Unity Not Division

Together we are strong. Divided we fall.
Sovereign Australia

Division is taking hold in Australia. Belonging is at its lowest level since records began, and hostility toward one community has risen sharply in two years. Done properly, multiculturalism has been one of this country’s great achievements, and an overwhelming majority of Australians say so. This memo sets out who Australians are, what they already celebrate, what was lost on every side, and what a government would build.

1. Why this comes first

Social cohesion is the capacity of a population to act together. It is not warmth, agreement or affection. It is whether people who do not know each other will co-operate anyway — pay tax, obey a law nobody is enforcing, join something, follow an instruction in an emergency, and accept a result they voted against.

Every other function of government runs on it.

The economic literature finds that trust causally drives growth rather than merely correlating with it. Low trust raises transaction costs across a whole economy, discourages investment in public goods and increases tax evasion, because people stop believing the money will be used properly.

The cost of losing it is the largest cost there is. Violent conflict took nearly US$20 trillion out of the world economy in 2024, about 11.6 per cent of global GDP. Conflict-affected countries in Sub-Saharan Africa grow about 2.5 percentage points a year below peaceful peers, and high-intensity conflict is followed by a fall of roughly 20 per cent in GDP per capita within five years. More than 60 per cent of the world's extreme poor are expected to live in fragile states.

No country that has fallen apart expected to. Every one of them had a period in which the division was visible, profitable to somebody, and treated as a cultural argument rather than a national risk.

Cohesion does not maintain itself. It is produced by institutions — schools that mix children, clubs that survive, ceremonies people attend, a media market not owned by three people, a fair go that is actually available, and a state that can be seen doing what it says. Every one of those is a policy setting that can be legislated, funded or neglected.

Every other policy in this platform assumes cohesion and none of them creates it. Energy independence requires a population that will accept a twenty-year build. Housing reform requires people to accept construction near them. Defence requires a country worth defending. Tax reform requires people who believe others are paying too.

With unity, every challenge in this platform is solvable. Without it, none of them are, and the argument is no longer about which policy is correct.

A nation is not a landmass and it is not an economy. It is a group of people who have agreed to act as one, and that agreement is maintained or it is lost.

2. Who Australians are

All figures are from the 2021 Census, which counted 25,422,788 people. Four facts follow from it.

Australia is a majority-migrant-descended country. 27.6 per cent were born overseas, against 19.1 per cent in 1971. 48.2 per cent have at least one parent born overseas. First and second generation Australians together are 51.5 per cent — a majority for the first time, crossed in 2021.

There is no majority religion. The largest single response is no religion at 38.9 per cent, up from 30.1 in 2016 and 22.3 in 2011. Christianity totals 43.9 per cent across all denominations, of which the largest is Catholic at 20. Islam is 3.2 per cent, Hinduism 2.7, Buddhism 2.4, Judaism 0.4.

There is no majority ancestry. The largest ancestry of origin is English at 33.0 per cent, followed by Irish at 9.5 and Scottish at 8.6. A further 29.9 per cent record their ancestry simply as Australian. More than 300 ancestries were reported.

English is near-universal at home and not exclusive. 72 per cent speak only English; 5.66 million people use another language, of whom 852,706 speak English not well or not at all. The largest single other language is Mandarin at 2.7 per cent.

812,728 people identified as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander, 3.2 per cent of the population, up from 2.5 per cent in 2011. The estimated resident population is 983,700. The median age is 24 against 38 nationally, and 167 languages are still used at home by 76,978 people.

No group in Australia is large enough to constitute the country on its own. That is the arithmetic every proposal here begins from.

3. What Australia already celebrates

Australia already celebrates everything, in pieces.

Seventeen recurring national observances span the national story, the Indigenous story and at least five faiths — Australia Day, Anzac Day, Remembrance Day and Christmas; Sorry Day, Reconciliation Week, Mabo Day, NAIDOC Week and Coming of the Light; Harmony Week, Lunar New Year, Easter, Eid, Vesak, Diwali, Hanukkah and Refugee Week.

Alongside them sit at least eighteen recurring Scottish, Celtic and Cornish festivals, from the Maclean Highland Gathering's 120th year to Bundanoon is Brigadoon and the Australian Celtic Festival at Glen Innes — and a comparable set of First Nations festivals including Garma, Yabun, Barunga, Laura and Desert Mob. Almost all of them are volunteer-run and unfunded.

