Values Proposition
Beyond the cheap politicking, there is a case for a civic orientation programme in Australia.
The Liberal Party in Australia are starting to panic. The success of One Nation at the South Australian state election – securing 22.9% of the vote, mostly at the expense of the Liberals – has been understood as an existential threat to the party. Yet the response has been predictable – to take One Nation’s hostility towards immigration and its culture anxiety and try to dress it up as semi-serious policy.
This has led to the party leader, Angus Taylor, to propose an “Australian Values Migration Plan”, which would prioritise shared values within the country’s immigration program, not just skills or economic need. This would include stronger screening of migrants for alignment with Australian values, and tougher consequences (including removal) for those who don’t adhere to those values.
Taylor identified Australian values as “freedom, respect, fairness, and equality of opportunity,” including commitment to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties. He claimed that migrants from liberal democracies are “more likely to align with Australian values.” This idea argues that political background and institutional familiarity as indicators of compatibility with Australia’s civic framework.
Yet there is a recognisable flaw in this conception. People born in China who migrate to Australia are not coming from a liberal democracy, but they are significantly under-represented in crime statistics relative to their share of the population. While second generation Chinese-Australians are the most upwardly mobile and high-achieving group in the country. How people adjust to liberal democratic societies depends on a range of other factors, it’s not solely about their origin.
Alongside this, Taylor is not really outlining what “Australian values” are if these values are common to other liberal democracies. There’s nothing uniquely Australian in what he stipulated. This may be because it would be incredibly difficult to embody the national traits of a country you’ve never lived in before. But it’s also because the Liberal Party hasn’t really thought through this policy. If it did it would have a little more substance and practical measures. It’s a policy for show, not implementation.
So while I am deeply suspicious of the Liberal Party’s motives – being driven by political panic and cheap politicking, rather than genuine concern for Australia’s social cohesion – I am broadly sympathetic to the idea that there should be a common set of civic understandings and bonds that provide a social glue within a highly multicultural society. Also, to protect Australia’s immigration programme a shared sense of belonging is incredibly important.
Of course, social cohesion is not simply about migrants integrating into a new country, it is a two-way street where there needs to be a friendly and welcoming culture from the native population, with a strong spirit of neighbourliness and empathy for those adjusting to a new environment. There is also a recognition that there are plenty of people who are born in Australia (or New Zealand, as was Australia’s most prominent Neo-Nazi) who don’t conform to these civic values that Taylor identified.
Yet to focus on the issues Taylor has raised, how do you build a civic understanding and commitments within new migrants? Most children of migrants will pick up values and cultural traits at school as part of the everyday interaction with other kids, teachers and the curriculum. While the workplace can also offer a practical environment that can also impart values and cultural traits. Yet work is often fragmented now, with less face-to-face contact. Particularly for the professional classes.
Like most Western countries, over the past decades Australians have drifted away from the community organisations that previously formed the social backbone of the society. This has weakened the civic space that new migrants can connect themselves into (although Indian migration has revitalised Australia’s local cricket clubs).
So there may be the need for a more formal structure to impart this social knowledge.
Since 2022, I’ve been splitting my time between Australia and Sweden, and I’ve become aware of Sweden’s civic orientation classes (Samhällsorientering). Unfortunately, the visa I obtain is a temporary one, so it doesn’t afford me these classes, but I’m actually desperate to get in. Nothing could tickle my fancy more, so I’ve been reading about the programme instead. And I believe there could be a good model for Australia to take inspiration from.
I don’t think I am unique in being someone who would love such classes. There’s a progressive impulse to see such measures as suspicious – as some kind of brainwashing exercise to strip out people’s culture and make them into good little white people. But this is not the case. Most people want to know more about the country they’ve moved to. It is both rational and exciting for them to do so.
Samhällsorientering provides around 100 hours worth of classes for people in their first years of obtaining permanent residency. That is, importantly, before people become citizens.
What Samhällsorientering Teaches:
How the State Works
Structure of government (parliament, government agencies, municipalities).
How laws are made and enforced.
Democracy and Values
Core principles like democracy, equality, and individual rights.
Gender equality and anti-discrimination norms.
Freedom of expression, religion, and association.
This part is quite explicit – Sweden isn’t neutral about values here; it’s trying to socialise newcomers into a liberal democratic framework.
Everyday Life in Sweden (Practical and Social Understanding)
Accessing key services: how to use healthcare, education, childcare, and navigate housing.
Labour market and workplaces: how jobs are structured, expectations at work.
Interacting with authorities: dealing with government agencies, understanding processes, and institutional trust.
Family and legal context: basics of family law, parenting expectations, and children’s rights.
There’s a strong emphasis on the idea that rights and responsibilities go together.
Cultural Norms and Social Expectations
Communication style: generally direct but non-confrontational, with an emphasis on personal space and respect.
Workplace culture: informality, low hierarchy, collaboration, and punctuality.
Gender equality: strong expectations around equal roles in work and parenting.
Individual autonomy: independence in decision-making.
