The flood of migrants from everywhere that is currently coming into Australia in an unmistakeable attempt to change the demographic character of the population appears destined to make Australia like a bad (even worse) copy of the European Union. Who has not seen the photograph (a photograph?) of the crowds in Melbourne outside Flinders Street station, where there is hardly a “white” face to be seen. But this situation can be turned on its head, particularly when one bears in mind Israel’s success in instituting Hebrew as the language of their state, in glaring contrast to e.g. Ireland’s failure to implant the Irish language as the lingua franca of that country.
The attempt to turn Ukraine into “the new bigger Israel” has apparently failed. Perhaps it is time to take some hints from one of the successful aspects of the colonization of Palestine: Israeli linguistic policy. Hebrew has been successfully introduced as the primary language of the Israeli state, displacing Yiddish, displacing or at least overshadowing, the national languages of the many countries from which Jewish immigrants have come to Israel.
In Australia the “white Australia policy”, which survived into the mid twentieth century, has been replaced at the official level by a quasi-religious idealization of Australia’s “first peoples”. This is due for toning down but in my opinion it is unlikely to “go back” to anything recognizable from the past.
As an Australian born in New South Wales but having lived in the 1970s for four years in Melbourne and having some slight contact with trade union activities, I noted that “first nation” Australians and others who identified with them were much friendlier to Mediterranean immigrants (primarily Greeks) than they were to Australians of Anglo-Celtic ancestry.
Check out this entry from the website of the young Greek-Australian Kanellos Patsios: https://main.cse-initiative.eu/?p=1313
Kanellos recently also interviewed former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis, who lived for twelve years in Australia, has a second family in Australia, and regards Australia as his second homeland. Would Varoufakis (and indeed Kanellos) be interested in trying to make the Greek language “the Hebrew of Australia”? Canada is a dual-language state with English still in the topmost position. But English is much more suitable to be a winner’s Esperanto, as it were, than to be the language of a state. In today’s world English native-speakers who know no other language are at a distinct, and accelerating, disadvantage.