As fuel and supply pressures build, multicultural Australia offers practical lessons in restraint, cooperation and resilience – but policy has yet to catch up.

One of the clearest lessons emerging from the fuel pressure now moving through Australia and the wider region is that wartime resilience already exists in multicultural Australia.

For too long, multicultural policy in Australia has largely been treated as a language of inclusion, recognition and social harmony. All of that has value, but external shocks now reach daily life much faster than our politics admits. Fuel pressure, supply disruption, shipping insecurity and rising public anxiety are no longer abstract foreign policy questions once they begin changing behaviour at home. They become questions of trust, restraint, cooperation and civic tone.

This is where multicultural policy should already be doing far more practical work. It should be one of the places where Australia learns how neighbouring societies respond early when insecurity builds, how pressure is shared, and how ordinary restraint (like fuel rationing) becomes part of public life. In that sense, multiculturalism does not sit outside national safety. It contributes to it.

It can also help Australia read its own region more practically. It reduces some of the cultural hesitation Australia still carries around ASEAN and gives practical depth to the language of “Pacific Family”, not as ceremony but as habit: learning how neighbouring societies respond when pressure builds, and recognising that some of those habits already exist inside multicultural Australia.

Around us, governments are already moving in practical ways. In the Philippines, parts of the government work week have been shortened and official travel limited to reduce fuel demand. In Thailand, staff have been sent home, travel reduced and energy use tightened across government offices. In Vietnam, fuel tariffs have been cut while businesses are being encouraged to work from home and reduce travel.

These are practical responses, but they also suggest something deeper: across much of Asia, war memory still sits closer to civilian life, where shortages, restraint, adjustment and cooperation remained part of lived memory, not only military history. That memory of sacrifice does not land in Australia in any comparable way.

ASEAN met on 13 March to discuss shared civilian pressures building across the region: fuel vulnerability, supply disruption, energy continuity and local cooperation. Australia, while a dialogue partner, remains outside that internal habit of coordinated civilian response. Australia still tends to speak first in the language of supply, reassurance and market continuity, while panic buying, hoarding and immediate resale behaviour appeared almost instantly here alongside partisan argument. Australia often appears regionally first through alliance settings and military posture, not as a neighbouring civilian society learning alongside others.

This is where multicultural Australia should be treated as more than symbolic representation. Many multicultural communities in Australia already carry lived memory of rationing, shortages, restraint, informal resource sharing and making things work quietly under pressure. That knowledge already exists inside Australian society, and not using it is becoming a policy failure.

Diaspora communities are too often treated only as communities requiring reassurance, rather than as real Australians already carrying Asia-Pacific memory, regional habits and practical knowledge that national policy should be learning from.

The multicultural peak sector should stop treating social cohesion as a domestic postscript floating above foreign shocks. Fuel pressure is already a social cohesion question.

Trust, cooperation and public tone are directly tied to national resilience. Wartime resilience memory is active in multicultural communities and should be invited into practical national thinking: helping manage local resources, reinforcing cooperation, and offering ideas drawn from neighbouring societies that already understand how civilian behaviour changes under strain.

There is wide acknowledgement across the sector that the multicultural portfolio is not leading strongly enough under Anne Aly, even though it sits in the one part of government capable of connecting multicultural policy, social cohesion and national emergency thinking.

If Home Affairs cannot innovate more flexibly by drawing practical lessons from neighbouring societies, then Jonathan Duniam, as Shadow Home Affairs Minister, should also be encouraged to move beyond partisan attack and begin offering regionally competent policy suggestions as if preparing for government.

Multicultural leadership in government and shadow government now has to help develop the civic grammar that DFAT can also use, so Australia is not speaking into regional pressure through defence language alone.

Policy cannot continue developing only through partisan pressure when the consequences now affect all Australians, including the communities these bodies claim to represent. Many diaspora communities understand the practical value of bipartisanship differently because memories of war, shortages and political breakdown often remain present in family life, not only in history books.

The multicultural sector itself represents serious cultural capital during periods of rupture. That includes language, memory, regional understanding and practical familiarity with how neighbouring societies think when conditions tighten. Diaspora communities often understand the region not as theory, but as living habit, family obligation and inherited adjustment. This is exactly where multiculturalism can help give practical depth to the language of “Pacific Family”, not as slogan but as policy.

This is also why speaking about wartime thinking is not an overstatement. As Cameron Leckie argues, pressure now arrives faster than our political habits are prepared to admit. Long before a society uses the word war, behaviour has already begun changing: hoarding, fear, private workarounds, distrust and sudden adaptation. The thinking and feeling side of war often appears first.

That is one reason multicultural policy now needs to become more practical than symbolic. In harder years, it may prove to be one of the few parts of Australian life already carrying habits of adjustment that the wider nation has neglected.