On 3 June, Australia’s Home Affairs Minister, Tony Burke, issued a joint statement with Multicultural Affairs Minister Anne Aly, announcing the establishment of an Office for Multicultural Affairs within the Home Affairs Department.

Aly also took the opportunity to hail the Albanese Labor Government as the first to appoint a standalone Multicultural Affairs minister in Cabinet.

The announcement was broadly welcomed by multicultural organisations and communities, who regarded it as a positive step forward. This support comes despite concerns that the new office represents a compromise of a key recommendation from the 2024 Multicultural Framework Review which called for the creation of a standalone Department of Multicultural Affairs, Immigration and Citizenship, led by a dedicated minister outside the Home Affairs portfolio. The review highlighted a widespread perception that the Australian Government viewed multicultural communities more as groups to be monitored or managed, rather than genuinely supported.

Public and political discourse in Australia frequently invokes the term “social cohesion”. This is evident in headlines such as:

• ASIO warns social cohesion at risk (Australian Financial Review, October 2023)
• Social cohesion ‘fraying’, Albanese admits amid anti-Israel backlash (Australian Financial Review, May 2024)
• Islamic leaders accuse premier of threatening social cohesion over protest ban (Sydney Morning Herald, October 2024)
• Australia is going backwards on race but ‘social cohesion’ is not the answer, commissioner warns (The Guardian, February 2025)

The term’s prevalence has drawn critical attention, with Crikey journalist Cam Wilson recently asking, ‘Why are ABC execs suddenly talking about “social cohesion”?’

A closer analysis of this discourse reveals two key patterns.

First, social cohesion is most often discussed in negative terms and typically framed as something under threat. Efforts by the government or multicultural communities to build interfaith and intercultural understanding tend to receive significantly less media attention than conflicts or tensions perceived to endanger social cohesion. In this context, it is unsurprising that the announcement of a new Office for Multicultural Affairs received minimal media coverage. For example, neither Nine’s major mastheads nor News Corp Australia’s publications reported on the development. The ABC’s attention was limited to a single interview with Aly on Radio National.

Second, narratives around social cohesion are largely shaped by politicians, the national security establishment and the mainstream media. These actors play a dominant role in defining when, and how, social cohesion is perceived to be at risk. As a result, developments initiated by multicultural communities or aimed at institutional reform are often sidelined in the national conversation.

Sociologist Andrew Jakubowicz has long studied these dynamics and offers a pointed critique:

“If people are creating problems for me, there’s an issue with social cohesion. If the minorities are making me feel uncomfortable, then there’s a problem of social cohesion. If the government/establishment are making the minorities community uncomfortable, it is their problem.”

This observation highlights a core issue: dominant institutions rarely acknowledge how their own actions and narratives can undermine the sense of belonging among multicultural communities. These experiences of exclusion or alienation often remain invisible in public discourse and are seldom conceptualised as challenges to social cohesion.

Two recent examples involving Australian-Chinese communities illustrate this point.

First, in the lead-up to the May 2025 federal election, Liberal Senator Jane Hume appeared on Channel 7’s breakfast program Sunrise alongside Labor Minister Clare O’Neil and alleged there “might be Chinese spies” among the Australian-Chinese volunteers in O’Neil’s campaign. The allegation triggered widespread anger and indignation on Chinese-language social media platforms such as WeChat. Responses from Australian-Chinese communities included an open letter demanding an apology, an online petition calling for the Liberal Party to distance itself from Hume’s remark, and articles in Chinese-language media ventilating the anger of those in these communities. While Australia’s English-language media reported on Hume’s allegation, coverage generally did not frame it as detrimental to social cohesion. The absence of such a framing points to the asymmetry alluded to by Jakubowicz: when minorities are made to feel unsafe or unfairly targeted, their experience is rarely interpreted as evidence of social cohesion being at risk.

Second, in recent weeks, several violent incidents involving individuals with Chinese backgrounds in Sydney — such as the assault by juveniles of a couple in Eastgardens and of an international student working as a food delivery driver — have raised serious concerns within Australian-Chinese communities. In response, Multicultural New South Wales published a statement, the Chinese Australian Forum issued an open letter and more than 30,000 people signed a petition urging the NSW Government to toughen youth crime laws, while about 300 members of Australian-Chinese communities participated in an anti-youth violence march in Sydney. Growing concerned for their safety, some international students from the People’s Republic of China and Australians with Chinese heritage formed self-defence groups and mini-apps were developed for protection. Although police declined to confirm if the Eastgardens attack was racially motivated, many in Australian-Chinese communities still feel targeted. While there was some media coverage of these incidents, once again, none was presented as a threat to social cohesion.

In recent remarks, Aly explicitly challenged the prevailing approach:

“Social cohesion is about everybody. Making multicultural communities solely and wholly responsible for social cohesion, I think, has added to that perception of multicultural communities being over-securitised, being responsible for things like social cohesion.”

This redefinition is significant. A truly inclusive conception of social cohesion must account for the actions of all members of society, not just those from minority backgrounds. The physical, mental and emotional harm experienced by Australian-Chinese communities in the examples above are closely tied to social cohesion, even if they are rarely recognised as such. Instead of highlighting these harms, the mainstream media frequently casts unwarranted suspicion on members of these communities.

If the vision articulated by Aly is not meaningfully embedded, the current framing of social cohesion risks entrenching marginalisation rather than addressing it. In this light, the establishment of the Office for Multicultural Affairs may serve as a useful starting point, but the broader conversation, and the institutional accountability that must accompany it, remains an urgent and unfinished task.

Republished from Australia-China Relations Institute, University of Technology Sydney, 24 June 2025

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.