Reflections on a multicultural nation

Has multiculturalism had its day? Some people would say that multiculturalism no longer carries any policy impact. Andrew Robb worries that it is confusing. The federal government’s history summit doesn’t mention cultural diversity, let alone multiculturalism.

The 1960s term, “integration” has become the favoured term to refer to the relation between immigrants and the rest of Australia. The government’s cherished Australian values do not include inter-cultural competency. The Prime Minister praises Quadrant magazine and warns of the dangers of the “soft left”. Quadrant is that government-subsidised journal that has attacked multiculturalism almost since the term was first permitted to enter the Australian political lexicon.

We live in a world now where unease about the “other” has escalated dramatically.

“Others”, of course, have always had it hard. My family were Polish Jewish refugees who survived the Holocaust through a mixture of luck and rapid thinking, and made their way to Lithuania, then to Japan, Shanghai in China and, finally, to Australia.

Their window of opportunity slammed shut soon after, when an Australian government report concluded that Jews from Shanghai were prostitutes, drug runners, black-marketeers, and disease carriers. En route, they changed their identities to save their lives; their protectors acted in ways that belie the stereotypes we now have of them: a Japanese samurai spy, Soviet NKVD agents, Russian businessmen, and Chinese communists.

My childhood in Bondi was framed by the refugee and immigrant communities around me. But the cultural politics I first learned were those which existed between the Catholic kids at the church school down the street and the rest of us - or at least, the rest of the kids who chose one of the (to me) bizarre Christian sects for scripture classes.

I attended the Jewish class for a while, but its rigid discipline and disconnect from my sense of the world scared me off. My parents, who did not warm to religious ideologues of any religion, let me wander off to the Anglican class - there was no philosophy class for atheists, and Anglicanism of that time was like warm milk - which was all about a gentle and mild Jewish boy called Yeshua, Jesus in English.

I first became involved in the political and cultural struggles now described as multiculturalism back in the late 1960s, when my honours thesis in government examined inter-communal relations - Anglo-Australian, Greek and Aboriginal - in downtown Redfern, the heartland of inner-city transformation.

At that time the “M” word wasn’t around, though assimilation was already going out of fashion (except in the immigration department; I was put on some sort of black list, and department officials were warned not to listen to me speak).

As an activist around urban issues, I was very involved in coalitions of tenants and residents, looking for ways of joining up the dots and building community organisations that stretched across ethnic boundaries.

When the ALP came to national government in 1972, I was asked by Al Grassby to enter the lion’s den and join the immigration department’s migrant task force. It was the first time the animals had been asked to run the zoo or, at least, enter the manager’s office.

It was a transformative time. Racism was under attack; the Vietnam war was over as far as Australia was concerned (at least until the Indo-Chinese refugees arrived in their hundreds of thousands); and the burst of new nations in the region meant that the old colonial certainties were fast disappearing.

Inside the department, the upper echelons were terrified that a multi-racial Australia might be on the agenda of the new government. After some hard pushing by the emerging ethnic leadership, including people like Melbourne’s Walter Lippman, the department acquiesced to the novel terminology from Canada, that Australia should become a “multicultural” society, even though the fear of Black immigrants remained.

The term “multiculturalism” has a mixed parentage, as one would hope. Its Latin origins mean “many cultures”, while the Greek “-ism” can imply a philosophy, ideology, movement or action.

The key issue in 1960s Canada was national unity: how to hold the nation together when there was significant political and economic inequality associated with the bi-cultural divide - that between francophone and anglophone Canadians. Canadians tried to solve this dilemma through a recognition of the right to cultural integrity for the main antagonists, as the price for, and ultimately as it turned out, the most sensible way to achieve, structural (economic and institutional) unity.

In the process, the broader principle of cultural differentiation was sanctified, and thus the “multicultural” rubric came into being with, in time, national legislation and a national human-rights charter that enshrined the right to cultural difference.