Three facts follow.

Almost none of it is national. Australia has three national public holidays among seventeen observances, and two of the three are Christian in a country where 38.9 per cent report no religion. No Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander observance is a public holiday anywhere in the country. Neither is Harmony Week.

One national day is contested and the calendar has no answer to it. Australia Day marks the 1788 landing. Sorry Day, Reconciliation Week, Mabo Day and NAIDOC Week mark what followed. They sit on the same calendar without meeting.

The heritage registers are already shared. Australia holds 21 World Heritage properties and about 120 National Heritage places. Kakadu, Uluru–Kata Tjuta and Willandra Lakes are listed for natural and cultural value at once. Budj Bim, in Gunditjmara country, is listed as one of the world's oldest and most extensive aquaculture systems.

The instruments exist. What does not exist is a national occasion at which all of it is celebrated by everybody at the same time.

4. Two dispossessions, and the land

The Scottish, Celtic and Cornish gatherings and the First Nations festivals are doing the same thing: people gathering to perform, in public, the practices their ancestors were prevented from continuing.

The difference is that one group is remembering a place on the other side of the world, and the other is standing on theirs.

Most people who came to Australia did not come because things were going well. The Highland Clearances ran from about 1750 to 1860 and destroyed traditional clan society, resettling families onto coastal crofts too poor to live on, with documented cases of homes burned. The Great Highland Famine followed in 1846. Between 1852 and 1857 the Highland and Island Emigration Society assisted about 5,000 Scots to Australia — "compulsory emigration", the choice between eviction, or eviction plus a paid passage. Add enclosure in England, the Irish famine, and roughly 162,000 transported convicts.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians were dispossessed of this continent. More than 250 languages were spoken at contact and 167 remain in use at home.

The losses are not equivalent and this memo does not rank them. But the instrument was the same on both sides: removal from land, and local knowledge replaced by wage labour somewhere else.

England shows what that costs, and what recovery looks like. The Cotswold Olimpick Games were established in 1612 at Chipping Campden — running, throwing, jumping, wrestling, horse racing. They ran for nearly two centuries and ended in 1862, killed by a dispute over land enclosure.

In 1850 a country doctor named William Penny Brookes revived the idea at Much Wenlock in Shropshire: cricket, quoits, a hopping race, opened by a band-led procession. In 1861 the Shropshire games began rotating between host towns. In 1890 Pierre de Coubertin visited. In 1894 he founded the International Olympic Committee. In 1896 Athens hosted 241 athletes from 14 countries.

A land-based English folk festival was destroyed by enclosure. One man revived it in a small town, on a field, with a procession and a running race, and within forty years it had become the largest recurring shared celebration in human history.

Local revival of an interrupted tradition is not a nostalgic gesture. It is how the biggest celebration on earth started.

Every tradition named in this chapter is land-based in origin. Highland games were clan gatherings on their own ground. Harvest festivals and saints' days mark a place and a season. Songlines, ceremony and seasonal burning do the same here with 65,000 years behind them. Every Australian is descended from people who knew a landscape well enough to live from it, and most are descended from people who lost that knowledge involuntarily.

The land those people now share is this one.

5. The National Festival

Australians turn out in millions for a free, local celebration built on food, music and a parade.

Five features recur: free or near it; delivered locally; something to do rather than watch; food and music as the entry point; and no argument attached.

Two of them prove the design. Christmas in July was invented in 2017, has no religious claim and no ethnic ownership, and drew a quarter of a million people within three years — Australians will turn out in large numbers for a celebration that belongs to nobody in particular. Moomba is Australia's largest free community festival, delivered by a council, named by Bill Onus, a Yorta Yorta man and former president of the Australian Aborigines League, from a word popularly translated as "let's get together and have fun" — and it has run for seventy years without controversy attaching to it.

Moomba's 2026 parade is the policy already operating: 1,800 performers from more than 35 community and cultural groups, and nine floats — one developed with the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung community, eight built to designs submitted by children.

But every large Australian celebration is either in one city, on one culture, or behind a ticket. There is no day on which the whole country celebrates the same thing at the same time in its own suburb.

The policy: a national day of celebration, held in every local government area on the same day, funded by government and built by the people who live there.

