Rules for Thee
How the West was told to diversify - and everyone else was not.
Here is something that actually happened.
The short version
In March 2026, China passed a law requiring every government body, business, school, and citizen in the country to actively promote a single national identity. Minority languages are being removed from classrooms. Cultural difference is being legislated out of public life. The law passed by 2,756 votes to three.
In the same month, Australian government agencies were filing mandatory annual diversity reports, updating DEI roadmaps with named leads and due dates, and preparing for new mandatory gender equality target reporting commencing April 2026 under amendments to the Workplace Gender Equality Act. The Australian Defence Force, the Australian Federal Police, and Australia Post all operate under Commonwealth diversity strategies. Breach of the code of conduct that underpins them attracts formal sanctions.
Nobody required China to do any of this. No international body issued binding obligations. No compliance framework was imposed. No sanctions were threatened. China went in the opposite direction and the world noted it, criticised it in journals and human rights reports, and otherwise left it entirely alone.
Japan - a G7 democracy, a peer economy, a close ally - has maintained among the lowest immigrant populations of any OECD nation for decades. Its leaders have openly said the policy is deliberate. There are no mandatory diversity roadmaps in Japanese government agencies. There’s no equivalent of Section 10A of the Public Service Act 1999 applying to Japan’s bureaucracy. Japan faces criticism in academic literature. It doesn’t face sanctions, compliance obligations, or legally enforceable diversity targets.
This isn’t an accident. It’s the architecture of a system that was built in a specific place, by specific institutions, for a specific audience - and that audience was always, only, the West.
What follows is the documented record of how that system was constructed, how it was made mandatory, and what it means that the US Department of Defense’s own strategic planning body - in a classified report released only through FOIA litigation - found that China regards Western multiculturalism as a component of American decline.
The documented record
Section 10A of Australia’s Public Service Act 1999 requires every Commonwealth agency - including the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Federal Police, and Australia Post - to foster workplace diversity. Compliance is mandatory. Breach of the Code of Conduct that supports it attracts formal sanctions. The APS Gender Equality Strategy runs to 2026. The APS Disability Employment Strategy runs to 2025. The Commonwealth Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Workforce Strategy is, as of January 2026, still in effect. [1]
In the same period, the People’s Republic of China passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress. Signed by President Xi Jinping on 12 March 2026 and due to take effect 1 July 2026, it requires government bodies, businesses and citizens to actively support a single national identity. It prohibits activities deemed to promote cultural division. Minority languages are being eliminated from classrooms in Xinjiang, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia. [2]
No international body has issued binding obligations to China requiring it to diversify its institutions. No equivalent of the APS Employment Principles has been imposed on the People’s Liberation Army. Japan, a G7 peer nation, maintains among the lowest immigrant shares of any OECD economy - approximately three percent - and faces no legal or institutional sanction for it. [3]
If diversity is a universal value, why does its enforcement infrastructure exist only in Western nations?
What the framework actually requires
The diversity framework embedded in Australian law isn’t aspirational language. It’s operational machinery with reporting requirements, targets, annual census obligations, and formal consequences for non-compliance.
The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade runs a 40/40/20 gender target across its workforce - 40 percent women, 40 percent men, 20 percent any gender - enforceable through its Inclusion, Equity and Diversity Strategy 2024-2027. [4] The Department of Infrastructure’s DEI Roadmap 2025-26 lists specific initiatives with named leads, due dates, and reporting obligations to a DEI Committee. The Australian Financial Security Authority’s iBelong strategy runs to 2030, with seven diversity portfolios covering gender, disability, neurodiversity, LGBTQIA+, CALD backgrounds, First Nations peoples, and carers. [5]
From 1 April 2026, private sector employers with 500 or more employees are required to select and report against gender equality targets under the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Setting Gender Equality Targets) Act 2024. Commonwealth public sector employers follow from 1 September 2026. Failure to meet or demonstrate progress against selected targets is published publicly on the Workplace Gender Equality Agency’s website. [6]
For an APS employee who questions, for example, why the ADF carries legally mandated diversity obligations that China’s People’s Liberation Army doesn’t - the APS Code of Conduct applies. The risk isn’t theoretical. It’s structural and currently operating.
