether disorder feels contained or tolerated, whether citizens feel protected or merely processed.
When shocking acts occur, they are treated as aberrations—unrelated to any broader moral disintegration—so that nothing fundamental ever has to be questioned. The state administers consequences while refusing to address causes.
And beneath all of this sits the quietest transformation of all: belief.
Australia did not merely secularise. It desacralised.
Christianity was not defeated in argument; it was dismissed as embarrassing.
The moral framework that once underpinned reality was hollowed out and replaced with procedural ethics and therapeutic language.
But a society does not survive on neutrality. When transcendence is removed, it is relocated.
What cannot be sacred in God will become sacred in identity, in sexuality, in grievance, or in politics.
Progress itself becomes the untouchable doctrine. Question it, and you are not wrong—you are immoral.
This is why certain identities are publicly celebrated with ritual seriousness, while public expressions of Christianity are mocked without consequence.
It is not tolerance. It is hierarchy.
Liberal democracy, having rejected inherited moral authority, manufactures its own—and enforces it with moral ferocity.
The point of this audit is not nostalgia. It is diagnosis.
A country can survive change. It can survive immigration. It can survive secularisation. What it cannot survive is the loss of confidence in its own legitimacy—its right to exist as something more than a neutral administrative zone.
Liberal democracy, when treated as an end rather than a means, dissolves the substance it depends on.
It thins family continuity while calling it freedom. It corrodes institutional trust while calling it accountability. It replaces shared moral life with managed diversity. It desacralises inherited belief while quietly sanctifying progress itself.
And when violence or disorder surfaces, it responds with procedure rather than meaning, consequence rather than cause.
This is not an argument against democracy. It is an argument against confusing governance with civilisation.
So no—don’t blame Arabs. Migrants arrive into the moral architecture they are given.
They respond rationally to the incentives, boundaries, and expectations of the society that receives them. If a country cannot articulate who it is, what it stands for, or what it expects, the failure does not lie with those who take it at its word.
The country you grew up in was not destroyed by outsiders. It was hollowed out by an ideology that insisted nothing was sacred except change, nothing permanent except process, and nothing worth defending except its own moral authority.
That experiment has now been running for half a century. The results are no longer theoretical.
The real shock is not that the country has changed, but that those now lamenting its loss were warned—clearly and repeatedly—and chose not to listen.