• A public holiday. Free, everywhere, without exception.
• Floats built by the organisations that already exist — sports clubs, schools, cultural and heritage associations, First Nations organisations, RSLs, Men's Sheds, CWA, emergency services and cadets, faith communities, industry, disability and aged care groups. The eligibility rule is that anybody who wants a float can have one.
• Funded to the builders. A fixed grant per registered float applied for on one page; a per-head allocation to every council for staging, road closure, sound and insurance; paid engagements for local bands, dance schools and choirs; food stalls free of site fees with community groups keeping their takings. A standing appropriation, not a competitive grant round.
• Country welcomed by its traditional owners, as Moomba has done under an Aboriginal name since 1955.
• Citizenship conferred on the day, so the country's largest act of welcome sits inside its largest celebration. Australia Day 2026 saw 325 ceremonies confer citizenship on about 19,000 people from more than 150 nations.
• Local service awards, as councils already give.

Australia Day and Anzac Day are unaffected. Neither is moved, reduced or replaced. This is an addition to the calendar.

The money goes to the people building the floats and playing the music, not to an agency administering a program. It is not a broadcast event with an audience; it is a participation event with a broadcast.

6. Truth-telling, and the record

Truth-telling establishes what happened. It has already been done once in this country and it worked.

The Yoorrook Justice Commission, Australia's first formal truth-telling inquiry, ran for four years by agreement between the Victorian Government and the First Peoples' Assembly. It took more than 1,300 submissions across 67 hearing days from more than 250 witnesses, compelled more than 7,000 documents from the State, and delivered 100 recommendations and an Official Public Record. It concluded on 1 July 2025.

The part that belongs in this memo is the Walk for Truth — 370 kilometres from Gunditjmara Country at Portland to the Victorian Parliament, open to every Victorian, to create space for shared conversation. That is truth-telling as a public act anyone can join rather than a report anyone can ignore.

Everyone here has a truth to tell, and the pattern across all of them is about power rather than nationality. The wars were declared by people who did not fight them. The clearances were ordered by landowners who did not lose a house. The enclosures were passed by a parliament of the people who gained the land. Ordinary people on every side did the suffering, and their descendants are now in the same country.

This does not mean the losses are equivalent. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were dispossessed of this continent and the consequences are measurable today: a suicide rate of 33.9 per 100,000 against a Closing the Gap baseline of 23.6, and a median age at death of 33. No Scottish or Irish descendant in Australia carries that, and nothing here is offered to reduce it.

What the party commits to.

• A national truth-telling process on the Yoorrook model — First Peoples-led, with an official public record produced once and kept.
• Truth-telling as a public, participatory act, not only a report.
• A permanent, publicly searchable national record where any community — Aboriginal, Scottish, Irish, Greek, Vietnamese, Sudanese, convict-descended — can lodge its own history in its own words.
• Open the archive. Digitise and make freely searchable the births, deaths, marriages, immigration, shipping, convict, mission, church and government records that let Australians find their own past — subject to the access controls Aboriginal communities set over their own records.
• Fund language. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander language centres funded as national cultural infrastructure rather than through grant rounds.
• Teach the depth — 65,000 years of this continent and the deep history of the places Australians came from, rather than beginning the story at 1788 or 1945.
• The fifth Royal Commission, into Indigenous Governance and Royalties. Most royalty agreements between mining companies and Aboriginal communities are confidential, so neither the communities receiving the money nor the public funding the system can establish whether the arrangements are fair. An audit of twenty years of payments, with coercive powers. The 2021 reform that put an Aboriginal-controlled body in charge of the Aboriginals Benefit Account is welcome and does not answer the twenty years before it. The purpose is not to investigate Aboriginal organisations. It is to establish what was owed, what was paid, what was withheld, and by whom — and the parties most likely to be uncomfortable are governments and mining companies.

A celebration that cannot mention what it cost to get here is a party. A celebration that can is a country.

7. Media

Australia's media market is among the most concentrated in the developed world, and it was legislated into being. Foreign ownership rules were repealed in 2006 and 2007, the remaining cross-media restrictions and the 75 per cent audience reach rule were removed in 2016, and Nine acquired Fairfax in 2018. In early 2026 Seven West Media merged with Southern Cross Media, so that in Western Australia commercial television and radio in the affected licence areas fall to either Seven-Southern Cross or WIN.