Where the doctrine came from
The diversity and multiculturalism framework now embedded in Australian law wasn’t discovered. It was manufactured, in a specific place, by specific institutions, for specific purposes, within a narrow window of time.
“Multiculturalism” came into use during the American civil rights movement and gained currency as a prescriptive policy concept - not a description of demographic reality, but a set of attitudes, value judgements, and institutional requirements - in American universities beginning in the late 1960s. [7]
The financing mechanism was the Ford Foundation. A succession of grants in the late 1960s and 1970s established the politicised fields of Black Studies and Women’s Studies in American universities. [8] In a September 1990 press release, Ford Foundation president Franklin Thomas described the goal as ensuring that “college curricula and teaching keep pace with the rapid demographic and cultural changes under way in American society.” [9]
Henry Ford II, who resigned from the foundation bearing his family name in 1976, was direct in his resignation letter. “The foundation is a creature of capitalism,” he wrote. “It is hard to discern recognition of this fact in anything the foundation does.” Former US Treasury Secretary William Simon put the foundation’s trajectory more bluntly: by the late 1960s, he said, it had become “engaged in a radical assault on traditional culture, under the rubric of the ‘public interest’ and ‘systematic social change’.” [10]
These aren’t fringe characterisations. They’re the documented assessments of the man whose family name was on the door and the former Treasury Secretary he spoke with.
In Australia, the founding document of official multicultural policy was the Galbally Report of 1978, produced under the Fraser government. It recommended that migrants be actively supported to maintain their cultural identities, and that government fund ethnic-specific services to enable this. [11] The term “multiculturalism” had been introduced into Australian government usage five years earlier by Immigration Minister Al Grassby under the Whitlam government. [12]
Parekh, writing in the Research Handbook on Multiculturalism (2025), describes multiculturalism as “a radical and potentially even revolutionary doctrine” whose purpose is challenging “the hegemony of the dominant culture.” [13]
The term was adopted - deliberately, on the record - so that “audiences of white educators would listen.” The framing was instrumental from the start. [14]
Where it was not installed
The framework’s architects knew their audience. What they built was directed at Western nations, applied to Western institutions, and enforced through Western legal and corporate structures. No equivalent project was directed at non-Western states.
Japan is a G7 member, a major democracy, and a peer economy to Australia. Its foreign residents represent approximately 3.35 percent of its population - the lowest share among G7 nations and among the lowest of any OECD economy. Former Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi stated in 2005: “If [the foreign labour] exceeds a certain level, it is bound to cause a clash. It is necessary to consider measures to prevent it.” [15] Academic scholarship describes Japan’s approach as ethnic homogeneity backed by a ‘right of blood’ citizenship framework. [16]
Japan hasn’t been subject to binding international obligations to diversify its institutions. The criticism it faces is published in academic journals. It doesn’t result in sanctions, compliance frameworks, or mandatory DEI roadmaps.
China’s national ethnic policy runs in the opposite direction to Western DEI requirements. On 12 March 2026, the National People’s Congress passed the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, scheduled to take effect 1 July 2026. It requires state institutions, schools, media outlets and businesses to promote a shared national identity over distinct ethnic ones, mandates expanded Mandarin-language education, and has been described by international human rights organisations as formalising longstanding policies pressuring Tibetans, Uyghurs, and Mongolians to assimilate into Han Chinese culture. [17]
China officially recognises 56 ethnic groups but has long rejected the concept of “Indigenous peoples” within its borders. [18] The Uyghur Human Rights Project documented state policies incentivising Han-Uyghur intermarriage as part of what researcher Adrian Zenz described as a strategy of “breaking down and dismantling Uyghur culture.” [19]
No international DEI framework requires China to produce a Reconciliation Action Plan. No ESG obligation requires the People’s Liberation Army to publish a diversity census. No equivalent of Section 10A applies to Chinese state institutions.
Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) confirmed the structural asymmetry in 2023: there’s no global DEI framework. “There is no global framework or a ‘one-size fits all’ approach,” BSR’s Asia offices documented. APAC companies move at “a relatively slower pace than their North American and European counterparts,” primarily due to “fewer compliance-related expectations.” [20]
Fewer compliance-related expectations is institutional language for: the rules don’t apply here.
