Australia

No shit.

Crusty old white man expects others to change but not himself.

The irony is that it is the waves of migration of people from different backgrounds and cultures that has made Australia the place it is today.

No one but Howard looks back on the boring, white bread, meat and three boiled veg culture that was Aus in the 1950s with any sort of nostalgia.

Remember the good old days, when, straight off the boat, Giovanni would change his name to John, and schoolboys would be caned for playing soccer rather than rugby or Aussie Rules? Howard does.

65000 years of indigenous Australians: “This dude said what?!”

Doesnt sound as bad when the quote has context:

Multiculturalism is a concept that I’ve always had trouble with. I take the view that if people want to emigrate to a country, then they adopt the values and practices of that country, And in return they’re entitled to have the host citizenry respect their culture without trying to create some kind of federation of tribes and culture – you get into terrible trouble with that.”

I think one of the problems with multiculturalism is we try too hard to institutionalise differences, rather than celebrate what we have in [common].

Bigots generally do.

6Howard always implied a distinction between Asian countries and Australia's Asian communities. As Brett (Citation2003: 151) reminds us, Asian-Australians were consistently presented as individuals instead of members of cultural groups. As such, and by virtue of the fact that they had brought in values like family, hard work and entrepreneurial flair – not coincidentally the restricted pool of ‘Asian values’ that overlapped with Howard's cultural outlook – ‘Australians of Asian descent’ could aspire to be ‘as honoured citizens as any other section of the Australian community’ (Howard Citation1996).This circumstance allowed the ‘integration’ of Asians as individuals maintaining the separateness from Asian countries from the identitarian point of view.

8In a speech to the Heritage Foundation – often overlooked supposedly because it was given three years into his ‘retirement’ – Howard (Citation2010: 5–6) stated that ‘the values that bind the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … are deeper and more abiding … than the bonds between any other countries’ and that ‘one of the errors that some sections of the English-speaking world have made in the past few decades has been to confuse multiracialism and multiculturalism’, to conclude that ‘the English-speaking nations have made an enormous contribution  … in excess of any other grouping of countries – to the defence of liberty in the last two hundred years’. Howard thus appropriated the whole intellectual body underlying the Anglospherist perspective in its entirety.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10361146.2014.965658

Emphasizing “shared values” in international relations and emphasizing the closeness of “values” with similarly anglo-sphere nations.

The “shared values” rhetoric is a very thin wrapper hiding outright white supremacism.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

John Howard has declared he “always had trouble” with the concept of multiculturalism, because immigrants should be expected to “adopt the values and practices” of the country they move to.

The former Liberal prime minister made the comments at the inaugural conference of new right-wing political forum the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) on Wednesday in London.

Critics including the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating have accused Howard and other reactionary conservatives of “outrageously and wilfully misinterpreting” the referendum result in an attempt to return to “the great assimilation project”.

When Pauline Hanson, a former Liberal, was elected to the lower house and formed the reactionary One Nation party, Howard responded by adopting some of her anti-Asian rhetoric including his suggestion that Asian migration should be “slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb [was] greater”.

The voice was one limb of the Uluru statement from the heart, which also calls for truth-telling and treaty-making, which is founded on the fact sovereignty of Indigenous nations has never been ceded.

Addressing the audience assembled by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and backed by a pro-Brexit hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment group, Anderson decried the influence of “cultural elites”.

The original article contains 914 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I wish the media would just stop letting this has-been steal oxygen. There are other people with way more relevant opinions.

Conservative of politics, but really rather radical of eyebrow.

Try an interesting little exercise some day. Punch Howard' and 'multiculturalism' into the Hansard database. You will find he has never mentioned the word.

When you punch in 'Howard' and 'multicultural' you do get it nine times but each and every time he is referring to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.

(From when Albo was cosplaying as a leftie)

Why do we still care what this man thinks