72 per cent of Australians who used a digital platform in the first half of 2025 believe they encountered misinformation on it. Complaints to the broadcasting regulator are up 57 per cent in five years, and complaints to the newspaper self-regulator run 42 per cent above their long-term average. Neither body has powers that match the volume.

Division sells. That is not a conspiracy, it is a business model: conflict holds attention longer than agreement, and attention is what media revenue is priced on. A market held by a small number of owners will produce more conflict than a diverse one.

This is a matter for legislation, not for appeals to the goodwill of proprietors.

• Ownership. Cross-media control limits and an audience reach cap reinstated. A statutory ceiling on the share of national readership, audience or revenue a single controller may hold, with divestment where it is exceeded. No acquisition that reduces the number of independent voices in an already concentrated market, without exception and without ministerial discretion.
• Transparency. Every outlet publishes its controllers, ultimate beneficial owners and foreign shareholdings, and its government advertising revenue by department. All paid and sponsored content disclosed at the point of publication. Platform algorithms subject to disclosure: what is amplified, on what basis, and at whose request.
• Accountability. A statutory right of correction at equivalent prominence in the same slot. A statutory right of reply for any community materially misrepresented. Penalties proportionate to revenue. The regulator resourced to its actual complaint volume.
• Diversity. Public interest journalism funded, with priority on local and regional newsrooms. Community broadcasting funded as national infrastructure. Public broadcasting funding set multi-year and insulated from the budget cycle of the government of the day.

What it does not do is create a government body that decides what is divisive. The party's transparency doctrine is that the state publishes rather than controls, and that principle does not get suspended because the subject is division. A government empowered to rule on divisiveness is a government empowered to rule on criticism of itself.

The legislation reaches four things a government can properly touch: who owns the megaphone, what they must disclose, what happens when they are demonstrably wrong, and who else gets funded to speak.

8. The bogey man

There are 813,392 Muslims in Australia — 3.2 per cent of the population.

Negative attitudes toward Muslims rose from 27 per cent in 2023 to more than one in three in 2024. About 25 per cent of Australians express those attitudes when a researcher asks, and about 40 per cent on a self-administered form: the same people answer differently depending on whether somebody is listening.

The Islamophobia Register recorded 932 incidents in the year after October 2023 — more than the previous eight years combined. In September 2025 the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia described anti-Muslim sentiment as pervasive and at times terrifying, attributed it to geopolitical events, negative media coverage and divisive comments by politicians, and recorded women spat at, punched, choked and having hijabs forcibly removed. In 2019 an Australian murdered 51 Muslim worshippers in their mosques in Christchurch.

Content analysis of Australian coverage, including both the national broadsheet and the public broadcaster, finds representations that are overwhelmingly negative and stereotypical, with Islam conflated with Islamism, Muslims conflated with terrorism, and Muslim voices largely absent from stories about Muslims.

The arithmetic is set out in a separate memo, The Arithmetic of Islam. One comparison stands in for the rest: recorded alcohol consumption is 11.2 litres per adult per year in Australia and 0.1 in Egypt and Indonesia.

This is not a claim that terrorism does not exist, that no Muslim has committed a crime in Australia, or that any belief is beyond criticism. It is a claim about arithmetic. 813,392 people cannot be characterised by the actions of a handful, and no other Australian community is asked to accept that they can be.

Three per cent of the population is being used to organise the fears of the other ninety-seven. A country in which one community is the standing bogey man is a country practising for doing it to another — the Chinese-Australian community has had its turn, and so have Greeks, Italians, Irish Catholics and Vietnamese before them.

Ignorance is the fuel and the media market is the engine.

9. How ignorance is broken

Prejudice falls when people meet. It is one of the most tested findings in social science, and it holds here.

An Australian study of 1,020 people found non-Muslims living in areas with a substantial Muslim population scored 2.31 on an Islamophobia scale, against 2.80 for the general Sydney and Melbourne populations. Australians aged 18 to 34 scored 2.32; those over 65 scored 2.80.

The Australians most likely to fear a group are the Australians least likely to have met one.

Australians who hold negative views about Aboriginal people also substantially overestimate how many others agree with them. That makes the prejudiced feel normal and everybody else stay quiet, so the actual majority position is more tolerant than the perceived one — and the gap is filled by whoever speaks loudest.

Contact only works under conditions: equal status, a common goal, institutional support, and repetition long enough to become friendship, which does more than any other form. Contact under adverse conditions can increase prejudice instead. Putting people in a room is not the intervention; putting them in a room as equals, with something to do, is.

