Australia is drifting into a political age where culture wars no longer appear as noise at the edges of public life, but as a key organising principle of politics itself.
They flourish in a political and media environment finely tuned to provoke outrage, harden belief, and prize the comfort of moral certainty over the slower, more vulnerable work of reflection.
Culture wars demand certainty. They reduce complex, multifaceted issues into rigid binaries, where to hesitate, to question, is to show weakness or disloyalty to the cause. In this world, complexity is not a virtue but a threat, and doubt, which could spark genuine reflection, is treated as a betrayal of moral clarity. The beauty of nuance is lost, replaced by the simplicity of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’
Consider Australia Day. Or is it Invasion Day?
Well it depends on the allegiance one is compelled to declare. Is it a celebration of nationhood, or a reckoning with a history shaped, in part, by dispossession and injustice? The uncomfortable truth is that it is both. Yet culture wars offer no space for such ambiguity. They demand clarity, even when it is a false clarity. They insist on allegiance, even when that allegiance requires the sacrifice of truth.
The protester who rallies against immigration refuses to trace his logic to its roots, where he, too, is a product of migration. His own lineage perhaps not shaped by a government-approved visa, as those he wants removed, but by conquest and dispossession, buried truths he is unwilling to confront or content to look past.
Yet, paradoxically, he has every right to protest and hold the views he does. In a democratic society, the right to control immigration is fundamental, and it is precisely this right that allows for such dissent.
In the realm of culture wars, subtlety and ambiguity are the first casualties. If one were to encounter the pro-choice or pro-life arguments for the first time, it would not be difficult to persuade someone that a baby is merely a fetus, or just as easily to convince them that a fetus is already a baby.
Language becomes not only a tool of persuasion, but the very lens through which we construct reality. Terms like ‘fetus’ and ‘unborn’ are not neutral; they carry moral weight. ‘Fetus’ comes from the Latin ‘little one’, a word that evokes tenderness, singularity, and a sense of innocence. In contrast, the clinical use of ‘fetus’ often carries a cold, detached tone. Similarly, ‘unborn’ may be technically accurate, but its brevity reduces the complexity of life to mere absence, stripping away its mystery. These terms, while simple, invite reductionist thinking and foster utilitarian frameworks that obscure the deeper moral questions at play.
Pro-life arguments
At its core, the pro-choice argument asserts that women should have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. Autonomy is fundamental to human dignity, and any society that fails to protect this autonomy fails its citizens.
On the other hand, pro-life arguments emphasise the moral responsibility of the mother and legal responsibility of the state to protect life in the womb. Both positions stem from good intentions, each striving to protect two of the greatest gifts, life and freedom, though in different ways.
Pro-choice advocates
Pro-choice advocates do not see the fetus as a life with inherent moral worth or weight in comparison to the mother’s freedom, while pro-life advocates fail to fully recognise that a woman’s womb is a space in which her personal autonomy should hold sway.
The irony lies in the contradictions on both sides. Pro-life advocates, who claim to hold life sacred, often support policies that perpetuate death and suffering elsewhere. In the early 2000s, those supporting Prime Minister John Howard were much more likely to be “pro-life,” yet endorsed Australia’s involvement in the U.S.-led wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, which caused countless innocent deaths. A passionate defense of life in the womb, yet a chilling disregard for life beyond it.
COVID-19 vaccine debate
On the other side, the pro-choice camp champions bodily autonomy, except when it’s inconvenient. Take the COVID-19 vaccine debate, where many who defend women’s right to choose on abortion were unwilling to extend that same logic to women resisting vaccine mandates. The moral argument employed, ‘Think of others, the innocent and vulnerable who might be affected by your choice’, mirrors pro-life rhetoric. It’s a paradox: the same logic that defends personal choice in one context is rejected when it challenges the same autonomy in another.
In this culture war, each framing makes its case compellingly, backed by deeply held moral convictions. Once the frame is set, the conclusion often feels inevitable. There is little room for grey areas, for the nuance that defines so many human experiences. Instead, we are left with stark dichotomies: right and wrong, moral and immoral, and those who disagree are not merely mistaken, but adversaries. This is the danger of language and framing, it distorts the moral complexity of life, reducing it to a binary struggle, where moral clarity is prized over complexity, and where certainty often trumps understanding.
Politics
The Greens and One Nation are, in different ways, products of the culture-war era. They are political parties defined not by broad governing visions but by tightly framed existential narratives. For the Greens, climate change is the civilisational threat. For One Nation, immigration takes on the same existential weight.
Each frames its defining issue as not just important, but overriding, eclipsing all other concerns.
Both sides may be right. Both may be wrong. It’s even possible that neither represents the most pressing challenge we face. Artificial intelligence, for example, could prove far more consequential than climate change or immigration.
But political risk is shaped not by objective danger alone, but by the issues that mobilise political bases, what people see, fear, and demand action on. Minor parties, driven by identity or single issues, continue to grow not because they offer viable governing programs (though they may), but because they provide moral clarity and a sense of belonging.
Even the major parties are not immune to the fragmentation brought on by culture wars. Labor, despite holding a commanding majority in the House of Representatives, now faces historically low primary support, hovering around 33 percent.
The Coalition’s position is incredibly weaker. The dominance of Australia’s major parties now rests more on the mechanics of preferential voting than on any enduring voter loyalty. Australians are increasingly drawn to political ideas rather than traditional parties.
Allegiance has become fluid, conditional, and transactional. This is why culture wars are so potent, they dissolve traditional party loyalty and reframe political identities around moral causes.
What makes the dynamic of culture wars so corrosive is not hypocrisy, everyone is hypocritical, but the refusal to admit it. Once a position becomes fused with identity, challenging it begins to feel like self-erasure. Reasoning halts not because it has reached a conclusion, but because continuing would be personally costly. Culture wars do not resolve themselves because they are not debates aimed at truth. They are defences of identity. Any idea, no matter how fragile, can be protected indefinitely if questioning it is framed as an attack on one’s existence.
Loud, fragile voices
The result is a political culture that grows louder, narrower, and more fragile, one in which existential framing crowds out proportional judgment, and where the loudest fears shape the agenda.
When morality supplants curiosity, when certainty silences thought, and when identity is forged only through opposition to others, culture does not deepen; it fractures. As we argue over identity, language, and allegiance, the deeper questions about power, labour, dignity, freedom, and meaning remain unresolved.
The real challenge, then, is not choosing sides. It is asking a far more difficult question: Why am I so quick to pledge allegiance to ideas that demand far more scrutiny and reflection? Where does my logic stop, and why? These question does not yield slogans. What they offer instead is the one condition culture wars cannot sustain for long: intellectual honesty.
♦ Chaiy Donati holds degrees in Law and Political Science from the University of Queensland. He is President of the Mullumbimby Brunswick Valley ALP Branch.
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