Racism has always been at the core of Australia’s hard culture. A hard culture is one which entrenches meanings of exclusiveness (or uniqueness), resistance to change, hostility towards outsiders, and acceptance of the status quo as normal. Any deviance from the status quo is seen as perverse, undermining “respectable” cultural beliefs.

The recent explosion of so-called Great Replacement Theory into current political campaigns in America, Germany and France is particularly focused on opposing migration, on keeping a country white, ensuring its white population is “unadulterated by foreign blood". It was used cunningly by Donald Trump when he accused especially non-white immigrants of being murderers and rapists and “poisoning” the blood of white Americans.

It is alarming that the racism at the core of Australia’s hard culture and the prejudices of Great Replacement Theory are coming together in some of the rhetoric of Peter Dutton. Dutton has a bad habit of using racist tropes – consider for example his championing of white South African farmers to be given special visas to settle in Australia, his baseless accusations about African gangs terrorising Melbourne’s restaurant goers, his claims that Palestinian refugees are terrorists, and that Sudanese migrants are criminals. These claims are carbon copies of Trump’s lies intended by the recently elected US president to rouse the populist base of the MAGA movement. The hard culture’s racism provides fertile grounds for incubating Great Replacement prejudices, particularly among marginalised people here in Australia and among many complacent Australian voters.

Dutton has lately been ratcheting up his language. In a recent event, sponsored by Sky News, he is reported as saying_: “Why would you bring people in from a war zone, without the requisite checks on a tourist visa, without precedent? Why would you do that? And, knowing that it’s territory controlled by a listed terrorist organisation, why would you expressly push people through the process to receive citizenship in advance of an election, which is pending?”_

None of Dutton’s claims are based on the facts of the matter. There is a strict legal process which, by law, has to be scrupulously followed and which takes at least four years for citizenship to be granted to any foreign person applying for Australian citizenship. In many cases it can take much longer. Visas are not being pushed through for anyone as part of some devious political ploy hastening a pathway to citizenship and allegedly to bolster “left-wing” candidates in the forthcoming federal election. To suggest otherwise is either a blatant lie, or it is based on extreme ignorance of the law­ ­– an odd possibility for a former Minister of Immigration.

In a sinister development, Dutton is slyly echoing some of the worst aspects of Great Replacement propaganda. His anti-immigration speeches — especially those identifying Palestinian refugees — resonat among the victims of policies that he as a member of the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments enthusiastically supported. And his attacks on the public service hints at anti-elitist rhetoric straight from the playbook of Donald Trump. When will he promise to drain the Canberra swamp?

Populism is another core element of Australia’s hard culture. It festers in the minds of people who feel marginalised, ignored, even reviled for who they are. Frequently they are victims of social and economic policies that exclude them from training and educational opportunities. Many are unemployed or under-employed. Some come from dysfunctional and violent families. Some suffer from a wide range of physical and mental injuries. They are resentful of those they see getting ahead of them, particularly when those who are getting ahead come from different ethnic backgrounds. They blame the “elites” whom they accuse of being responsible for their misfortune. They provide a base in which populist propaganda can take root and spread its egregious tentacles into wider society.

The grim fact is that since the 1980s Australian governments — both Labor and the Coalition — have presided over economic policies resulting in a devastating shift of capital into the wealthier sector in the economy, leaving many people marooned in poverty or seriously struggling to survive economically, socially and personally. The “cost of living crisis” is real, very real. It is a stunning fact that it is a crisis that is still not being comprehensively addressed by the Albanese Government or by the Dutton Opposition.

The damage of those policies has been incalculable. But one of the main political outcomes is the attraction to their victims of populist ideas that focus the blame for their marginalisation on “outsiders”. This makes migrants and minority groups in society easy targets. In the populist era of Nazism in Europe, it was the Jews (and let us never forget that antisemitism was not confined simply to Germany). In the days of segregation in the Deep South of the United States, it was black Americans.

Here in Australia it was Aborigines, as demonstrated by the populist rantings of Pauline Hanson. Riding on that wave of anti-Aboriginal prejudice, and following John Howard’s lead, Dutton refused to support the apology to the Stolen Generation delivered in the parliament by Kevin Rudd. Later, an emboldened Dutton mounted his destructive attack on the Voice to Parliament referendum, fuelling the incipient racism that has been one of Australia’s most tragic cultural characteristics since the early days of European settlement. Meanwhile, the grotesque rise in antisemitism in contemporary Australia is being deliberately inflamed by some of the most unconscionable politicians, journalists and media hype this country has ever experienced. Dutton’s contributions to this heinous development have not helped to curb it; maybe they are even intended to subtly encourage it.

It is fashionable among right-wing politicians and commentators to deny that Australia is a fundamentally racist country. They gloss over the dispossession, victimisation and alienation that has been the experience of most Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples since 1788. They forget about the anti-Asian racism directed at Chinese gold seekers in the 1850s and which has festered in Australia’s hard culture ever since. They pretend that the white Australia policy never existed. They offer glib rationales for cutting immigration levels, rationales that feed on side-ways glances at racist beliefs.

Dutton’s flagrant flirtations with the spurious ideology of Great Replacement Theory are feeding into a narrative that, if allowed to succeed, will entrench the racist and populist hardness of Australia’s culture. The country has so much to lose if this happens.