And one finding decides the policy: people are more willing to engage across groups when they can see others in their own group doing it. Contact is contagious. The barrier is rarely hostility; it is that nobody goes first.

A whole-of-town festival solves exactly that. Every group registers on the same form and builds the same kind of float; nobody is a guest and nobody is a host; it runs annually in the same street with the same neighbours; and the whole town is there.

The float shed is the mechanism. Six weeks of building something with people from three streets over does more than any campaign about tolerance, because nobody involved experiences it as being about tolerance. They experience it as being about the float.

Ignorance is not a character flaw. It concentrates where contact is lowest, which is a structural condition, and structures are fixable.

10. Schools

The non-government share is about 41 per cent at secondary level, up from 22.1 per cent of all enrolments in 1977. Between 2021 and 2025 independent schools grew 15.3 per cent and government schools shrank.

Australia has one of the most segregated school systems in the developed world — fourth on the OECD's socioeconomic measure, increasing at the second fastest rate, with the fourth lowest proportion of secondary students in government schools. 51 per cent of disadvantaged students attend disadvantaged schools against an OECD average of 48, and only 4.6 per cent attend advantaged schools against an average of 6.4.

Researchers examining the sectors reach one conclusion: no school sector reflects the Australian population.

A child can now complete thirteen years of education in this country without spending a structured hour alongside a child of another faith, another income bracket or another background. The ignorance described in chapter 8 is manufactured in adulthood by media. It is made possible in childhood by a school system that ensures the two children never met.

Parents keep the right to choose their child's school. Nothing here closes a school, changes a curriculum or alters a school's religious character. Faith schools remain faith schools.

What changes is that every school meets a minimum annual requirement of structured contact with students from another sector. Each school is paired by the state registration authority with a school unlike it — not one of similar fees, faith or profile. The activity is joint sport, music, debating, science projects, community service or the festival float, held on neutral ground or alternating campuses so neither school is host or visitor, with the same partnership held across years so acquaintance becomes friendship. It is a condition of registration and of Commonwealth funding, reported annually and published.

Voluntary versions already exist and reach few students, because they depend on two principals knowing each other. The schools least likely to volunteer are the schools where contact would do the most.

The cost is a bus, a hall and a teacher's time. The return is a generation of Australians who met each other before anybody told them who to be afraid of.

A country that separates its children for thirteen years and then asks why they do not trust each other has answered its own question.

11. One law, one standard

Unity is not unconditional. A country that asks people to belong to it must state what belonging requires, and enforce it.

The requirement is civic, not cultural. Nobody is asked to abandon a language, a faith, a cuisine or a festival.

• Australian law is the only law. No parallel legal system, no customary exemption, no religious exemption.
• Men and women are equal, in the home and outside it.
• Freedom of religion, including the freedom to have none and to leave one.
• Freedom of speech, including speech that offends.
• Children are protected, educated, and not married.
• Disputes are settled by courts, not by families, clerics or communities.
• The law applies to the person enforcing it as much as to the person breaking it.

Australia already deports non-citizens who commit serious crimes, in volume. Visa cancellation is mandatory, with no discretion, where a non-citizen has a sentence of 12 months or more and is serving it. Between January 2014 and December 2023, 8,200 people were removed on character grounds. The party's position is that this power should be used consistently and decided quickly, rather than after years in detention.

Citizenship can be ceased for dual nationals aged 14 and over where serious convictions demonstrate repudiation of allegiance. That power now sits with a court, not a minister: the High Court struck down ministerial citizenship-stripping twice, on the ground that removing citizenship is a punishment and punishing people is the work of courts. The party accepts that ruling. A power to strip citizenship held by a minister is a power that will eventually be used on somebody a minister dislikes.

What the party adds: a substantive civic values assessment as a condition of permanent residency; prosecution without cultural exemption for forced marriage, female genital cutting, so-called honour violence, coercive control and the denial of education to a child; rehabilitation programs inside every sentence, because prison that returns a person unchanged has failed the community twice; and statutory deadlines on character decisions.

Applied to everyone, or it means nothing. The Australian who assaulted two Muslim women in a Melbourne shopping centre broke this standard. The people who booed an Acknowledgement of Country at a dawn service broke it. The Australian who murdered 51 people in their mosques in Christchurch broke it, and he was born here.