Under-pinning the rubric was the belief that social cohesion and institutional integration would be best served by the institutional recognition of cultural difference. Canada had another set of dilemmas, of course: devising a national languages policy, and deciding how to recognise and integrate the first nations of indigenous peoples.

Australian multiculturalism was framed rather differently. Our only national language has no competition, and, for the most part, our multicultural policies avoid all issues to do with Indigenous people except in so far as the 1990s national language policy sought to protect and support Indigenous languages.

However, the problem that we wanted to address - that of how to ensure an integrated society as the nation entered the push towards globalisation - also required awareness of the many complex relations between structural inequality (what we once might have called “social class”) and cultural attributes and resources (or ethnicity).

Thus, the Petro Georgiou-Frank Galbally-Malcolm Fraser model of multiculturalism fashioned in the late 1970s aimed to disentangle ethnicity from class by opening up social mobility for new immigrants and their children, unlocking their natural potential and enhancing their cultural capacities to contribute.

The strategy overseen by Georgiou and his cohorts was systematic, well researched and aimed at institutional change. They reasoned that existing institutions had an interest in the status quo while their officers did not possess either the competence or confidence to change, and the barriers facing communities to learning about how to affect change were very high. Furthermore, they determined that national resources were moving unequally away from ethnic groups who experienced disadvantage.

The hallmarks of the strategy put in place contained institutional beachheads such as the migrant resource centres and the Special Broadcasting Service to provide participative but distinctive role models.

It also tried to create alternative centres of knowledge, such as the Australian Institute of Multicultural Affairs, powered by intellectuals from the marginalised communities who could contest the taken-for-granted self-serving assumptions of what had come to be called “the mainstream”.

After the ALP came to power in 1983, processes of institutional change such as access and equity and later, once more under the Coalition, the government charter of service for a culturally diverse society were introduced.

The point about these exercises was that they were supposed to change the social world; they were supposed to empower more marginalised groups and enable their members to move into more powerful locations in society, particularly the public sphere of government and cultural creativity.

Many powerful groups did not like this strategy and its consequences. We only have to look at Petro Georgiou’s own career trajectory to see what happens if one moves against the heartland of real power. Georgiou found a place for himself as adviser to Prime Minister Fraser, and in many of the initiatives that were to characterise Australian multiculturalism.

He then secured pre-selection for Kooyong, once held by his hero Sir Robert Gordon Menzies and later by Andrew Peacock.

He showed that in socially progressive, multicultural Melbourne, in the wealthiest locality in Australia, surrounded by all those migrants who had really “made it” in terms of income and wealth and where the old quasi-aristocracy welcomed the new boy on the block, the Greek working-class kid with the immigrant father who couldn’t speak English well but loved Australia, could take his street-fighting fists and make a space. But that’s where it stopped.

There was no way the inner sanctum of his cherished Liberal Party would ever let a radical “wog” from the streets sit at the high table. Not only that, they would plough every one of his cherished ideals into the dirt and try to force him to wield the shovel.

When the Coalition came to power in 1996, they were washed in on the same wave that landed Pauline Hanson on the cross-benches. Much has been written about how the government rebounded to her challenge and incorporated her ideas into its programs. Yet, as the most vociferous haters of cultural diversity have argued (in Quadrant of course) the Coalition has, unfortunately, still left bits of the multicultural project in place.

The question is why has this happened? Why hasn’t the axe that was to fall in the wake of the 1996 victory cut fully through the forest of political correctness, and left it as flattened as the old-growth stands of Tasmania?

It’s not just that SBS bought the cricket and the world cup and a portfolio of multilingual soft-core porn for the suburbs on Saturday night. It’s not just that migrant resource centres, despite the sustained and malevolent cutting of their resources, somehow survive (at the moment) and respond to the next wave of suffering souls seeking refuge and new lives. It’s not just that in schools and communities across the country, dedicated teachers, interested parents, and excited kids invest energy and creativity in trying to work together across cultures to realise the potential of their minds and bodies.

