SYDNEY, Aug. 14 (Xinhua) -- Australia's Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong warned in a speech on Friday that calls for Australia to exist as a monocultural society make the country weaker and more vulnerable.
Wong said in a keynote lecture at the Lowy Institute in Sydney that Australia has only ever existed as a multicultural society, warning that pursuing the "melancholic fantasy of monoculture" would make the nation a more hostile place.
Her comments were a response to populist Senator Pauline Hanson, who in June said that Australia must exist as a monocultural society.
"The call for a monoculture is a call for Australia to curtail our choices and to cut off our connections. To look inwards, to have no friends to work with, no partners to trade with, and no opportunities to grow from," Wong said on Friday.
Hanson's right-wing One Nation party, support for which has risen across Australia in 2026 according to opinion polls, has vowed to cut immigration, reduce foreign aid and withdraw Australia from multilateral institutions if it wins power at the next general election due to be held in 2028.
Polling conducted by YouGov Australia in July found that 26 percent of Australians said they intend to vote for One Nation at the next election, up from the 6.4 percent of votes the party received at the 2025 election.
The same poll found that support for the governing Labor Party has fallen from 34.5 percent at the 2025 election to 28 percent, while voter support for the conservative Coalition has fallen from 31.8 percent to 20 percent.
The annual Lowy Institute poll for 2026, released by the think tank in June, revealed that 55 percent of Australians think the total number of migrants coming into the country is too high, up from 53 percent in 2025 and 48 percent in 2024. ■