Group cohesiveness

And if they don't own assets, if they can't get on the homeownership ladder, then why do they wanna conserve a system that is not serving them? That's one of the reasons why I wrote the book.

I wanted to ring the alarm bells about where we were heading on the economic front in terms of the fragmentation of our society and social cohesion.

We need to restore the promise of Australia.

Right now, it feels the country's a bit off balance.

Mm

...

Antisemitism and Social Cohesion-

Mm

I remember being in school and part of your HSIE or civics curriculum was all around multiculturalism and it was presented as this just unimpeachable good.

I think we have to now acknowledge, or do you think we need to acknowledge now that the multicultural project in Australia has failed and a new approach to how we think about social cohesion needs to be aligned around?

Well, of course.

If the broad majority of the population believes something's broken, then it's broken.

Um, going on, the next one, if the answer to that is yes, then we can go on and ask this.

Uh, does the technology pr- to promote-- Does the technology promote personal contact, social cohesion, and do no harm? So again, I think we can see the importance of this.

Does the technology to promote, um, personal contacts, person-to-person contacts, people have to be working as teams on the ground.

Does it promote social cohesion, or does it cause social destruction? If we've got one people getting some benefit and another people not getting a benefit, then there's clearly the potential for quite a big clash there.

We have to be sensitive to that.

We need to promote social cohesion, and we have to make sure that the technology does no harm.

Just the same as in healthcare, we must do absolutely no harm.

So that is...

In fact, Liberians got so used to the peacekeepers that when the final date of withdrawal was announced, Liberians felt a little uncertain and a little scared.

I was part of a research called the Social Cohesion and Reconciliation Index, and we wanted to understand on the eve of the UN departure, what did Liberians think about about the UN leaving.

And surprisingly, many Liberians, I think a little over 50% at the time, said they wanted the UN mandate to be extended.

That was how insecure Liberians felt at the time.

... and then public lectures and working with other organizations as well.

W- were they about, like, social cohesion, understanding Islam, Muslims understanding themselves?

Yeah, I mean, it was called the engagement, uh, and they're gonna kill me for it.

It was called the ECR project or, um, there was, there was a term for it, and it was multiple projects that-

Mm

... revolved around women, social cohesion, migrant rights, um, education-

Mm-hmm

... literacy s- literacy, um, ramping up people with skills from TAFE.

And so I'm like, I don't really think that that's kind of like a slam dunk.

And I do recall because, remember, we watched the media block of the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion because the ABC editorial leaders and ombudsman also was there.

And the ombudsman was asked specifically about deliberations.

When you – When you get a complaint about something, do you look at it just the article or just the interview or just the story or is it in context? And the ombudsman essentially said that, no, we can only assess individual articles unless the ABC board asks us to look at something more comprehensively.