The problem with the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) and the wine and cheeseboard right

What should be the most important issue of the 2025 federal election in Australia?

Nuclear power? Whacking woke? The gender wars? Taxes and costs of living? Some new or existing foreign conflict in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia?

All worthy topics of discussion, no doubt. But there is one matter which dwarfs them all, as it poses by far the most immediate and existential challenge to our nation: mass immigration.

It is also a subject which, while not completely ignored, has still not been treated with the seriousness, urgency, and single-minded focus it deserves among our leaders. This is the case not just in Australia, but a phenomenon across the West.

The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship is a new much-hyped organisation which views itself as promoting new and big thinking for the right-of-centre elite. It is holding its second conference in London next week.

Yet, at its inaugural conference, the subject of mass immigration was barely mentioned. Listening to the speeches there in Canary Wharf, I remember thinking how odd the whole spectacle was considering what was going on in their society outside.

At literally the same time lovely erudite Oxford Union-style lectures were being delivered, a couple of miles down the road there were major protests with the now drearily familiar chants of “Death to Israel”, “River to the Sea” and the like.

The on-going Pakistani grooming gang scandal was somehow not considered sufficiently important to fit on the 3-day programme. I doubt it is an issue that William Wilberforce, a name often invoked from the podium, would have ignored.

Instead of focusing on how immigration had caused these problems, the core message of ARC was that the West just needs a more positive narrative. It is only by “telling a different story,” in their oft-repeated slogan, that we will supposedly solve our problems and shake ourselves out of our current malaise.

But how do they think that is meant to work exactly? Are more sparkling orations and clever op-eds really the answer?

For example, how would our own decent and well-meaning John Andersen go giving a pep talk on the need for greater appreciation for our Judeo-Christian heritage to that angry largely Islamic crowd in the City of London?

Would Jordan Petersen’s clever free style jazz rhetoric, Jungian analysis, and his famous injunctions to “man up” and “clean your room” really make any impact on depraved rapists in former industrial towns of England?

What too is the point of speaking portentously about the West being in a “civilisational moment” if your immigration policy continues to let in mass numbers of people from very different and often hostile civilisations?

Avoiding the subject of immigration may be polite, but it is not intellectually clever.

And it is certainly not politically smart.

A few months after ARC conference, the British Conservative Party suffered one of its worst ever defeats. Many of the speakers lost their seats. Their party was rightly judged to have completely lost control of immigration numbers despite repeatedly promising to do the exact opposite. In the last 20 years more people have been allowed to immigrate to the UK than in the last 2000 years. 13 of those years the Conservatives were in power.

It is the same story across the Anglosphere regardless which team was in charge. In Canada immigration numbers have been so large and skewed towards young men that that country now has a worse male-to-female sex ratio in the 20-29 age bracket than exists in China, Pakistan, or India.

Australia’s population in percentage terms has surged even more than that, indeed more any Western country over the same period. An Adelaide worth of people was dropped on our country in just the last 2 years. We are on track to bring in the population of Darwin and Canberra this year and, it seems, for the foreseeable future. In our capital cities the number of people born overseas is starting to resemble petrostates of the Middle East or tax havens.

America, after being particularly hopeless on this issue, now seems to be finally waking up. Trump’s new Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, now proclaims: “The age of mass migration must end” – referring to both legal and illegal immigration. It is still hard to imagine any political leader in Australia saying the same thing.

Yet others who never get invites to the VIP talkfests have been, consistently. Far away from the wine and cheeseboards, and the sanitised meeting rooms of modern political headquarters, this is the precisely the message which many voters have been trying to deliver for years.

Decent people whose suburbs have been radically transformed without any democratic mandate by mass immigration: Stop it.

Young people who have had their chance of buying a house destroyed and wages decimated: Stop it.

The white British girls in now notorious places like Rotherham, who polite simply society shamefully refused to listen to: Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.

First published in The Spectator 12 February 2025 as “On mass immigration, we need to listen less to elite talkfests, and more to conservatives of the heart” © Dan Ryan 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Dan Ryan is a director of The National Conservative Institute of Australia, a think tank focused on putting the nation-state and traditional conservatism back at the heart of policy formation and decision making in Australia. He's a commercial and technology lawyer with over 20 years of high-level advisory and transactional experience. He has worked as general counsel for technology companies based across the globe and has particular expertise in China and tech in the Asian region. He speaks Mandarin and is a former board member of the Australia-China Council. You can follow him on 𝕏 or read more from his blog here.