Australian Values: Do We Really Have a Consensus?

In fact, the Australian Government has already established an official definition of “Australian values.” Everyone applying for an Australian visa is required to sign the Australian Values Statement, committing to respect and uphold Australia’s fundamental values. The statement outlines a number of core principles, including respect for individual freedom and dignity, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the rule of law, and democracy. It also emphasises that everyone should enjoy equal opportunity regardless of their gender, race, religion, age, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnic background.

The government’s official definition also explains one of the concepts most frequently associated with Australian society: “Fair Go.” The idea extends beyond mutual respect and tolerance for others. It also emphasises empathy and care for those in need, while ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to compete on a level playing field and achieve upward social mobility. In addition, English is defined as Australia’s national language and is regarded as the common foundation for communication, social cohesion, and national unity.

Beyond signing the Values Statement, all applicants for Australian citizenship are also required to pass the citizenship test, which includes five compulsory questions on Australian values. The government’s official resource, Australian Citizenship: Our Common Bond, further sets out the same core principles contained in the Australian Values Statement, providing detailed explanations of each of these values.

Do Australians Know What Australian Values Are?

Although the Australian Government has established a clear official definition of “Australian values” and reinforces it through the Australian Values Statement and the citizenship test, this does not necessarily mean that all Australians truly understand what these values entail—let alone share a common understanding of them.

At the political level, there are clear differences in how Australian values are interpreted. Pauline Hanson, leader of One Nation, advocates returning to a “monocultural” framework, closely linking Australian values with assimilation, the English language, and cultural conformity, and using this as justification for tightening immigration policies. By contrast, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese presents a more inclusive and multicultural interpretation, arguing that the core of Australian values lies in respecting diversity and upholding fairness, rather than requiring cultural homogeneity.

However, these differences are not confined to politicians. Even within Australian society, there is no clear or consistent understanding of what Australian values actually mean. For example, “Fair Go” is often regarded as one of the defining Australian values, yet people interpret it in very different ways.

According to the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes conducted by a team of Australian researchers, when respondents were asked what “Fair Go” meant to them, the answers reflected a wide range of—and sometimes conflicting—interpretations. Some viewed it as equal opportunity and non-discrimination, while others emphasised the relationship between effort and reward. Still others extended the concept to fairness in social welfare and the distribution of public resources.

Further evidence came from a public opinion survey conducted by DemosAU in January this year, which found that there is, in fact, no single social consensus on what constitutes Australian values. When respondents were asked an open-ended question about what Australian values meant to them, the answers varied considerably. The most common response was “respect and kindness,” followed by “equality and fairness.” Other frequently mentioned values included community spirit, friendship and “mateship,” as well as peaceful coexistence. At the same time, some respondents believed that Australian values were disappearing altogether, while others said they simply did not know how to answer.

In other words, even under the same official government framework, Australian values continue to be interpreted differently across both politics and society, rather than existing as a clearly defined and universally accepted set of shared principles.

How Australia’s Immigration History Shaped Australian Values

To understand what we now call “Australian values,” it is not enough to look solely at government policies or political rhetoric. We must instead return to Australia’s immigration history and examine how these values were formed.

Australia did not evolve naturally as a single-culture nation. Rather, it is a society that has been gradually built through successive waves of migration across different historical periods. As a result, Australian values have never been a fixed or static concept. They have been continually redefined alongside changing migration patterns and evolving social experiences.

The earliest chapter of Australian society can be traced back to Britain’s convict transportation system. In 1788, large numbers of British convicts were transported to Australia, where they rebuilt their lives in a distant colony. Throughout this process, the ideas of hard work and freedom gradually became embedded in the emerging social culture. As the colony became more stable, Australia’s institutions continued to develop from the British system, laying the foundation for its future democratic governance.

The nineteenth-century gold rush then attracted migrants from around the world, including Europeans, Americans, and Chinese miners. Amid competition for resources and cooperation within mining communities, a social culture emerged that emphasised opportunity and social mobility.

During this period, many of the principles that are now regarded as core Australian values began to take shape, including equal opportunity, anti-elitism, and the spirit of fair competition. In particular, within mining communities, the belief that “those who work hard should be rewarded” gradually evolved into what is now widely recognised as the idea of a “Fair Go.”

In the twentieth century, the White Australia Policy imposed assimilation policies that restricted non-European immigration for decades, resulting in a relatively homogeneous cultural landscape for a period of time. However, as immigration policies gradually liberalised after the Second World War, large numbers of migrants from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East arrived in Australia, making multiculturalism an undeniable national reality. During this period, inclusiveness, multicultural coexistence, and respect for cultural diversity gradually became part of Australia’s understanding of its own values.

