How to undermine social cohesion: A guide from Australia's political elites

Pro-Palestine rally outside Sydney Town Hall, 21 October 2023. Photo: Bookish Worm, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Social cohesion has become one of the most contested terms in Australian political discourse. Following the Bondi Junction attack, Prime Minister Albanese invoked the term at least 35 times by March 13, 2026, with opposition leaders barely far behind. The Albanese government appointed Labor MP Peter Khalil as Special Envoy for Social Cohesion in July 2024, alongside separate envoys to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia. ASIO’s Director-General, in his 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, listed Palestine solidarity protests alongside “division” and “undermined social cohesion” as consequences of the Middle East conflict, placing protest within a national security framing. The Scanlon Foundation’s 2024 report, cited by the government itself, found that social cohesion had remained stable over the previous twelve months but was below its long-term average, a decline that predates the Palestine solidarity protests by years. The bipartisan deployment of social cohesion discourse has been primarily directed at suppressing those protests, managing diaspora political expression, and demanding conformity to a set of values whose consistent application would require something quite different from what those deploying the term are willing to deliver.

There is a tendency on the left to respond to social cohesion discourse by simply dismissing it as a mechanism of social control, captured, for instance, in Diane Fieldes’ analysis in Red Flag, which represents a common response within the Australian far-left. While the bipartisan deployment of the term definitely has this quality, dismissing it entirely risks foreclosing a more powerful critique, and ceding the ground of what a genuinely cohesive society looks like to more conservative forces. This piece argues for a different approach: taking seriously what genuine social cohesion would actually require, and using that standard to expose the hypocrisy of its current deployment. The discourse fails not just because it is being used as a weapon, but because it consistently undermines the very conditions it claims to be protecting.

What social cohesion actually means

Those invoking social cohesion in response to Palestine solidarity protests have a simple solution in mind: stop the protests. But beyond being a fundamentally undemocratic impulse, this approach fundamentally misunderstands both social cohesion as a concept and how protests function within it. To understand why, it is worth examining what social cohesion actually means.

Social cohesion is a sociological concept with its roots in the work of French sociologist Emile Durkheim and the US structural functionalist Talcot Parsons. At the centre of this theoretical framework is a view that within modern societies social unity is a normal state, and that social conflict reflects something being wrong in society. That is, visible social conflict, such as protests, is a symptom of deeper social problems within the society. Social cohesion within this framework is the glue and social solidarity that holds a society together. It is based upon the extent that people feel trust, solidarity, connectedness, and sense of belonging. Modern states have used this concept to promote shared values that they see as their base of cohesion. The Australian government has developed an Australian Values Statement that visa applicants are required to agree to:

• respect for the freedom and dignity of the individual;

• freedom of religion (including the freedom not to follow a particular religion), freedom of speech, and freedom of association;

• commitment to the rule of law, which means that all people are subject to the law and should obey it;

• parliamentary democracy whereby our laws are determined by parliaments elected by the people, those laws being paramount and overriding any other inconsistent religious or secular “laws”;

• equality of opportunity for all people, regardless of their gender, sexual orientation, age, disability, race, or national or ethnic origin;

• a ‘fair go’ for all that embraces:

  • mutual respect;

  • tolerance;

  • compassion for those in need;

  • equality of opportunity for all;

• the English language as the national language, and as an important unifying element of Australian society.

While this is an effort to construct and assert shared values from the outside, and as such should be seen as imagined shared values, Australian political discourse is often informed by at least some of these values, although as I have previously noted the Australian Labor Party’s discourse in relation to progressive patriotism tends to treat these values as uncontested and unproblematic. What goes unspoken in much of the discourse in relation to social cohesion, but central to the theoretical framework, is that social cohesion acts against dynamics of modern society that tend to pull society apart. Particularly that modern societies are riven by inequality, both in terms of economic inequality and in terms of access to political power and cultural capital. This inequality makes people feel like they are not really a part of society, or that the promise of the shared values does not apply to them.

The uncomfortable tension at the heart of the concept

This tension can give rise to a view from sections of the left that social cohesion should be rejected as purely an expression of cultural hegemony in the Gramscian sense. While there are undoubtedly aspects of control in the promulgation of social cohesion discourse, for it to have genuine impact, to actually hold society together in the way envisioned within the structural functionalist framework, it has to have some material foundation. Moreover, those values would need to have an organic life of their own, which we can see in popular Australian discourse. Social cohesion discourse is not simply imposed from above; it captures and channels something real in people’s experience of social fragmentation, even as it misidentifies its cause.

Whose values, whose belonging

The mainstream political hostility to Palestinian solidarity protests draws into sharp relief the question of whether these are genuinely shared values, not because the protesters reject them, but because the hostility itself reveals a view that Palestinians are not deserving of the benefits of these “shared Australian values”. This is not a new tension. It is a tension at the core of the Australian colonial settler state that has consistently viewed some people as undeserving of the benefits of the “social contract”. Most notably Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, who were first dispossessed and then marginalised and excluded. The selective character of the policy was made starkly visible by the Kisch incident of 1934, in which Egon Kisch, a Czech anti-fascist journalist, was denied entry to Australia under the Immigration Restriction Act by being administered a dictation test in Scottish Gaelic. The High Court found that Scottish Gaelic was not a European language under the Act. A deliberately narrow ruling that resolved the specific case without challenging the broader legislative architecture of the White Australia Policy. The mechanism of arbitrary exclusion was ruled invalid while the power to exclude arbitrarily was preserved.

