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Reflections on a multicultural nation

By Andrew Jakubowicz - posted Wednesday, 15 November 2006


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.

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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.

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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.

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This article was commissioned by Australian mosaic, the national magazine of FECCA and will be published in the next edition, issue 15.



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About the Author

Andrew Jakubowicz is a professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney. He blogs for the SBS program CQ: http://www.sbs.com.au/shows/cq/tab-listings/page/i/2/h/Blog/

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