Today’s Australian values are therefore the cumulative product of different waves of migration and historical experience: from the resilience and pursuit of freedom demonstrated by transported convicts, to the spirit of fair opportunity fostered during the gold rush, and later to the coexistence and inclusiveness that emerged within a multicultural society. In other words, Australian values do not originate from a single source; they have been collectively shaped by migrants from different backgrounds and different eras.

Recognising First Nations: Australian Values Beyond the Colonial Narrative

It is worth noting that Australia’s understanding of its own identity has undergone an important period of historical reflection in recent years. Increasingly, Australians have come to recognise that the First Nations peoples—including Aboriginal peoples and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who have lived on this land for more than 60,000 years—are the original custodians of the continent and the holders of its oldest continuous cultures. This recognition is more than a symbolic cultural gesture; it represents Australia’s growing willingness to re-examine the nation’s founding history and acknowledge the harm and inequalities inflicted upon Indigenous peoples through colonisation.

For much of Australia’s modern history, national identity was largely built around the legacy of British colonisation. The English language, British institutions, and European culture were regarded as the primary foundations of Australian society. However, with the development of multiculturalism, Australia has gradually come to recognise that a truly fair national identity should not be based on the dominance of a single culture, but should instead embrace both the original history of this land and the cultural experiences brought by successive waves of migrants.

In recent years, Australia’s Multicultural Framework has further emphasised that First Nations cultures are a fundamental part of Australia’s shared national identity. Rather than treating Indigenous Australians as simply one of many cultural groups within a multicultural society, the framework recognises their foundational place in Australia’s history and culture, while promoting more meaningful reconciliation, cultural safety, and social participation. In other words, Australia has begun to move away from a one-way model of asking migrants to integrate into Australia, towards a two-way understanding of how different communities collectively shape Australia.

This shift also reflects a deeper commitment to Australia’s values of freedom, democracy, and the rule of law. A healthy democracy is not only about protecting the rights of the majority; it also requires acknowledging the voices of those who have historically been marginalised and responding to historical injustice through institutional reform. In this sense, recognising First Nations peoples represents an important sign of Australia’s democratic maturity and its willingness to critically reflect on its own history.

Viewed from a broader historical perspective, everyone who has come to Australia over the past two centuries—whether early British settlers, transported convicts, European and Asian gold miners, or today’s migrants from around the world—arrived after the First Nations peoples. Consequently, when some political narratives attempt to define Anglo-white culture as the only authentic expression of Australian values, this historical perspective exposes the limitations of such claims.

Today’s Australian values are therefore not inherited from a single cultural tradition. Rather, they have evolved through the interaction of more than 60,000 years of First Nations history, the experience of colonisation, successive waves of migration, and the ongoing development of a multicultural society. At its core, Australian identity is no longer defined by who arrived first, but by how the nation acknowledges its history while building a society founded on freedom, democracy, the rule of law, inclusiveness, and equal opportunity.

Can Administrative Measures Really Shape Shared Values?

Although the Australian Government has established an official framework defining “Australian values” and incorporated it into the visa and citizenship process, does it truly represent the shared values of all Australians? From an institutional perspective, the government requires applicants to understand and commit to these values through official study materials, the Australian Values Statement, and standardized citizenship tests. However, this top-down, administrative approach to defining values raises an important question: can a set of official documents and examinations truly enable people to understand and genuinely identify with the core values of a society?

More recently, Liberal Party leader Angus Taylor proposed introducing a legally binding “Australian Values Statement” into migration law, making it a core requirement for obtaining a visa. He also argued that visa holders who breached these behavioural standards should face visa cancellation and deportation. At the same time, he criticised the Labor government’s migration policy as being too lenient, arguing that migration screening should be strengthened and entry requirements tightened to ensure migrants better align with Australian values.

The fundamental issue, however, is that even Australians themselves do not necessarily share a common understanding of what “Australian values” actually mean. If there is no clear consensus among the broader Australian public, it is reasonable to question whether migrants from different cultural backgrounds—particularly those from non-democratic societies—can truly change, embrace, and internalise these values in their daily lives simply by reading government materials, signing a declaration, or passing a citizenship test. This assumption itself deserves closer examination.

Australian Values Cannot Be Reduced to a Textbook

Under Australia’s current migration policy, the government primarily adopts an information transmission model to establish shared values. Through official documents, value statements, and standardized citizenship tests, new migrants are expected to “understand and accept” Australian values as part of the migration process.

However, from the perspective of communication theory, the formation of values is not simply a process of receiving information. Rather, it is a process of meaning-making, in which understanding is constructed through interaction, lived experience, and social relationships.

A migrant may be able to answer every question in the citizenship test, but that does not necessarily mean they truly understand how freedom, democracy, or fairness operate in Australian society. Values are not like legal provisions that can be fully internalised through reading and examination. Instead, they are gradually developed through everyday interactions with people from different backgrounds, participation in public life, and first-hand experience of how institutions function.

