Before a visa is granted, most applicants over 18 must sign a short declaration. It is called the Australian Values Statement, and it commits them to respect the freedom and dignity of the individual, freedom of religion, freedom of speech and association, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality of opportunity, a \u201cfair go\u201d, and the English language as the national language.<\/p>\n
I have no quarrel with any of it. That is rather the problem.<\/p>\n
The statement was introduced in 2007. It was rewritten in 2020 to add an undertaking to make reasonable efforts to learn English. In September 2025 it was re-made again \u2014 this time the wording was left untouched and only the list of visa subclasses changed. Eighteen years, three instruments, and almost nothing has moved.<\/p>\n
In that time Australia has legalised same-sex marriage, held a referendum on Indigenous recognition, absorbed millions of new permanent and long-term residents, and watched two overseas conflicts play out on its own streets. The 2020 revision added sexual orientation and disability to the equality clause, which was something. Beyond that, the words have barely moved.<\/p>\n
The deeper weakness is not that the statement is old. It is that it was built to be unobjectionable.<\/p>\n
Ask almost anyone, anywhere on earth, whether they value fairness, dignity, and the rule of law, and they will say yes.<\/p>\n
I have argued before that the real divergence between societies is rarely in the values people profess. It is in how those values are interpreted and what practices they permit. A man who believes deeply in family honour and a man who believes deeply in individual freedom will both sign a document praising \u201crespect for the dignity of the individual\u201d. They will disagree violently about whether a daughter may choose her own husband.<\/p>\n
So a statement of abstractions asks nothing of anyone. It cannot be failed. It cannot be argued with. And it gives a new arrival no useful information about what Australia actually expects, because the things Australians actually argue about do not appear in it at all.<\/p>\n
There is a lazy framing in this debate: you are either for multiculturalism or against it. Uniculture or multiculture, pick a side.<\/p>\n
Nobody actually lives at either pole. A pure uniculture would mean no Greek Orthodox Easter, no Diwali, no Vietnamese in Cabramatta, no Chinese New Year in Sydney \u2014 an Australia almost none of us wants and which never existed anyway. A pure multiculture, taken to its logical extreme, would mean any practice at all, however harmful, protected by the fact that someone\u2019s grandmother did it.<\/p>\n
Everyone real sits somewhere along the line between them. And the line is not one dimension but dozens. A person can be enthusiastically pluralist about food, festivals, dress and language while being uncompromising about the age of consent. Another can be relaxed about polygamy but appalled by religious schools. These positions do not stack neatly into Left and Right.<\/p>\n
What follows is my attempt at a full inventory of the places where that line actually gets drawn. Some of these are settled in law and near-universally agreed. Some are genuinely contested. Some are barely discussed at all. That is precisely the point: the current statement does not distinguish between them, because it does not mention any of them.<\/p>\n
That is around 50 items. A new arrival could sign the current statement in full sincerity and hold almost any combination of views on them.<\/p>\n
I am not arguing that all 50 belong in a visa declaration. Most do not. A statement should be short enough to read and mean something. I am arguing three narrower things.<\/p>\n
Firstly, it should say what is actually required, not what is admired. There is a difference between \u201cAustralia values equality of opportunity\u201d and \u201cin Australia a woman chooses whether, when and whom she marries, and no family, community or religious authority may override that choice.\u201d The second tells you something. The first is wallpaper.<\/p>\n
Secondly, it should be honest about which items are settled and which are contested. Child marriage is settled. Religious school funding is not. A statement that flattens both into vague affirmation teaches a newcomer nothing about how Australians actually argue \u2014 which is, in the end, the most important civic skill we could ask them to acquire.<\/p>\n
Third, and most importantly, the public should be asked. The current text was drafted by officials and signed into effect by a minister. It has never been tested against what Australians actually think. There are established mechanisms for this: a citizens\u2019 assembly, deliberative polling, a parliamentary inquiry with genuine reach beyond the usual submitters. Indigenous Australians would need to be in the room, not consulted afterwards, because the question of what is core to this country is not one that can be settled by the newest arrivals and the second-oldest alone.<\/p>\n
Indonesia, where I have lived and worked for much of my life, has Pancasila \u2014 five principles that every schoolchild learns and every citizen can recite. One can criticise how it has been used. But it is publicly known, publicly taught and publicly contested. Australia\u2019s equivalent is a form that only foreigners read.<\/p>\n
I should say plainly where this argument is vulnerable. It could become a wedge. A consultation on national values, run badly or run cynically, would be an invitation for the worst instincts in our politics. That risk is real. It is not, I think, an argument for leaving the question permanently unasked. But it is an argument for who runs the process and how.<\/p>\n
It could be aimed at one group. Almost every list of this kind, including mine, ends up read as a list about Muslims. That is why I have deliberately included the items that point elsewhere \u2014 religious school exemptions, the confessional, caste, Indigenous customary law, vaccination refusal, Australia Day. If a values conversation only ever interrogates the newest and most visible minority, it is not a values conversation. It is something else wearing its clothes.<\/p>\n
Majorities are not always liberal. A genuinely public process might produce a document less tolerant than the one we have. Deliberative formats tend to moderate this, but the risk cannot be waved away.<\/p>\n
And values cannot be created by signature. Nobody was ever made decent by a declaration. The statement\u2019s real function is to state a position, not to change a heart.<\/p>\n
All true. But the alternative is what we have now: a document that binds only the powerless, that no citizen has read, that says nothing anyone could disagree with, and that answers none of the questions we are in fact fighting about.A country is entitled to say what it stands for. It is entitled to ask that of newcomers.<\/p>\n
But it should have the courage to work out the answer in public first \u2014 and then to hold itself to the same standard it demands at the border.<\/p>\n
Right now we ask migrants to sign a statement of values that Australians themselves have never been asked to agree on. That is not a test of their commitment.<\/p>\n
It is a measure of our avoidance.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Published 28 August 2026.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n This article has been republished with the permission of the author.\u00a0It originally appeared on his Substack<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n