How the obligation was closed off
The conversion of a contested ideological framework into a mandatory legal obligation followed a specific sequence in Australia.
First, the framework was installed in government policy - Galbally Report, 1978.
Second, it was elaborated through successive policy statements: the 1989 Agenda for Multicultural Australia, the 1999 New Agenda for Multicultural Australia, and the 2003 Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity.
Third, it was embedded in primary legislation - the Public Service Act 1999, Section 10A Employment Principles, mandating that agency heads foster workplace diversity.
Fourth, it was operationalised through mandatory strategy cycles, census reporting, and annual diversity roadmaps.
Fifth, it was extended to cover the ADF, the AFP, and Australia Post.
Sixth, it’s being further tightened under the Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Setting Gender Equality Targets) Act 2024, with private sector reporting commencing 1 April 2026 and Commonwealth public sector from 1 September 2026. [21]
At each stage, the framework was presented as a practical administrative matter - workforce planning, service delivery, capability enhancement - rather than the ideological project its founders described it as. The ideological framing was stripped from the public presentation while the ideological content was retained in the institutional machinery.
The question of whether equivalent obligations should apply to non-Western peer nations wasn’t raised at any stage of this legislative history. It wasn’t addressed, considered, and rejected. It wasn’t raised.
What it’s now risky to say
An APS employee who raised the asymmetry documented in this piece - in a meeting, in a submission, in a formal response to a DEI compliance requirement - would be navigating the APS Code of Conduct. Conduct inconsistent with the APS Values and Employment Principles may be regarded as a breach of that Code and attract formal sanctions under Section 15(1) of the Public Service Act 1999. A challenge to the legitimacy of those obligations, made in a professional context, could be characterised as conduct inconsistent with the Values. [22]
Outside the APS, the ESG reporting infrastructure creates equivalent pressure in the corporate sector. Regulatory bodies in the UK, EU, Australia, and Hong Kong require companies to meet targets for board diversity, gender pay reporting, and inclusion measures. These requirements apply in Western jurisdictions. They don’t apply in China, Japan, or Saudi Arabia, where the same multinationals operate without equivalent obligations. [23]
A Bloomberg analysis from 2025 documented this directly: companies from Roche to Nissan maintained their international DEI websites untouched after Trump’s executive orders, while adjusting US-facing materials. It reflected the underlying reality - DEI compliance is a Western legal requirement applied in Western jurisdictions, not a universal standard. [24]
What the US government found when it looked
In 2013, the US Department of Defense commissioned a classified strategic assessment titled “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States.” The author’s name remains redacted. The document was released only through Freedom of Information Act litigation. [25]
It was commissioned by Andrew Marshall, Director of the DoD Office of Net Assessment - the Pentagon’s internal long-range strategic planning body - who held the position from 1973 until 2015.
At page 134, analysing how China views the United States:
“The rise of multiculturalism in the United States, and the West more broadly, has destroyed, or ‘decentered’ in the language of the multiculturalists, the American Creed, in favour of an explicitly multiracial, multicultural society that celebrates differences rather than requiring assimilation. Huntington’s American Creed has been replaced by an ideology that rejects its core principles and beliefs in favour of promoting any culture, so long as it is not Western.”
The report then cites Sinologist John Copper’s assessment of how Chinese strategic thinkers read this shift:
“The United States used to be a strong society that the Chinese respected, when it was unicultural, defined by the centrality of Anglo-Protestant culture at the core of American national identity aligned with the political ideology of liberalism, the rule of law and free-market capitalism. The Chinese see multiculturalism as a sickness that has overtaken the United States, and a component of US decline.”
The report further found that from China’s strategic perspective, “states are stable, and thus good for the Chinese, to the degree that they are unicultural.” [26]
It wasn’t cited in any subsequent APS diversity strategy. It wasn’t referenced in any Australian parliamentary debate on multiculturalism. It wasn’t mentioned in any Commonwealth DEI roadmap.
What I think this means
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s. I watched multiculturalism arrive in Australia in real time - not as a grassroots demand from ordinary Australians, but as a policy handed down by government, built on a 1978 report, and progressively tightened into law over the following five decades. I watched globalisation follow the same pattern: framed as inevitable, implemented from above, and presented as being in everyone’s interests when the evidence, accumulated over time, suggests it was primarily in the interests of those doing the framing.