A country that enforces its values against newcomers and excuses them in the locally born does not have values. It has a grievance with a legal department.

This is not deportation of Australian citizens; a citizen with no other nationality cannot be removed anywhere and Australia does not make people stateless. It is not detention for holding the wrong opinions. And it is not aimed at a community: every instrument applies to conduct, not to origin.

The offer is the same to everybody: this is a free country, these are the terms, and they are enforced on all of us equally.

12. Welcome to Country

A Welcome to Country is delivered by a Traditional Owner of the specific land an event is held on. It is not a welcome to Australia. An Acknowledgement of Country is the substitute used when no Traditional Owner is present, and anybody can give one.

Both halves of the usual argument are wrong. The claim that the ceremony is 60,000 years old is overstated — the public ceremony in its current form dates from the 1970s. The claim that it was invented in 1976 and has no basis is wrong — the underlying protocol of seeking permission before entering another group's country is documented across the continent long before.

And the origin is the part almost nobody knows. In 1976 Noongar man Richard Walley and Yamatji man Ernie Dingo devised a formal welcome for the Perth International Arts Festival — because the visiting Māori and Cook Islander performers refused to perform until they had been welcomed to the land by its Traditional Owners, in accordance with their own protocols, and the organisers had no ceremony to offer them.

It was not a demand made of Australians. It was an answer to a request from guests who found it strange that the country had no way of receiving them.

Sovereign Australia does not abolish Welcome to Country. It reforms the version that has drifted. Traditional Welcome to Country, where an Elder welcomes visitors to their country in the customary way of their people, remains entirely appropriate and continues. What is reformed is the mandatory, scripted, grievance-framed version that has become the default in government and corporate settings.

The model is the safety share. On every mine site and construction crew in Australia, someone opens the morning meeting with one safety observation. Two minutes. It sets the tone, and nobody resents it because everybody in the room can give one.

The Australian Cultural Share works the same way. Anyone, from any background, takes two to five minutes to share one positive thing about Australia — a story, an achievement, a place, a person, a moment that made them proud.

• Inclusive of all Australians. An Afghan-Australian on Australian medical research. A Wiradjuri Elder on their country. A recent arrival describing what Australia looked like from the outside. Owned by no one group.
• One positive thing. Not a recitation of wrongs and not a disclaimer about the past.
• Five minutes maximum. Brevity forces the speaker to identify what actually matters to them.
• Optional. A ceremony performed because it is compulsory has already failed.

It is not a replacement for substantive engagement with First Australians — that sits in the corridor towns, the Traditional Owner Services Fund, the Indigenous Australia Commission and the truth-telling in chapter 6. It is not about erasing history: Australia's history is complex and parts of it are painful, and that history belongs in schools, universities and national memorials. The opening two minutes of a workplace meeting is not where it is examined.

13. The National Year

Australia built this model, proved it over two decades, exported it — and never extended it beyond the military.

The ADF Gap Year launched in 2007: twelve months full-time for Australians aged 17 to 24, on a full tax-free salary with accommodation, meals and health care provided. Around 80 per cent complete it or transfer, and just over 57 per cent of recent cohorts transfer into the permanent force. It works so well that the United Kingdom launched its own version in March 2026, explicitly modelled on the Australian program.

France runs a civilian equivalent — 40,135 participants in 2023, at about €4,215 per person for a five-month placement. The European Solidarity Corps placed 66,000 young people between 2021 and 2023.

An eighteen-year-old in Australia who wants a structured, paid year of service has one option, and it is the defence force. Meanwhile fewer than one in three young Australians report a strong sense of belonging, formal volunteering has fallen from 30 to 23 per cent, and regional Australia cannot staff aged care.

The policy: a voluntary, paid, twelve-month National Year for Australians aged 18 to 24.

• Paid on the ADF Gap Year model, with accommodation and meals.
• Placed away from home — city participants go regional, regional participants go elsewhere.
• Cohorts deliberately mixed across backgrounds, faiths, incomes and postcodes, and housed together.
• Credentialled — aged care, conservation, first aid, machinery, a trades pathway — and recognised for university entry, apprenticeship credit and public service recruitment.
• The work: aged care and disability support; conservation, revegetation, catchment repair and cultural burning alongside Traditional Owners; agriculture and regional industry; emergency services support; community organisations and the national festival.
• Administered regionally, not centrally. A council or regional body identifies the work and hosts the cohort; the Commonwealth pays the wage and the training.

