A new Commonwealth Office of Multicultural Affairs has been established within the Department of Home Affairs.

This is a step in the right direction, although falling short of the recommendations of the Multicultural Framework Review. Other announced changes to immigration administration might provide clearer leadership.

The new ‘office’ and a bit of history

The latest Department of Home Affairs top structure chart reveals that the government has given effect to its promise, made in early June, to establish a Commonwealth Office of Multicultural Affairs.

This step is part of the government’s response to the Multicultural Framework Review “Towards Fairness – A Multicultural Australia for All” chaired by Dr Bulent Hass Dellal and presented to the government in July 2024.

The other crucial element of the response was to create the role of minister for Multicultural Affairs, at Cabinet level, and give the job to Dr Anne Aly.

Since the inception of Australian multiculturalism in the 1970s, multicultural policy has played a vital role at the Commonwealth level in helping Australia understand its evolving community and defining how an increasingly culturally diverse society should work for the benefit of all. These ideas embraced both those in the migrant community and those in the host community which received them. The entire Australian community was to be the audience.

The work was driven initially from the Office of Multicultural Affairs in the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and subsequently, after Howard Government changes, the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Work at the federal level was closely coordinated with the work of state and territory government multicultural offices. Several states and territories have legislation which enshrines the concept of multiculturalism.

Less well-known is that, at times of international crises, the extensive multicultural community liaison networks played a vital role in helping the Australian Government ensure that external pressures arising from conflicts overseas did not play out with violence between the relevant communities in Australia. Multicultural policy enabled scope for free expression of views on those conflicts, within Australian law, but without resort to communal violence or suppression of the views of one side. Conflicts in former Yugoslavia and the Middle East were examples.

Labor Governments have tended to emphasise “inclusivity” of all communities in Australia in their approach to multiculturalism. Coalition Governments have preferred an emphasis on security and social cohesion – which often had the flavour of “things would be better for everyone if you thought more like us".

The low point in Commonwealth multicultural policy administration was when the Coalition Government in 2013 shuffled the multicultural policy function off from the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to the Department of Social Services, presumably on the grounds that it was too soft and fuzzy for a hard-nosed border security portfolio. A couple of years later, someone remembered that the multicultural policy function did actually have a hard-nosed security dimension, and the function was returned to the Department of Home Affairs and buried in the counter-terrorism area. When Labor was elected in 2022 and tried to bring some coherence to the remaining immigration functions, the (by then well-travelled) multicultural policy function was extracted from the security side of the Department and brought into the immigration mainstream.

The task ahead for the office

The new Office of Multicultural Affairs is charged with taking forward multicultural policy and implementing whatever recommendations the government decides to pursue from the Multicultural Framework Review – such as a national plan to acknowledge and celebrate Australia’s cultural diversity, reform of the rigid and unnecessary Australian citizenship test, improving multicultural capability within the Australian Public Service and making government services more accessible and responsive to the diverse Australian community.

It starts its task with some limitations. The structure falls well short of what was recommended in the Multicultural Framework Review. The review had recommended that the government either establish an Office of Multicultural Affairs in the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet or a separate statutory Multicultural Commission. It further recommended that the immigration functions be taken out of the Department of Home Affairs and reconstituted as a separate, freestanding Department of Multicultural Affairs Immigration and Citizenship. None of that has happened.

The new “office” looks a lot like a standard “division” structure within a Commonwealth Department, but with the label “office". The structure also mixes the multicultural affairs functions with the ongoing migrant settlement policy and programs. These are not incompatible, but it is not the purest model available.

Nevertheless, the new “office” provides an excellent opportunity for revitalising multicultural policy at the Commonwealth level. It has the advantage of a minister well qualified for the role at the Cabinet table and fresh and energetic leadership at the bureaucratic level.

Time will tell how much the government is committed to implementing recommendations of the Review and how much the new office is able to achieve. Ultimately, it will succeed or fail depending on how it is able to position the 50-year-old concept of multiculturalism for the next generation of Australians.

Broader change to immigration administration

The change to multicultural policy administration comes with wider changes to the Home Affairs Department. A new Head of Immigration — Clare Sharp — has been named. She was formerly general counsel in the Department of Home Affairs. The “head of” designation is unusual. It is unclear to an outsider whether not the position she occupies is at associate secretary level as her predecessors were. But at least her immigration subordinates will know from the title who is in charge!

This arrangement has the prospect of being more successful than the appointment of her predecessor which involved the secondment of a Victorian public servant to the associate secretary position lasting barely 12 months.

Another notable element is of the newly published structure is that, on the face of it, fully one-third of the immigration structure is for compliance-related functions. After the inexplicable decision by Peter Dutton/Mike Pezzullo under the previous government to effectively eliminate immigration compliance functions (and the damning Christine Nixon report on the consequences), the government’s actions to reintroduce a serious compliance function have been highly commendable. However, its role in the structure now looks disproportionately large.

Unfortunately, what is missing from the new immigration structure are words which imply a clear commitment to “client service". There are many who might say that reflects reality. The Department of Home Affairs stopped publishing formal client service targets many years ago.

This is yet another of the many significant adjustments to immigration structures since the disastrous Morrison/Dutton/Pezzullo bureaucratic arrangements which absorbed immigration into the security-focused Departments of Immigration and Border Protection, and then Home Affairs, and banished “soft” functions such as multicultural policy, settlement programs and the Adult Migrant English program to other departments.

Since that time, the banished programs have come back together with immigration and more logical arrangements continue to re-assert themselves. It is reminiscent of those strange creatures in nature which, despite being completely dissected by an external force, can reassemble themselves into their original logical form.

This natural re-assembly process still has some distance to go, but, at some point, the logic of a separate Department of Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs will re-assert itself.

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