Large-scale immigration programs have contributed substantially to Australia since 1947, bringing much needed skills and demand into the economy. They have also helped make Australia a more culturally sophisticated country. In the 1970s, the oppressive policies of assimilation and integration were replaced by the policy idea of multiculturalism. Today, Australian politicians boast that Australia is the most successful multicultural society in the world. Their boasting is baseless. A combination of crass political opportunism and policy neglect mean that Australia’s unfinished multicultural project is floundering.
In 1973, the Whitlam government introduced the policy idea of multiculturalism. It was an idea about respecting cultural differences and being open to cultural adaptation and change across the whole of society. This was a visionary moment in Australian public policy history. However, before any serious policy reforms were initiated, the multicultural idea got lost amid the political turmoil at the end of the Whitlam era.
It was the country’s good fortune that Malcolm Fraser was a committed supporter of the multicultural idea. He persuaded recalcitrant colleagues to put policy muscle on the skeleton of the multicultural idea. His government commissioned the Galbally Enquiry into Migrant Services and Programs which reported in 1978:
[…] it is now necessary for the Commonwealth Government to change the direction of its involvement in the provision of programs and services for migrants and to take further steps to encourage multiculturalism. In taking these new directions, we stress at the outset that the closer involvement of ethnic communities themselves, and of other levels of government, is essential.
Subsequently, public services were made available in the languages of ethnic communities. English classes were made more accessible for non-English speakers. SBS television and radio began broadcasting. The Australian Institute for Multicultural Affairs was established – one of the finest social and economic policy research institutes this country has ever seen. (In the early days of the Hawke government, in an act of policy spite, it was subsumed into the Canberra bureaucracy and made redundant.)
Of particular note, was the fact the Fraser government welcomed refugee Vietnamese boat people to the country, echoing the Chifley and Menzies governments’ acceptance of large numbers of “Displaced Persons” (refugees) from post-War Europe in the late 1940s and 1950s. By welcoming the Vietnamese, Malcom Fraser hammered the final nail into the coffin of the white Australia policy. However, since the Fraser days, opportunistic politicking around the sources and annual rates of immigration has erupted. Policy-making in the multicultural sphere has stalled; what’s left of it is beginning to fray. Some communities – especially refugee communities – are turning inward.
This inward turning has been exacerbated by cultural exclusions escalating from the outside. Opportunistic politicians are articulating racist and Trumpist tropes, scapegoating minority groups, blaming them for housing shortages, criminal acts, even terrorism. This is aggravating the trend for ethnic communities to turn further inwards, seeking security within their own people, rather than looking to mainstream society for support. The highlighting of ethnic diversity rather than shared experiences is now the defining feature of Australia’s faltering multicultural project.
What can be done?
A clever starting point for resolving Australia’s unfinished multicultural idea would be the re-establishment of an Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs. It should be placed under the auspices of one of the country’s universities rather than left as a supplicant in the power plays of the Canberra bureaucracy.
The Institute must be given the resources to develop a three-fold agenda. These resources must include experts who are representative of the country’s cultural pluralism.
First, the Institute would need to establish a range of on-going research programs focused on the changing demographic profiles of Australia’s ethnic communities and their interactions with contemporary Australian society and the country’s economy. In particular, the research must be tasked with identifying disadvantages within specific communities and advising on effective policies to address those disadvantages.
Second, it should develop a major educational focus. For example, designing curricula for Australian schools about the cultural traditions within our ethnic communities – including, where relevant, their religious traditions – to provide young Australians with clear understandings of the vibrancy of our multicultural society. Public education programs should also be part of the Institute’s remit, including providing an accessible media outreach reporting on the Institutes research and related activities.
Third, the Institute should be charged with injecting new life into the idea of multiculturalism. Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s famous essay on the “politics of recognition” could be a good starting point. He notes that our identity:
… is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the mis recognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people around them mirror back a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves.
This has special relevance to the suppurating racism that is at the core of Australia’s postcolonial culture. However, identity is a problematic issue.
In fact, identity is always a richly multi-facetted phenomenon. To single out just one aspect of identity (for example, one’s gender, one’s ethnicity, or one’s religious affiliation) is a miserly view of what identity is all about. Our “identity” emerges from many traditions, experiences, and self-constituting imaginings, all of which all contribute to the amazing reality of our uniqueness as individuals. However, unique individualism can also mean deep loneliness and social isolation.
This is where Australian multiculturalism could do with a vivifying dose of cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is philosophical acknowledgement that whatever our local citizenship status or cultural ethnicity might be, we are all citizens of the world. At the end of the day we all share a common humanity. It is a philosophy that delights in cultural differences. In an intelligent society, that delight is based on educating the public about the history of cultural traditions and their transformative experiences in contemporary Australia.
It’s time to advance the multicultural idea in Australia, to make us the most genuinely cosmopolitan society in the world. An expert Institute is urgently needed to begin this advancement. It could also be a way of honouring the father of multicultural policy in this country by naming it the Malcolm Fraser Research and Education Institute for Australian Cosmopolitanism.
Dr Allan Patience is an honorary fellow in political science in the University of Melbourne.
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