In the 2000s and 2010s I watched political correctness harden into institutional enforcement. The acceptable range of opinion on immigration, cultural cohesion, and national identity narrowed steadily. People lost careers for stating positions that had been mainstream a decade earlier. Criticism of specific cultural practices imported from countries with very different values was labelled racism and dismissed without engagement. The social problems that followed - the violence, the segregation, the communities that stopped functioning as communities - were documented in crime statistics and coronial inquiries and largely ignored in public debate.
I’m not arguing that immigration is wrong, or that cultural diversity produces no value. I’m arguing something narrower and more specific: that the framework which governs how Australia thinks about these questions wasn’t designed by Australians for Australian conditions. It was designed in American universities in the late 1960s, funded by a private foundation whose own leadership described as having launched a radical assault on traditional culture, and installed in Australian law through a process that never asked whether the same obligations should apply anywhere else.
The evidence in this piece isn’t my opinion. It’s legislation, government strategy documents, a declassified Pentagon report, and the words of the framework’s own architects. What I’m offering here is my reading of what that evidence means after watching it unfold for fifty years.
It means:
ordinary Australians have been subject to an ideological project they didn’t design, didn’t vote for, and can’t question in certain institutional contexts without professional consequences
the countries most likely to benefit from a weakened, self-doubting West face none of the same obligations - China’s own analysts said so, in a classified report.
the conversation about what Australia should look like, who it should serve, and what values should sit at its centre was foreclosed before it could be held.
That foreclosure is what this piece is about. Getting it on the public record - where it came from, how it was installed, and why it matters - is the purpose of the evidence trail.
The record, held together
The diversity and multiculturalism framework embedded in Australian law was created in American universities in the late 1960s and 1970s, financed primarily through Ford Foundation grants, exported to Australia via a 1978 government report, and progressively legislated into mandatory compliance obligations covering every Commonwealth agency including the Defence Force.
In the same period, Japan maintained an explicit policy of ethnic homogeneity with no international compliance obligations requiring it to change. China enacted legislation in 2026 requiring national cultural assimilation of ethnic minorities while rejecting the concept of Indigenous peoples within its borders. No ESG framework, no international treaty, and no binding compliance obligation applies to either.
The US Department of Defense’s own strategic planning body produced a classified assessment - released only through FOIA litigation - finding that China views Western multiculturalism as a systemic vulnerability and a component of American decline. It hasn’t been cited in any Australian government diversity document.
From April 2026, Australia’s largest employers must select and report against mandatory gender equality targets under amendments to the Workplace Gender Equality Act. The reporting obligations apply to Australian employers. They won’t apply to their Chinese or Japanese competitors.
The doctrine was built in the West, imposed on the West, enforced in the West, and nowhere else - and the institution that built it called this universal.
Sources
Public Service Act 1999 (Cth), ss 10, 10A, 13, 15; Australian Public Service Commission, “Diversity and Inclusion,” apsc.gov.au; Australian Financial Security Authority, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Strategy 2025-2030, afsa.gov.au; Department of Finance, “Diversity Strategies,” finance.gov.au (as at January 2026).
Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, National People’s Congress of China, passed 12 March 2026, signed by President Xi Jinping, scheduled to take effect 1 July 2026; Intercontinental Cry, “China’s New Ethnic Unity Law Recasts Cultural Difference as Disloyalty,” icmagazine.org, April 2026; Uyghur Human Rights Project, “The Global Implications of China’s Ethnic Unity Law,” uhrp.org, April 2026.
Japan Center for Economic Research, “Japan’s Immigration Policy: De jure and De facto,” jcer.or.jp; Immigration Services Agency (Ministry of Justice, Japan), foreign resident statistics as of December 2025; Foreign Affairs, “Japan’s Stalled Immigration Experiment,” November 2025.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Inclusion, Equity and Diversity Strategy 2024-2027, dfat.gov.au.
Australian Financial Security Authority, iBelong DEI Strategy 2025-2030, afsa.gov.au; Department of Infrastructure, DEI Roadmap 2025-26, infrastructure.gov.au.