Rather, it is all those things. But also it is because the basic idea - that a complex society has to see everyone as having an equal stake in its success if it is to prosper - remains valid.

This was never clearer to me than a decade ago, when I gave a talk in Jakarta for the Australia-Indonesia Institute. The topic I was asked to address, “Is Australia a Racist Country?” was chosen by the Indonesian side in the wake of the Coalition victory and Hanson’s efflorescence.

Let’s say that after my ear burned from the Ambassador’s tirade and my paper was pulped at the order of DFAT, I became aware that a new political correctness had been born, and it was as uncomfortable for me as the supposedly constraining political correctness of the multiculturalists had been for John Howard. This rumpus aside, I had to answer the question my hosts had put. I proposed what I hoped was a truth: Australia was a society with a racist past seeking to prevent or avoid a racist future.

I think the reason that multiculturalism - with all its meandering inconsistencies, its occasional delusions, its difficulties with gender and sexuality, its discomfort with class, its ragged wounds around Indigenous issues - still continues to speak to us as a mode of thinking about the world and acting in it, is that through its prism we can appreciate how much societies are sustained through inter-dependence of their peoples.

Cultural hierarchies that force obeisance of some to others, that corral minorities into ghettos of hate and poverty, and that demand a singular consciousness, are doomed to be places of violence and outrage.

There is enough evidence from around the world to support such a statement: the USSR, Franco’s Spain, both the Shah’s and Khomeini’s Iran. We know that cultures that engage with each other and are open to exchange and growth produce extraordinary creativity and opportunities for innovation, as in Spain under the Muslim rulers of the early centuries of the last millennium.

This engagement has to be multi-directional to work, and a willingness to change and learn is a pre-condition for the positive outcomes that can result.

Is this all too soft and wishy-washy? Is this just another tirade from the “soft left” based on a naïve faith and a black-armband view of history? Let me suggest why it is not.

Multiculturalism has carried a lot of baggage. Many serious political players believe multiculturalism allowed Islamist jihad into Australia (or if not the terrorists, then at the very least organised and violent crime), widespread racially inspired sexual assault, and an upsurge in hard drug use (see Quadrant). Some of these things were said about my parents’ community in the 1940s, the Italians in the 1950s and 1960s, the Indo-Chinese in the 1970s and 1980s, and, of course, the Arabs-Muslims in the last decade or so.

We know from the last 60 years that some refugee Jews were criminals in Australia, but the vast majority were not, and since that time some criminals have been Jewish, though most are not. We know that the mano nero operated in Italian communities, and the mafia was active in various parts of Australia; most Italians had nothing to do with either, and detested them and their works and are ashamed by their residual presence.

Despite the shattered lives that forced 200,000 Indo-Chinese refugees to seek a new life in Australia, only a few were ever heroin dealers or extortionists or murderers. The overwhelming majority wanted nothing to do with these people and have proved themselves throughout Australian society.

And for the 400,000 or so Australian Muslims, the destructive behaviour of a small minority remains a cancerous sore eating at their hopes and dreams - or rather, the mainstream misperception is what is undermining their confidence and aspirations.

So multiculturalism has not had its day, though there are those who fear change in themselves and will do everything in their power to ensure it disappears from the political lexicon.

The avalanche of abuse directed towards the idea of a co-operative society, one that recognises all its members as part of the story, has overwhelmed the now too clearly fragile edifices built on decades of good-will and mutual respect. All it takes, as they say, for evil to triumph is for people of goodwill to do nothing.

The energy directed against multiculturalism has been truly evil, for it has been advancing an agenda of supercilious and corrosive superiority, with an absolute disregard for the consequences. This is not about Left and Right, of cold war ideologues snapping their braces as they see off their enemies. This is about ensuring a modern cosmopolitan society and its survival as a civil space. That task confronts us all.