Hire Anyone. Import Nothing.

Most owners believe they authored their standard. Most of them transcribed it from someone else’s page.

Ask a business owner what his company stands for and watch where his eyes go. Nine times out of 10 they go to the wall. There’s a framed page up there. A marketing contractor wrote it in 2019, three words with a sentence under each, and in the years since it’s never once been used to decline a hire.

That is not a set of values.
That is decoration with a budget line.

I’ve spent close to four decades across finance, technology, hospitality, professional services, and operating roles, with private equity and venture capital as one part of that, and I’ve never seen a business drift into a good standard by accident. Standards don’t settle. They get set, or they get supplied.

Four kinds of owner

The first never wrote anything down. He hired on availability and cost, told himself he’d sort the culture out once the revenue stabilised, and ended up with whatever walked through the door, weighted by whoever was loudest and whoever was hardest to correct. He doesn’t have a culture. He has an aggregate.

The second wrote it down. He pulled a template, ran it past a consultant, and published it. Ask him and he’ll tell you those are his values, and he’ll mean it, because he’s never held them against anything hard enough to find out whether they are. That’s not authorship. It’s transcription with a signature block.

The third is the one nobody talks about. He also wrote it down, and he went well past what any obligation required, because obligation was never the point. He’s a believer. He wrote the specific parts down, added the enforcement, and would like to see dire consequences for the people who aren’t on board.

The third one is what makes the first two rational. A true believer in a leadership team prices dissent for everybody else in the room. Nobody has to issue an instruction. The owner who wrote nothing keeps quiet, the owner who transcribed never goes back to check, and the standard is set by the person with the strongest opinion and the least commercial exposure to being wrong.

Then there’s the fourth, rare enough that most people have never worked for one, although, and I say gratefully, their numbers are expanding. The fourth is the bloke who wrote it himself. He knew what it would cost when he wrote it, and he’s paid that cost in front of the whole company, on a day when paying it was expensive and nobody would’ve noticed if he hadn’t. His standard and holding it has turned away revenue. That’s the only test that separates a value from a decoration, and it’s precisely why the fourth kind can hire absolutely anybody without a moment’s anxiety about it.

So the question is not whether your values are written down. It is who wrote them.

The first three aren’t personal failings. They’re produced. Owners don’t arrive at an unwritten standard, a borrowed one, or a zealot’s one by accident, and the machinery that produces all three has been running at national scale, on the public record, for 50 years.

Rated for 60,000

On 11 August 1973, the Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, delivered a paper in Melbourne titled A Multi-cultural Society for the Future. His department published it. It’s the founding statement of Australian multiculturalism, and it’s a more useful document than anybody who cites it approvingly seems to have noticed.

Early in it, Grassby describes his own function. A Minister for Immigration, he writes, is responsible for policies that cannot fail to affect the growth and rate of change of the society, and must therefore envisage some grand design, or at the very least long-term plans, as he exercises his options.

His words, not mine. The man holding the pen said unapologetically that he was drawing a design for the country.

The design wasn’t his though, and he’s candid about that too. Canada had legislated official multiculturalism in 1971, two years earlier, officially as a way of managing its French and English populations, and Grassby’s contribution was to adapt it. His paper points to generations of American scholarship on so-called majority and minority group relations, and increasingly Canadian scholarship alongside it. The three social theories he works through come from an evaluation of the American experience. The term he reaches for to describe Australians vacating the inner suburbs is American. The instrument he invokes to justify the whole arrangement is a United Nations covenant the government intended to ratify. Every receiving country in the West adopted a version of the same template inside the same decade. Call that a coincidence if you like. Whether intentionally or not, you’d be right. Lines drawn coincide where they connect.

Australia did not author this. Australia transcribed it, from someone else’s page, and then ran it on numbers of its own. The country is the second kind of owner. And a borrowed standard, pushed down through departments, agencies, and a funded sector that never had a test to pass, manufactures the third kind at every level below it. Plenty of the people administering this believe it the way a zealot believes it, and they’ve built entire careers on making sure questions never get asked, or if they do, they are discredited systematically.

Then he shows his workings. Citing the Bureau of Census and Statistics, he models the future on a consistent annual net migration gain of a moderate 60,000. On that figure, Australia reaches almost 21 million people by 2001, of whom roughly 40 per cent are born overseas or are the children of people born overseas, drawn from more than 60 countries.

Sixty thousand a year. That is the load the design was rated for. That was already too many in my book but let’s leave that there for the moment.

For 30 years the load stayed in the same order of magnitude as the design. Net overseas migration was 111,300 in 1990, 94,400 in 1996-97, 117,600 in 2003-04, and 123,800 in 2004-05. Roughly double what was modelled, which is over specification but not by a margin that would frighten anybody, and the country carried the burden and discomfort without the failure surfacing sufficiently to cause significant material public opposition.