A nineteen-year-old from a Sydney suburb spends a year in a town of four hundred people, doing work that visibly matters, known by name in a place they had never heard of. That young person does not afterwards need persuading about regional Australia, and that town does not need persuading about young people from the city.

A country that sends its young people out to serve it gets them back knowing why it is worth serving.

14. The programme

Everything proposed here is one programme with one purpose: to put Australians who would not otherwise meet in the same place, doing the same thing, often enough that it becomes ordinary.

Six of the seven are contact. The seventh stops the contact being undone faster than it is built.

It sits in one portfolio. Every instrument above is a family and community instrument. Harmony is not a foreign affairs question, a health question or an education question — it is what happens to families and communities, and the department that holds them owns it, with a single minister accountable and a standing obligation to report. A problem distributed across every portfolio is a problem nobody answers for.

Not a new agency. The Commonwealth funds, legislates and publishes. States match the school partnerships through registration authorities. Local government delivers the festival, hosts the cohorts and administers float grants. Community organisations do the work. The money moves to the bottom row; every layer above it exists to get it there.

Measured in public, annually, against a stated baseline — sense of belonging, currently the lowest since 2007; belief that hard work brings a better life, down 13 points since 2021; trust that most people can be trusted, at 50 per cent; formal volunteering at 23 per cent; negative attitudes toward Muslims above one in three; plus festival participation by local government area, school partnership hours by school, and National Year placements by region, all currently nil.

A programme that cannot show movement on those lines within a term has failed and should be said to have failed.

And eliminating division does not mean eliminating disagreement. A country where people do not argue is not united; it is silenced, and this platform has refused that instrument everywhere it has been offered. It does not mean eliminating difference: the Cornish festival stays Cornish, Garma stays Yolngu, the faith school stays a faith school. What can be eliminated is the manufactured kind — division that exists because somebody profits from it, and because the two Australians involved have never met.

Everything here is aimed at the production line rather than at the people holding the product.

15. What this memo is not

It is not a claim that Australia is falling apart. Cohesion has been stable for three years and an overwhelming majority say multiculturalism has been good for the country.

It is not a proposal to merge anybody's culture into anybody else's, to abolish Welcome to Country, or to make it compulsory.

It is not a government arbiter of what may be said.

It is not a claim that the losses in chapter 4 are equivalent, that terrorism does not exist, or that any belief is beyond criticism.

It is not conscription.

And it is not a new idea. Every instrument in this memo is already operating somewhere in Australia, at small scale, usually on volunteer labour.

16. Summary

Division is taking hold in Australia, and it is being manufactured faster than it is being repaired.

The headline cohesion index has not moved in three years, and that is the most misleading figure in this memo. Every measure underneath it has. Belonging is at its lowest level since records began in 2007, and five measures fell between 11 and 13 points in four years: belonging, the belief that hard work brings a better life, life satisfaction, optimism about the country, and the expectation that one's own life will improve.

Hostility is rising where it is recorded. Negative attitudes toward Muslims went from 27 per cent to more than one in three in a single year, and the Islamophobia Register logged more incidents in one year than in the previous eight combined.

Membership of community organisations has fallen across every category measured, and trust that most people can be trusted fell from 55 to 50 per cent.

No group here is large enough to constitute the country alone. 51.5 per cent of Australians are first or second generation, the largest single religious response is no religion, and the largest ancestry of origin is a third of the population.

Australia already celebrates all of it, in pieces — seventeen observances, at least eighteen Celtic festivals, a comparable number of First Nations festivals, almost all volunteer-run. Three national public holidays exist and two are Christian. No Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander observance is a public holiday anywhere.

Both halves of the country lost a land-based culture, by the same instrument: removal from land. And ignorance concentrates precisely where contact is lowest, in one of the most segregated school systems in the developed world, while 59 per cent of print readership sits with one owner.

Sovereign Australia's position is that social cohesion is a priority policy of government, not a sentiment — owned by one portfolio, with one minister answerable for it and published measures reported every year.

A national festival in every community on one day. School partnerships across sectors. A paid national service year. Funding for the clubs and halls that do the introducing. Truth-telling for every community about its own past. The Australian Cultural Share. And legislation that breaks the concentration of media ownership.