Workplace Gender Equality Amendment (Setting Gender Equality Targets) Act 2024 (Cth); Workplace Gender Equality Agency, “WGEA Statement on Setting Gender Equality Targets Act,” wgea.gov.au; Lexology/MinterEllison, “Australia Enacts Workplace Gender Equality Targets,” April 2025. Private sector reporting period commences 1 April 2026; Commonwealth public sector from 1 September 2026.
EBSCO Research Starters, “Multiculturalism: History,” ebsco.com.
National Association of Scholars, “Diversity and Western Civilization,” August 2011; DiscoverTheNetworks, “Ford Foundation,” discoverthenetworks.org.
Ford Foundation, press release, September 12, 1990, cited in DiscoverTheNetworks, “Ford Foundation.”
Henry Ford II, resignation letter, 1976, cited in Fortune, “The Real Story of How the Ford Family and Ford Foundation Ended Their Decades-Long Estrangement,” December 2024; William Simon, characterisation of Ford Foundation direction, cited in CAIRCO, “Ford Foundation Funding of the Diversity Demagogues,” cairco.org, drawing on FrontPage Magazine, January 9, 2004. The “radical assault on traditional culture” formulation is Simon’s; Ford II’s documented resignation letter used the capitalism framing.
Galbally, Frank, Review of Post-Arrival Programs and Services for Migrants (Canberra: AGPS, 1978); Parliament of NSW, “Multiculturalism” Research Paper, parliament.nsw.gov.au; ANU Press, “Chapter 2: Politics, Public Policy and Multiculturalism,” James Jupp, press-files.anu.edu.au.
Department of Home Affairs, “Australia’s Multicultural Policy History,” archive.homeaffairs.gov.au.
Soutphommasane, Tim, “The State of Multiculturalism,” 2025, journals.sagepub.com, citing Parekh (2025).
Rethinking Schools, “Origins of Multiculturalism,” rethinkingschools.org.
Migration Policy Institute, “Japanese Immigration Policy: Responding to Conflicting Pressures,” migrationpolicy.org; Foreign Affairs, “Japan’s Stalled Immigration Experiment,” November 2025.
Oxford Academic, “Dam Break in Japan’s Immigration Policy,” Social Science Japan Journal, February 2025.
Intercontinental Cry, “China’s New Ethnic Unity Law Recasts Cultural Difference as Disloyalty,” icmagazine.org, April 2026; Foreign Policy, “China’s Coerced Assimilation Targets Minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang,” foreignpolicy.com, May 2026.
BYU Political Review, “Ethnic Minorities in China: Celebrated Diversity or Second-Class Citizens?”, February 2025.
Uyghur Human Rights Project, report on Han-Uyghur intermarriage incentives, cited in Global Security, November 2022.
BSR (Business for Social Responsibility), “How Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion is Gaining Momentum in Asia-Pacific,” bsr.org, July 2023.
Department of Home Affairs, “Australia’s Multicultural Policy History,” archive.homeaffairs.gov.au; Public Service Act 1999 (Cth); Australian Public Service Commission, diversity and inclusion documentation, apsc.gov.au.
Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Chapter 3: Values and Codes of Conduct, DFAT Policy Manual, dfat.gov.au; Public Service Act 1999 (Cth) s 15(1).
American Bar Association, “The Transatlantic Divide in ESG Disclosure Requirements,” Business Law Today, March 2025; Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance, “Trump Has Companies in Europe and Asia Walking a DEI Tightrope,” 2025.
Bloomberg/Yahoo Finance, “Trump Has Companies in Europe and Asia Walking a DEI Tightrope,” 2025.
Redacted author, “The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States,” Office of Net Assessment, US Department of Defense, 7 January 2013; released via FOIA litigation. Available at: esd.whs.mil/Portals/54/Documents/FOID/Reading%20Room/Litigation_Release/
Ibid. First blockquote from p. 134 (author’s analysis of Chinese view of US multiculturalism). Second blockquote from Executive Summary, pp. 13-14, citing Sinologist John Copper’s characterisation of Chinese strategic thinking. “States are stable...unicultural” from p. 134.