To some extent, the current policy assumes that Australian values are a complete and fixed set of principles that simply need to be transmitted from the government to new migrants. Yet Australia’s own history demonstrates the opposite: national values have never been static. They have continuously evolved through the interactions of different communities.

From more than 60,000 years of First Nations cultural heritage, to the colonial era, and later waves of migration that brought diverse cultural experiences to Australia, the values that Australia now upholds—freedom, democracy, the rule of law, and equal opportunity—are themselves the product of long-term social negotiation.

If Australia genuinely seeks to build a shared sense of national values, administrative procedures and standardized testing alone are insufficient to reflect the realities of a multicultural society.

The real question is not whether migrants know Australian values, but whether they are given the opportunity to experience them within Australian society.

Intercultural Democracy: Understanding Values Through Interaction

Compared with a one-way information transmission model, Australia needs to develop a form of intercultural democracy that places interaction at its core.

Intercultural democracy is not merely about allowing different cultural groups to coexist peacefully. Rather, it involves designing institutions that create opportunities for ongoing dialogue, collaboration, and participation in public affairs among diverse communities. Values are not standards imposed from the top down; they are social understandings gradually formed through people living together, inspiring one another, and influencing one another through everyday interaction. In this context, the role of government is no longer simply to tell people what “Australian values” are, but to create opportunities for people to understand, through practical participation, why these values are worth upholding collectively.

This also means that policy design should shift from excluding those who do not conform to encouraging shared participation. For example, governments could promote intercultural community collaboration programs that encourage new migrants and local residents to participate together in Rural Fire Service (RFS) activities, community kitchens, youth mentoring programs, and local governance initiatives. By working together to address social issues, participants do not merely learn about fairness, responsibility, mateship, and mutual support in theory; they experience these values in practice.

Governments could also establish honour and incentive mechanisms to encourage participation. Initiatives such as an Intercultural Excellence in Participation Award or a Community Inclusion Points Scheme could recognise the contributions of both migrants and local residents who engage in community activities. Recognition might include official certificates, public service benefits, or other forms of acknowledgement. In addition, residents from different backgrounds could be encouraged to work together to solve local issues, thereby gaining a deeper understanding of democracy, the rule of law, and equal participation, while putting the principle of Fair Go into practice through cooperation and shared outcomes.

More importantly, these policies should not be designed solely to help migrants integrate; they should enable the whole society to participate in the construction of shared values. Intercultural democracy does not require migrants to unilaterally adopt mainstream culture. Local Australians can also, through interaction, gain a renewed appreciation of the cultural resources, life experiences, and global perspectives that migrants bring. Genuine integration is not a process in which one group changes another; it is a process of mutual growth through two-way interaction, allowing Australian values to continue evolving alongside society.

Ultimately, Australian values should not exist merely as answers in a textbook. They should be lived experiences practiced in communities, schools, workplaces, and public life. Intercultural democracy enables people from different backgrounds to engage in ongoing dialogue, negotiation, and shared decision-making, thereby gradually understanding what Australia is, rather than simply being told what Australia should be. Values understood through interaction are no longer cold and rigid migration requirements; they become living Australian values that are practiced in daily life and continue to evolve over time.

Australian Values Should Not Become a Political Tool

However, as Australia rethinks how to foster intercultural dialogue, it must also be alert to a growing concern: a set of values originally shaped through history, migration, and democratic practice is increasingly being appropriated by some politicians as a tool for winning votes.

In recent years, some politicians have deliberately simplified complex social issues in order to appeal to voters’ anxieties. Through emotionally charged rhetoric, they have framed immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity as issues of conflict and division. They have redefined “Australian values” as a narrow cultural standard, implying that only those who conform to a particular language, culture, or background truly belong in Australian society. Such narratives not only ignore Australia’s history as a nation built by migration, but also dismiss the contributions that diverse communities have made to Australian society over many decades.

Pauline Hanson’s call for a return to a “monocultural” Australia exemplifies this approach. It reduces Australian values to an exclusive identity rather than recognising them as a set of shared principles that continue to evolve within a democratic society. This form of populist politics amplifies fear and public anxiety, portraying migrants as the cause of housing pressures and rising living costs, while avoiding deeper structural issues such as policy failures, economic conditions, and governance challenges.

Yet in the face of this political narrative, the major parties have largely responded passively. Although Angus Taylor criticised One Nation’s proposals as inconsistent, he has failed to put forward a clearer and more inclusive vision of Australian values. In doing so, he has also avoided the responsibility of shaping a more constructive national conversation.

Australian values have never belonged to any single cultural or ethnic group, nor should they be redefined or manipulated by politicians for electoral gain. To genuinely uphold Australian values is not to divide society into “us” and “them” through fear and confrontation, but to continue strengthening the foundations of understanding, mutual respect, and shared participation within a democratic society.