One law applies to everyone, on the same terms, to the oldest family in the district and the newest.

Together we are strong. Divided we fall.

Australia does not need a new idea. It needs to be in the same room often enough to notice that it is one country.

17. Sources

1. Scanlon Foundation Research Institute, Mapping Social Cohesion 2025 and Insights 10: The "glass half empty" country? (2026) — the cohesion index, 84 per cent agreement on multiculturalism, the five declines of 11 to 13 points between 2021 and 2025, belonging at its lowest since 2007, fewer than one in three younger Australians reporting belonging, financial circumstances as the leading factor, and negative attitudes toward Muslims rising from 27 per cent to more than one in three.
2. Andrew Leigh, address to the National Press Club (June 2026), citing the ABS General Social Survey — trust, formal volunteering, social group and civic membership between 2019 and 2025.
3. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Cultural diversity: Census, 2021, Religious affiliation in Australia, and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people: Census, 2021 — ancestry, country of birth, generation, religion, language, and First Nations population, median age and languages.
4. Our World in Data, Trust; Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Meltdown of trust in weakly governed economies (2025); UN World Social Report and UNU-WIDER (2025); World Bank and IMF research on conflict-affected economies — the causal link between trust and growth, and the costs of conflict and fragility.
5. Department of Home Affairs, National NAIDOC Committee, Reconciliation Australia and state and territory public holiday schedules — the seventeen recurring observances and their public holiday status.
6. UNESCO World Heritage Centre and the Australian Heritage Database — 21 World Heritage properties and approximately 120 National Heritage places, including Budj Bim.
7. City of Melbourne, Moomba Festival; Destination NSW; Royal Agricultural Society of NSW; Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras; and The Rocks Christmas in July — attendance, the 2026 Moomba parade, and the origin of the name proposed by Bill Onus.
8. Department of Home Affairs citizenship reporting — 325 ceremonies conferring citizenship on approximately 19,000 people from more than 150 nations on Australia Day 2026.
9. Scottish, Celtic and Cornish festival organisations in Australia; the Yothu Yindi Foundation; and Gadigal Information Service — the recurring festivals of both traditions.
10. Historic Environment Scotland and published histories of the Highland Clearances; Chipping Campden Olimpick Games records; the Wenlock Olympian Society; and International Olympic Committee historical records — the Clearances and assisted emigration, and the Cotswold-to-Olympic chain.
11. Yoorrook Justice Commission final reports and the Walk for Truth (2025).
12. National Indigenous Australians Agency, Aboriginals Benefit Account, and the Aboriginal Land Rights (Northern Territory) Act 1976 with its 2021 Economic Empowerment amendments.
13. Australian Communications and Media Authority, News media in Australia: 2025; Reuters Institute; and IBISWorld — ownership concentration, the deregulation timeline, misinformation exposure and complaint volumes.
14. Office of the Special Envoy to Combat Islamophobia, A National Response to Islamophobia (2025); the Islamophobia Register Australia; and published content analysis of Australian coverage of Islam and Muslims.
15. Boh Morel, The Arithmetic of Islam, moralsmark.com/memo-the-arithmetic-of-islam (2026).
16. Published Australian research on intergroup contact and prejudice, including the 1,020-respondent Sydney and Melbourne survey, Watt and Larkin (2010) on false consensus, Cernat (2019), Meleady (2021) and Barlow and others (2012).
17. Australian Bureau of Statistics, Schools, 2025, with OECD PISA-based segregation analysis (Gutiérrez 2023; O'Brien and others 2023; Sciffer and others 2026).
18. Migration Act 1958 (Cth) s 501 and Department of Home Affairs FOI release; Australian Citizenship Act 2007 (Cth) as amended in 2023; Alexander v Minister for Home Affairs [2022] HCA 19; Benbrika v Minister for Home Affairs [2023] HCA 33.
19. Published accounts of Richard Walley and Ernie Dingo and the 1976 Perth International Arts Festival ceremony.
20. Department of Defence, ADF Gap Year materials; Australian Army Research Centre analyses; UK Ministry of Defence (December 2025); France Stratégie (2025); and European Solidarity Corps programme materials.
21. Sovereign Australia, The Australian New Deal federal platform (sections 3.5, 3.6 and 8.5) and the Royal Commissions policy; and Memos 2, 14, 18 and 19.