Then somebody raised the load and nobody looked at the design. Net overseas migration peaked at 556,000 in the year to September 2023. Curiously at the tail end of the main Convid push there appeared a rush to import as many foreigners as possible, including extended families. These people were used, in some instances, to replace essential workers who had been sacked for non-compliance vis-à-vis the jab mandates, including police creating a situation where foreigners now police nationals. In 2023-24 it was 429,000, 306,000 in 2024-25, and 301,000 across calendar 2025. Against 60,000, that’s five to nine times. (The Bureau changed how it counts in 2006, in a direction that raised the measured figure, so the older numbers understate rather than flatter the comparison.)

The demographic projection went the same way. In the 2021 Census, 51.5 per cent of Australian residents were born overseas or had at least one parent born overseas, against the roughly 40 per cent Grassby modelled for 2001.

Any operator knows the shape of this, because every one of us has watched it happen. A system runs over its rated capacity for 30 years without appearing to fail, so everybody concludes there’s headroom. Nobody measures the headroom. Then the load gets multiplied, and nobody re-engineers anything, because it held last time. You don’t describe that as an outcome. You describe it as a choice. Somebody set the load and nobody went back to the design carrying it. Unless the design was set up for a different purpose than the utility promoted, which in business is crazy; in politics it would seem that this mechanism is just business as usual.

He saw all of it

The convenient story is that the architects meant well and couldn’t have known. The document doesn’t support that, and it takes about 20 minutes to establish.

Grassby describes migrant belts in the major cities, and he’s precise about the mechanism. Thousands of people from widely differing linguistic and cultural backgrounds crowd into small areas without significant social or linguistic contact with Australians and without much chance of achieving any. He asks, directly, whether they can be expected to live in a cultural and social vacuum for years while learning to adapt to the life of Australians they seldom meet.

He anticipates the objection that Australia’s talent for absorbing newcomers will prevent the growth of communities within the community, and he dismisses it as wishful thinking, unsupported by the evidence available to him in 1973.

He records that the local population is gradually moving out of many inner suburbs, replaced by incoming waves of newer arrivals, and he names the phenomenon by its American technical term, ecological succession instead of the real cause, economic reality.

As I often say, someone forgot to remind the migrating hordes about the second verse of the national anthem, which includes:

For those who’ve come across the seas
We’ve boundless plains to share;

Boundless plains. Out west; or out east if they arrive in Perth. Basically towards the middle and not harbour shoreline apartments of properties with ocean views.

Then Grassby identifies the driver. Ethnic group life, he writes, may be destined to become stronger as the overall percentage of recent migrant stock in the community increases. Citing Professor Jean Martin’s 1972 lectures at La Trobe, he records that ethnic groups have developed alternative micro-societies which are becoming stronger as the migration programme proceeds, intensifying relationships inside their own communities and consistently increasing ethnic consciousness. That is the design doing the work in the shadows until its final product is no longer deniable.

Take a moment and read Grassby’s writing slowly again. Volume is named, in the founding document, as the thing that strengthens separateness. Not as a risk to be managed. As an observation, in passing, before the apparatus was built.

Then comes the part that dates the whole argument. Grassby acknowledges critics of the pluralist approach who warned it would produce a fragmented society, lacking cohesion, tending toward permanent and hostile segregation. He dismisses them. An unreal threat, he says. A sort of communal apartheid, not founded on fact. His stated reasons are that the groups are economically integrated through the workforce, and that because many different ethnic groups live close together, no part of the population can remain permanently segregated from the majority.

That’s a falsifiable prediction with a date on it. 53 years have passed. Anyone’s free to walk through the suburbs in question and mark it.

As the evidence shows today, that communal apartheid has happened and it has been imposed in reverse by the so-called minorities sequestering themselves from the perceived majority.

What got funded, and what got defunded

From 1950, the Commonwealth ran the Good Neighbour Councils. This was the beginning of the deconstruction of the so-called ‘white Australia policy’. The purpose of the Good Neighbour Councils was to win public acceptance of mass post-war immigration by promoting rapid assimilation, coordinating church and community organisations across suburbs and country towns to that end. Yet another case of the state using your money to convince you that giving up what you have and getting by with less is a good idea. It wasn’t quite Klaus Schwab’s “you’ll own nothing and be happier” but at that time the message was a little more subtle, albeit not much, you’ll have less and be happier. Whatever you think of the aim, the state had a body whose job was to make newcomers into Australians, and it ran it for 28 years.

On 30 May 1978, Frank Galbally’s review of post-arrival programmes was tabled. 57 recommendations, roughly $50 million. It recommended withdrawing funding from the Good Neighbour Councils, and they were abolished that year. Three years prior the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 became law and closed the book on white Australia policy. And for the avoidance of confusion I am not expressing an opinion here on whether the set of laws that constituted this policy were good or bad. That is an individual choice.

Galbally’s report moved migrant services out of general social welfare into ethnic-specific services, shifted on-arrival delivery from public agencies to voluntary organisations, and established migrant resource centres operated by representatives of locally based ethnic communities. At its heart was financial assistance so that migrants could maintain their cultural identity. It was published in 10 languages, which tells you what the drafters assumed about who would be reading it, and for how long.

