There is no doubt that Malcolm’s hold on the Lodge is dependent on how he handles “multiculturalism”, that is, on how he lays down the law on unacceptable behaviours in a society made up of many different peoples from many different backgrounds. And we have the European example right before us of how it is not to be done. Nick Cater discusses just this issue today in an article with the appropriate title, Nightmare behind the diversity dream revealed.

The utopian dreamers who see virtue in diversity seem oblivious to the damage they have done. If only we were nicer to our guests, they insist, then everything would be fine.

The severity of the social fracturing is seldom reflected in the mainstream media. Well-intended journalists and editors are uncomfortable about giving oxygen to the ugly side of multiculturalism. Strict social sanctions have been imposed on anybody breaking the code of niceness.

Now, thanks in part to the internet, the thought police are losing control. On social media, ordinary citizens share information — some of it correct, some little more than rumour — in a space where they no longer feel ashamed to speak their minds.

The mainstream media are in cahoots with the barbarians not at the gates but inside the gates. Cater lists examples of crime explosions caused by the arrival of migrants who have absolutely none of the background cultural understanding of what it takes to live in a modern society. Yet he also notes this about Angela Merkel

Scarily, Germany’s Angela Merkel has responded by preparing to send the thought police into Facebook. “Are you working on this?” she was overheard asking Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg last month. “Yeah,” replied Zuckerberg.

The idea that private thoughts could be expunged on the orders of a German chancellor is too horrible to contemplate. Yet Merkel nurses the delusion that a quick word with Zuckerberg will silence discontent.

Merkel has become a deeply polarising figure, splitting Europeans into opposite camps. There are those who think she deserves the Nobel Peace Prize and those who think she has completely lost the plot.

Progressive internationalism is the socialism of our era, an insane belief that we can all get along through good will alone. A bit of reality would therefore go a long way.

A 2010 study by the Institute for the German Economy found the unemployment rate for those without a German passport is 14 per cent. Among those from Islamic countries it was even higher: 55 per cent for Lebanese migrants, 46 per cent for Iraqis and 28 per cent for Afghans.

Elsewhere in Europe, the picture is much the same; asylum-seekers are far likelier to live off welfare than locals or migrants who arrive by other means.

The same picture — mercifully on a smaller scale — is emerging in Australia.

A study of 8500 entrants under the humanitarian resettlement program conducted by the Gillard government in 2011 found that more than six out of 10 refugees had failed to get a job after five years. Eighty-three per cent received Centrelink payments. As in Europe, those from Islamic countries fared worse. Fewer than one in 10 Iraqi and Afghan refugees had found work; 94 in every 100 were receiving welfare.

“Fared worse” depends on the intent of those who have come here, such as whether their intent was actually to work for a living. And there is nothing merciful about our smaller numbers. That has been through the hard work done to limit those arriving uninvited by boat, not an ounce of which was supported by Labor.

We are not a “multicultural” society. We are an Australian community made up of people from many different backgrounds. We are the freest most open society in the world, and it should be the most pressing imperative of our political class to ensure that we stay just exactly like that. Meanwhile our “well-intentioned journalists and editors” should get out of their bubbles and start to think of how we might ourselves avoid the fate of Europe. For us, it’s still not too late.