The selective character of the social cohesion framework is further illustrated by the appointment of Jillian Segal as Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism alongside Peter Khalil’s social cohesion role. Advance Australia, one of the most prominent drivers of the No campaign against the Voice to Parliament, a campaign that actively undermined social cohesion by casting Aboriginal Australians as a threat to other Australians’ rights, and a group that has described Palestinians in Australia as a “risk to security”, received a $50,000 donation from a trust linked to Segal’s husband. The revelation drew calls for her resignation from the Lebanese Muslim Association, the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network, and the Jewish Council of Australia, with the Lebanese Muslim Association stating that her household had been aligned with a group that “actively undermines the very goals she claims to champion: social cohesion, tolerance, and the fight against hate.” The government’s response, that it was a matter for Segal herself, revealed that the social cohesion framework does not extend to scrutinising the political alignments of those appointed to enforce it, nor to the activities of organisations that produce the very conditions it claims to be preventing.

Protest is not the problem; it is the evidence

This is not simply an external critique. The system has explicitly recognised protest as both a right and an appropriate mechanism for political change. The Australian Values Statement itself enshrines freedom of speech and freedom of association. The High Court has recognised an implied freedom of political communication in the Constitution. The international human rights instruments Australia has ratified commit to the right to peaceful assembly. Within the system’s own framework, protest is not a threat to social cohesion, it is one of its expressions.

This lack of commitment to the shared values by the Australian elites is also demonstrated by the hostility to the protests themselves. From a structural functionalist perspective, protests do not cause a breakdown in social cohesion, they are symptoms of pressures on cohesion. Banning them does not address those pressures; it is likely to make them worse. This is primarily because protests are a sign of faith in the shared values: in articulating dissatisfaction with a situation, people are expressing a belief that the system can and will be responsive, which is a core commitment of liberalism, on which Australia’s shared political values are supposedly premised. Banning protests makes clear that those doing so don’t actually hold those values.

Banning protests will not stop the expressions of concern that drive them, anger at Israel’s actions in Gaza, solidarity with Palestinians, it will simply change their form. A ban may reduce overall numbers, but in doing so it distils participation to those prepared for confrontation, raising an immediate question for the state: when people defy the ban, does it pull back or move to brutalise and arrest?

This is precisely the dilemma the Starmer Labour government faced after it banned Palestine Action. Far from stopping protests or ending sympathy for the organisation, the ban produced an escalation of demonstrations with explicit public support for Palestine Action. The police response, large-scale arrests that included many pensioners, created a situation in which a number of arrestees have been on weeks-long hunger strikes, with some in potentially life-threatening situations. None of this has cooled the situation in Britain. It has made it substantially worse. The High Court subsequently ruled the ban disproportionate, finding that the Home Secretary had failed to properly account for the impact on the right to protest. Cnfirming within the system’s own legal framework precisely what critics had argued: that suppressing legitimate political expression violated the system’s own stated commitments.

Even if bans on protests or specific slogans, such as Queensland’s prohibition on “from the river to the sea” and “globalise the intifada”, under which two protesters were arrested on the day the laws came into effect, were successful in suppressing those specific expressions, that would not be a sign of a return of social cohesion. It would simply be opposition going subterranean. Which is what happens in dictatorial societies, and which results, as history repeatedly demonstrates, in a more determined and explosive articulation of opposition when it does eventually resurface. This is precisely what Kennedy warned when he observed that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”

What genuine social cohesion would actually require

For these reasons, responding to assertions about the importance of social cohesion, or anxiety about its breakdown, it is a mistake to reject the concept outright. This cedes the ground of discussing and valuing a cohesive society to more conservative forces. Far better would be to draw out what a truly cohesive society would look like, to highlight their lack of genuine commitment to social cohesion and how they deploy the discourse as a mechanism of control. Mainstream criminological research confirms that coercive laws cannot build social cohesion. They can only reduce some threats to it, and risk undermining the very goals they aim to achieve when they clamp down on democratic participation. What genuine social cohesion actually requires, as Keiran Hardy and Rebecca Wickes of Griffith University argue, are the positive conditions of trust, social mobility, economic equality, democratic participation, and belonging. A truly cohesive society would be one that takes seriously what its own stated values actually require. The Values Statement’s commitment to a “fair go” is not merely rhetorical. It implies genuine equality of opportunity: the material conditions for social mobility, freedom from discrimination in employment and housing, access to healthcare and education regardless of background, and the ability for all members of society to live a comfortable and dignified life. It implies that diaspora communities’ political attachments are treated with the same respect as those of the Anglo-Australian mainstream. And it implies that protest, the most system-affirming form of political expression available, is not merely tolerated but welcomed as evidence that people still believe the system is capable of responding to their concerns. A society that suppresses that expression while failing to deliver on the material conditions its own values require has not achieved social cohesion. It has simply demanded compliance while withholding the conditions that would make genuine belonging possible. An antisemitism envoy whose household funds an organisation that targets Palestinian and Muslim Australians and actively undermined First Nations political representation is not an anomaly in this framework, she is its logical expression.