The arguments are not new, but the intensity is. Across dinner tables, comment sections, and parliamentary chambers, Australians are talking past one another on questions of immigration, identity, religion, and belonging with a frequency and sharpness that would have seemed exceptional a decade ago. This week, SBS attempts something ambitious: to put people who genuinely disagree in the same room and ask whether common ground still exists.
The Social Schism, premiering on SBS and SBS On Demand on Wednesday 4 March at 7:30pm, sees SBS World News presenter Janice Petersen bring together high-profile thought leaders and community voices from across the spectrum, including Hannah Ferguson, Allegra Spender, Adam Creighton, Lynda Ben-Menashe, Sami Shah, Giridharan Sivaraman, Hana Assafiri, Kirstie Parker and Om Dhungel. The discussion canvasses questions around free speech, hate laws, immigration, racism and social cohesion.
SBS Director of News and Current Affairs Mandi Wicks said the programme was part of the broadcaster's commitment to "sharing the stories that define our nation," bringing together "leading thinkers and community voices to explore our differences with empathy and honesty." That stated aim is admirable. Whether a single televised forum can move the needle on something as structural as national division is, of course, a separate question.
The data suggest the problem is real and not easily dismissed as media confection. The 2025 Scanlon Foundation Mapping Social Cohesion survey, conducted by the Australian National University and the Social Research Centre and capturing the views of more than 8,000 Australians, found that the Scanlon Index of Social Cohesion was steady for the third year in a row. That flat line sounds reassuring until you look beneath it. Forty-six per cent of adults reported a "great" sense of belonging in Australia, compared with 63 per cent in 2020, and the proportion of millennials with a great sense of belonging has declined from 64 per cent in the 2010s to 34 per cent today.
When Australians who believed the country was more divided than united were asked what the main issues were causing that division, immigration topped the list, and some people surveyed really struggled to name a single issue on which they felt the country was united. That is a striking finding for a country that has long prided itself on a broadly successful multicultural project.
The panellists on The Social Schism bring genuinely different prescriptions. Adam Creighton, Chief Economist and Senior Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, argues that Australia should halve its current immigration intake, and that immigration is a major factor in wealth inequality and housing issues. Hannah Ferguson, co-founder of Cheek Media Co., argues that class divisions, particularly in housing, are contributing to declining trust and engagement among younger Australians, and while she supports hate speech laws, she cautions against introducing them hastily. Writer and comedian Sami Shah describes himself as a free speech absolutist, opposing government determinations of safe and unsafe voices, and says he is worried about how hate speech laws will be used.
These are not strawman positions. They reflect genuine tensions that sit at the heart of liberal democracy: the right to speak freely versus the right to live free of vilification; the economic benefits of migration versus the pressure it places on housing and infrastructure; the value of cultural diversity versus the need for shared civic norms. Researchers at QUT's Digital Media Research Centre have described rapidly increasing partisanship and polarisation, especially online, as an urgent threat to societal cohesion in Australia and other established western democracies.
Kirstie Parker, a Yuwaalaraay woman from northwestern NSW and co-Chair of Reconciliation Australia since 2024, brings a First Nations perspective that spans rights advocacy, policy development, journalism and the arts. Sydney-based community leader Om Dhungel, born in the Kingdom of Bhutan, arrived in Australia as a student in 1998 and now sits on the NSW Police Multicultural Advisory Council, the Blacktown Multicultural Advisory Committee and the board of the Asylum Seeker Centre. Their presence matters: too often these conversations are conducted exclusively by people whose belonging in Australia has never been questioned.
The progressive case for strong intervention, whether through hate speech legislation or targeted anti-racism programmes, rests on the argument that social cohesion cannot be built on a foundation of unchallenged prejudice. Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner, Giri Sivaraman, who prior to joining the Commission served as a principal lawyer with Maurice Blackburn and as Chair of Multicultural Australia, argues that education to stop racism should start in schools and workplaces. That position is supported by evidence that the 2025 Mapping Social Cohesion report highlights a persistent hierarchy of acceptance and a concerning level of prejudice particularly towards people of Islamic faith and Australians from Asian and African backgrounds.
The centre-right counter-argument is not that prejudice is acceptable, but that legislative remedies carry their own risks to the freedoms that make a pluralist society worth defending. Rushed or broadly drafted hate speech laws can suppress legitimate policy debate, chill journalistic inquiry, and hand governments a tool that history shows is rarely used with perfect neutrality. Former ABC broadcaster Jon Faine has also observed that the politics of multiculturalism has at times become a contest between ethnic power blocs over public funding, and that social cohesion is not improved by cynical power brokers treating ethnicity as a factional weapon. That critique comes from the left, and deserves to be heard.
The most durable insight from the research may be one that cuts across ideological lines. The Scanlon Foundation's 2025 report found that while cost-of-living pressures and global uncertainty continue to affect Australians, local communities remain a key source of resilience, and that people living in cohesive neighbourhoods showed significantly more resilient perceptions of national cohesion than those in less cohesive areas. In other words, the antidote to polarisation may begin not in Canberra or on a broadcast panel, but in the habits of everyday life: whether we know our neighbours, whether we participate in local institutions, whether we extend trust across differences of background and belief.
A television special will not resolve any of this. But the conversation SBS is hosting is at least a recognition that the questions are urgent. The Scanlon Foundation's ongoing research and the work of bodies like the Australian Human Rights Commission point toward the same conclusion: that social cohesion requires active, sustained investment from institutions, governments, and ordinary citizens alike. The first step is being willing to sit across from someone you disagree with and actually listen. Whatever its limitations, that is precisely what The Social Schism is attempting.