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by rayiner
894 days ago
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Sectarian conflict exists everywhere. But in America it’s all-encompassing, because there is no dominant group. Australia is still majority English. Scotland is majority Scot, etc. America has no majority group. Only 4% of Australians have German ancestry. In America, by contrast, Germans are 17%. I don’t think there’s any election in Australian history where people from a foreign ancestry ended up tipping the balance and caused major change. That’s happened repeatedly in America. FDR never would’ve gotten elected without Irish and Italian immigrants. That would be an explosive event in most other countries. |
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In the 2021 census, only 33% of Australians reported English ancestry. Of course, there are probably many Australians with English ancestry who didn't report it on the census – I know, I am one of them. But, my Irish ancestors outnumber my English ones, and I feel a certain emotional connection with Ireland which I lack with England. There's a cemetery in County Kerry where many of my Irish ancestors are buried–I've never actually been to it (one of these days), but my parents have–whereas, I know almost nothing about my English ancestors except for the fact of their existence (on my paternal grandmother's side)
The quasi-official term for Australia's historical ethnic majority is "Anglo-Celtic Australian", which incorporates all the ancestries of Britain and Ireland (English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh, etc). Referring to that majority as "English" can be seen as excluding the Irish/Scottish/Welsh. On the other hand, the term has been criticised as minimising the role that British-vs-Irish/Protestant-vs-Catholic conflict has played in Australia's social and political history
> I don’t think there’s any election in Australian history where people from a foreign ancestry ended up tipping the balance and caused major change.
Irish Australians played a major role in defeating the 1916 and 1917 conscription referendums; if only English Australians had been able to vote, the referendums would have likely passed. The Ireland-born Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Daniel Mannix, played a big role in the defeat of both referendums, publicly arguing that Germany's crimes against Belgium were nothing compared to Britain's crimes crimes against Ireland. The defeat of the referendums had major political consequences – the governing Labor Party split into pro-conscription and anti-conscription factions, with the former ending up merging with the conservatives, while the rump anti-conscription Labor Party ended up locked out of government for the following decade.
> FDR never would’ve gotten elected without Irish and Italian immigrants. That would be an explosive event in most other countries.
Australia's Labor Party split again in 1954, this time over communism. The activist B. A. Santamaria (leader of the "Catholic Social Studies Movement", both his parents were Italian immigrants) claimed that Soviet agents had infiltrated Labor, and demanded they be expelled; the party rejected his allegation, and expelled his followers instead. Santamaria founded his own anti-communist "Democratic Labor Party" (DLP). Mannix, still Archbishop of Melbourne (he died in office in 1963, at the age of 99) played a pivotal role in encouraging Catholics (still majority Irish) in the state of Victoria to vote for the DLP, whose members once elected supported the conservative federal government, and helped keep it in power for the next 15+ years. Conversely, Normal Cardinal Gilroy, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney (first ever Australian-born, but both his parents were born in Ireland), opposed Santamaria's movement, and hence the DLP was unsuccessful in New South Wales.
Once again, arguments for American exceptionalism rely on ignorance of comparable events in other countries