The overall aim is to reduce social friction by making implicit norms explicit. To help participants understand not just what to do, but why Swedish society functions the way it does.
For this, all these aspects of life in Sweden are also given some historical background. Focusing on the key developments that explain modern Sweden:
The evolution of democracy and the welfare state.
Industrialisation and social reform movements.
Sweden’s shift toward gender equality and secularism.
The development of modern institutions and public services.
How Samhällsorientering Is Delivered
Usually in group sessions with discussion-based teaching – albeit guided by fixed content.
Led by trained “civic communicators,” often with migrant backgrounds themselves.
Encouraging questions and comparison with participants’ home countries.
The classes are designed to be delivered in the participant’s strongest language to ensure that the information is best comprehended. With the caveat that there are actually “civic communicators” who can speak this language.
None of this is meant to negate people’s culture – unless that culture conflicts severely with Swedish values (like female genital mutilation). Instead these classes are designed to give people the practical knowledge they need to thrive in Swedish society, including an awareness of local norms. Adjusting yourself to different environments is not the same as having your own culture stripped from you. Knowing what is and isn’t appropriate in different countries is actually a very handy life skill.
For Australia, there is an extra and incredibly important element to why civic orientation classes should be considered – our compulsory voting. The ethos behind compulsory voting is that each citizen should have a broad awareness of the country’s affairs, and to see themselves as responsible participants in these affairs.
Australia’s compulsory voting means that the onus is on the government – via the independent Australian Electoral Commission (and state commissions) – to make it as easy as possible to vote. But making it logistically easy to vote is only one element of this. Australia also has a complicated voting system, using preferential voting (ranked choice), and being one of only four countries to do so at a national level (Ireland, Malta and Papua New Guinea being the others). Australia’s Senate voting ballot is additionally complex, giving you two choices on how to cast a ballot (rank six parties, or rank every individual candidate – the latter clearly being the most fun).
Therefore making it easy to vote also requires giving the public the requisite knowledge to fill in a ballot correctly. Here there is a recognisable problem. The Australian Electoral Commission has just published a review of the large number of informal votes at the 2025 federal election – that is, people who didn’t fill out a ballot in a way that can be counted. Of the ten electorates with the highest number of informal votes eight have large percentages of people from migrant backgrounds.
It is perfectly legal to spoil your ballot to register discontent, but the report concluded that 73% of people attempted to vote correctly, but failed to place a number next to each candidate. Indicating a low knowledge of the correct procedure.
Most people will come to Australia from countries that do not have compulsory voting and therefore may have never voted before. Or may have come from countries without elections at all. People who have voted in their countries of origin before would probably just have had to tick a single box, rather than rank every candidate. Therefore, the government has a responsibility to provide people with the knowledge of how the system works so they can fulfil the civic duty that compulsory voting expects.
This, as well as broader civic knowledge, is incredibly important for migrants to be able to fully participate in Australian society. But civic orientation programmes also send an important signal to the native population that the country has an “operating system” which citizens plug themselves into. It can help cool the passions of those who are struggling with cultural anxiety.
I suspect the Australian government understands this all in theory, but the problem is political, rather than one of policy. Australian politicians lack the communication skills to actually explain complex ideas with clarity, and they are – or at least the Labor Party are – petrified of advancing policies that they believe could be misconstrued. Even with their current large majority and the fragmenting of Australian politics that will play to their advantage.
While the Liberal Party are especially terrible at selling such propositions because like all conservative parties they have an obsession with “toughness”, believing it to be a signal of “strong leadership” and “moral clarity”. When instead it just makes them look like pricks. And now they’ve just gone and made any discussion around civic values toxic to a large percentage of the population.
The key political lesson of our era is that everything is Nixon-in-China if you want to get something important done – that is, all policy solutions come from persuading your own “base” of the merits of a proposal that they would be instinctively opposed to. Which places the idea of building stronger civic commitments and bonds in the hands of the Labor Party – if they can withstand the inevitable bad faith hysterics from the Greens.
Liberalism is often mischaracterised as a philosophy of pure individual autonomy, but its survival depends on something more demanding: a citizenry that has actually internalised cooperative habits. A free society is not self-sustaining, it requires people who show up, who trust institutions, who feel a strong stake in the national project.
This is the paradox at the heart of much contemporary progressive politics. It speaks the language of community, solidarity, and mutual care, yet is instinctively suspicious of the very mechanisms – like civic orientation programmes, national service, shared public rituals – that might actually cultivate these behaviours. This leaves a political space open for the Liberal Party who think they can build community spirit with fists instead of flowers.
It’s a battle of two idiocies.
Australia has a genuine and pressing case for civic orientation: a highly multicultural society, a compulsory voting system that demands a high degree of literacy, and a weakened community infrastructure that once did this work informally.
The policy architecture should not be complicated, as Australia has the ability to understand and adapt civic orientation models like Sweden’s. What is missing is a political party willing to make the argument outside of cheap political calculations. To promote the idea of strong civic bonds with sophistication, kindness and care. As the current government this opportunity belongs to Labor, although it seems unlikely they’ll have the courage to take it.