Last week four Murdoch tabloids – the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, the Courier Mail and the Adelaide Advertiser – published an opinion column by Andrew Bolt. The headline the Telegraph chose, “The Foreign Invasion”, was not inaccurate. According to Bolt, Australia was losing its identity. The principal cause was “a tidal wave of immigrants” who refused to assimilate and treated Australia not as a “home” but as a “hotel”. In his view “immigration was becoming colonisation”.

The kind of evidence Bolt produced to demonstrate that Australia faced a foreign invasion was an entirely indiscriminate mish-mash of birthplace, language, religion and even small business activity. “In Sydney’s Fairfield, one-in-four residents were born in Vietnam, Cambodia or China.” “In Melbourne’s Clayton and Sydney’s Campsie” one-third of the residents “speak Chinese” (sic). In Lakemba, “nearly two-thirds of all residents are Muslim”. Dandenong had “33 Indian businesses”.

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The source of Bolt’s information was the readily accessible figures of the census of 2016 for each locality in Australia published by the Bureau of Statistics online. Bolt’s research likely took him no more than half an hour.

One piece of evidence Bolt cherry-picked, to demonstrate the colonisation of Australia, concerned the demography of North Caulfield where, as he pointed out, “41 per cent of residents are Jews”.

It is indeed true that 41% of North Caulfield residents cite Judaism as their religion. But it is also true that 59% of North Caulfield residents were born in Australia, that 69% speak only English at home, and that only 5% thought of their ancestry as Jewish. It is more than slightly odd to argue that Australia was being colonised by unassimilated hotel dwellers by pointing to a suburb where 40% of the residents are Jewish but where almost 60% were born in Australia and almost 70% speak English exclusively at home.

Does Bolt regard those who practise the Jewish religion and who choose to live close to other Jews as foreigners, colonists or parasitic hotel dwellers – a common view 70 years ago in Europe but one not entertained in any western country since the Holocaust? Or was his column so ill-thought out that he did not grasp the implication of what he wrote? This seems to me certainly the case. Bolt is not an antisemite. However, in using the fact that 40% of the residents in a small Melbourne suburb are Jewish to support his more general claim that Australia was being colonised by hotel dwellers, probably inadvertently Bolt crossed a line.

Bolt’s most dramatic claim concerned not the Jews but the Chinese. In Box Hill, a moderately well-to-do suburb in Melbourne’s east, he informed us, “an astonishing two-thirds of residents were born in China or have Chinese ancestry.”

This figure is indeed astonishing but not for the reason Bolt believed. Bolt appears to have arrived at this figure by adding those who claimed to have Chinese ancestry in the 2016 census (35.4%) to those born in China (27.6%). Ancestry and country of birth, however, were not alternatives but entirely separate questions. Someone born in China would have ticked both relevant boxes. By Bolt’s method of calculation, an even more astonishing 111.8% of residents in the suburb where I live, Hurstbridge, are “Australian”. Judging by place of birth, ancestry and language, the census reveals that a little over one-third of the residents of Box Hill, not two-thirds, are ethnically Chinese.

The letter caused pandemonium at Liberal party headquarters. Hanson was stripped of her preselection.

As it seems likely that the startling factoid – that two-thirds of Box Hill’s population is Chinese – will provide ammunition for racists, I sent a letter to the editor to the four Murdoch tabloids where Bolt’s column appeared. The letter was published only in the Daily Telegraph and there in severely abbreviated form. The other Murdoch tabloids were apparently happy to allow Bolt’s egregious claim to pass uncorrected. Bolt published a defence of his column this morning. There was no admission that in his earlier column, through a careless error, he had doubled the percentage of ethnically Chinese people living in Box Hill.

There is in my view such a thing as a national conversation. One of its characteristics is an implicit, usually unconscious judgment of what can be uttered respectably in public forums and what cannot be. Over the past 20 years the slow but inexorable drift of the national conversation – chiefly policed by the Murdoch press – has been towards refusing permission to anti-Anzac sentiment and granting permission to racism. This latter drift can be demonstrated objectively.

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On 6 January 1996, a letter, written by the preselected Liberal party candidate for Ipswich, Pauline Hanson, was published in the Queensland Times. It claimed nothing more than showering the admittedly once-wronged Aboriginal people with “money, facilities and opportunities” not available to other Australians was harming them and “causing racism”. The letter caused pandemonium at Liberal party headquarters. Hanson was stripped of her preselection. (The rest as they say is history.) Today, such a letter would be barely noticed by anyone.

Twenty-two years later, on 2 August 2018, the country’s most influential columnist, Andrew Bolt, regularly published in four Murdoch tabloids, claimed that Australia was being destroyed by waves of immigrants – Chinese, Jews, Vietnamese, Indians, Muslims etc – who refused to assimilate and who, as colonists, treated Australia not as a home but as a hotel. That a column like this could be published in the mainstream media, unthinkable 20 years ago, is a consequence of the steady and sinister and perilous drift of Australia’s national conversation towards a permissible racism.