Nobody was ever instructed to stay separate. The body whose function was integration was defunded, and the bodies whose function was cultural maintenance were funded, in one report, in one year. By 1978 the assimilation apparatus had done what it was there to do, which was to get the intake accepted. It was not repaired. It was retired.

Judge a design by what it pays for. Not by what it says it wants.

Nobody ever checked

Here’s where it stops being history, at least as of today.

In 2026 the Australian National Audit Office reported on the Settlement Engagement and Transition Support programme. Not a think tank. The Commonwealth’s own auditor, examining the Commonwealth’s own settlement apparatus across 205 grants.

The grant agreements don’t contain the key performance indicators set out in the programme’s own guidelines. Payments are not linked to provider performance. Fewer than 35 per cent of providers fully spent their funding in any given year, and $4.44 million was rolled forward into 2025-26 across 42 providers, contrary to the published guidelines. 55 per cent of planned assurance visits never happened, including visits to providers already flagged as high risk or as having recurring reporting problems. On improving client independence and participation in Australian society, the auditor rates performance as mixed.

Nobody measures integration, because nothing in the architecture requires it to be measured.

This is a design flaw with a familiar shape. A programme built without an exit condition becomes permanent. Welfare was built as a hand up and there are families three generations into it. Transitional housing was built to be transitional and there are tenancies older than the staff administering them. Hiring subsidies pay an employer for taking a category rather than for the person working out, and an aboriginal jobseeker qualifies immediately where others wait six months. I’ve no objection to a man getting help when he needs it, irrespective of his background or beliefs. I object to a system that never once asks whether the help worked, and asking whether it is still required, because asking was made unspeakable somewhere around 1978.

And then the transcription. Towards Fairness, the Multicultural Framework Review, delivered March 2024 and released on 24 July 2024. 29 recommendations. Its roadmap calls for a national commitment based on social cohesion, cultural identity, and equality of opportunity, which are the Galbally principles of 1978 restated without amendment. Recommendation 1 is that the government affirm its commitment to multicultural Australia. The review then recommends a commission, a commissioner, a standalone department, a dedicated minister, more investment in community organisations, a review of English language citizenship testing, and more interpreter funding.

46 years, and the framework was reaffirmed rather than tested. That’s the second kind of owner operating a country, and then staffing it.

Now walk back into your business

Every one of those mechanisms reaches your hiring desk.

The subsidy converts a choice into a decision. A hire you make on your own judgement is yours, and you carry it when it goes wrong. A hire you make with money attached arrives with reasoning already built in, and reasoning is somewhere to point. The tender pre-qualification pack arrives with participation requirements attached, and you sign because you want the contract. The enterprise customer’s supplier clause lands in your inbox. None of it is an order. All of it is a term set by somebody who doesn’t carry your risk, and the cumulative effect is that your standard gets written offshore, passed into your paperwork, while you’re busy quoting.

And it doesn’t only arrive as paperwork. It arrives as a person. Somewhere in the business there’s someone who believes every word of it, who reads the policy more carefully than you ever will, and who has worked out that certain phrases carry consequences nobody wants to test in front of a lawyer. You never get overruled. You just get quoted. And once your stated standard is something you can be measured against by somebody who doesn’t carry a dollar of the risk, the next hire gets made with one eye on how it will read, and the other on whether it advances the agenda, rather than both eyes on whether the person can do the work.

The reversal

The reason to hold a real standard is as much operational as it is a moral value.

A business with an actual standard, written by the person who carries the risk, stated at the door, and enforced from day one rather than month nine, can take anybody. Any background, any country, any accent. The standard does the filtering, so the paperwork doesn’t have to, and the subsidy can’t buy a choice you’ve already made on other grounds. These are our values. If you are aligned with them, come and do the job. Do not bring anything else here. Hire anyone. Import nothing.

A business without one can’t take anybody safely, because it has nothing to hold the new arrival against, and it’ll end up with whatever the loudest person in the room decided the place was going to be. Ask Socrates how well it works when the loudest or largest group gets to decide what’s true. The jury that condemned Socrates had plenty of votes. What it lacked was wisdom. Businesses make the same mistake every day.

The diversity industry claims to deliver a business that can take anybody, and yet structurally cannot, because it counts composition and never once measures standard. 50 years of national policy, and the auditor still can’t tell you whether it worked.

None of that needs a programme, a consultant, or a framework. It needs one person prepared to write the thing himself and then be the one who enforces it on the day it costs money. That’s the fourth kind of owner, and there’s no route to becoming one that runs through somebody else’s template.

So here’s the test, and it takes about four minutes.

Write down three values your business genuinely operates on that you can trace to a choice you personally made and have enforced at cost. Then write down three you can only trace to a document somebody sent you.

If the second column is longer, you’re not running the place. You are administering it on behalf of people you’ve never met, who set the load, never checked the capacity, and will not be there when it gives.