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Australian Multiculturalism: successes, problems and risks

By John Menadue - posted Wednesday, 27 November 2002


In a broad sense, ‘Australian multiculturalism’ describes the cultural and ethnic diversity of Australia. More than 50 per cent of Australians were born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas.

More specifically, ‘Australian multiculturalism,’ as a public policy, attempts to manage the consequences of that diversity. It acknowledges the right of all Australians first, to cultural identity – the right within limits to express their cultural heritage in such areas as religion and language; second, to social justice – the right to equality of treatment and opportunity, regardless of race, language, religion and gender; and finally, to economic efficiency – the need to maintain and develop the diverse skills and talents of all Australians.

This is in contrast to assimilation, which assumes that newcomers will abandon their cultural identity as soon as possible.

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Australian multiculturalism also importantly insists that with the rights of newcomers go certain obligations. First, there must be an over-riding and unifying commitment to Australia and its future. Second there must be acceptance by all of the basic principles and structures of Australian society – the Constitution, Rule of Law, Parliamentary democracy, freedom of speech and religion, English as the national language and tolerance and equality. A superstructure of diversity can only be built securely on a common and secure sub-structure. Furthermore, diversity for its own sake is not sufficient. The test is what it contributes to the common good.

Australian culture, society and institutions are dynamic – today's Australian society is different from that of yesterday. It is good to look back and value what we have inherited. Federation was a great national achievement, but our founding fathers didn’t get it all right. They entrenched racism in our constitution and White Australia was the first legislation of the Federal Parliament. Australian society today is more open and tolerant than the society in which I was brought up. There never was a golden age for the Australian cultural identity. Nostalgia must be tempered with realism. Our cultural identity is a work in progress.

The most meaningful job of my life was Head of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs under Malcolm Fraser and Ian Macphee in the early 1980s. I knew that I was part of nation-building. I also learned at that time that it was possible to manage a humanitarian program for 100,000 Indo-Chinese refugees while at the same time protecting our borders. Malcolm Fraser showed that humanitarianism and border protection could be managed together. John Howard tells us that it can’t be done.

I contend that Australian multiculturalism is our greatest achievement, but it has always been fraught with tension. Its challenge is to risk present comfort for a better future for ourselves and others.

As Moses and the Israelites discovered, change is risky and it can be painful. But if it is properly led and managed it can bring great benefits. The key for us is to get the scale and timing of change right. My own experience is that innovation and improvement do not come from sameness and homogeneity. They come from difference, diversity, challenge and competition. Over the years, I think Australia has got it about right – but not in the past year.

Facts about Australian Multiculturalism

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Of Australia’s 19 million population, 28 per cent were born overseas and a further 25 per cent have at least one parent born overseas. Net immigration is about 75,000 to 100,000 per annum, which will give Australia a population of about 25 million by 2051. Nine per cent will be of Asian background.

According to the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, the top 10 countries of origin are the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Italy, Vietnam, Greece, China, Germany, Philippines, Netherlands and India. Two hundred foreign languages are spoken, with the leading five languages other than English being Italian, Greek, Cantonese, Arabic and Vietnamese. Each of these five languages is spoken by more than 100,000 people.

Two thirds of second-generation migrants marry outside their cultural and ethnic backgrounds. Forty per cent of Australians are of mixed cultural origins. These quite remarkable figures belie the concerns about ethnic separateness down the generations.

Asian groups have a high uptake of citizenship – for Chinese and Vietnamese it is about 80 per cent. People born in the United Kingdom, Northern Europe and New Zealand, have much lower uptakes of citizenship. Citizenship is the legal glue that holds us together. It should be more actively promoted as was proposed by the FitzGerald Committee in the mid-1980s. I remain very skeptical about dual citizenship – with the dual loyalty it implies.

Myths about Multiculturalism

It is often implied in our media that crime rates are high among new migrants. Taking migrants as a whole, there is no evidence of this.

It is also suggested that multicultural societies collapse. New settlers are inclined to stick together for mutual support and become ‘a community of communities’. Over time however, they move out into the wider Australian community.

We also hear concerns about ghettos in the United States and the necessity to learn from the current European experience. I suggest that US and European experiences are quite different from our own. In contrast to Australia's planned immigration, the US waves of immigration in the late 19th Century and 20th Century were largely unplanned. We don’t have a common border with a large and populous country like Mexico and America’s problems have also been exacerbated by an historical slave class.

Europe’s problems have also been magnified by mistaken guest-worker policies, a phenomenon Australia has always rejected. Moreover, the United Kingdom and Europe felt morally and perhaps legally obligated to take in millions from former colonies. When Papua New Guinea became independent in 1975, Australia refused similar rights for Papua and New Guinea residents who claimed long associations with Australia.

Achievements

Through migration, Australia is much more dynamic and outward looking. Although our early history was dogged by insularity, there has been a significant transformation and we are now more tolerant of people with diverse origins. A 1997 ANOP poll indicated that 78 per cent of Australians felt that multiculturalism had been good for Australia.

New settlers have a strong commitment to succeed and have made outstanding contributions to Australia. They are invariably industrious, entrepreneurial and risk-taking. As Geoffrey Blainey said, referring to Hitler: "when tyrants shake the trees, Australia harvests the fruit".

Newcomers have high educational aspirations for their children. In New South Wales high schools, 25 per cent of students are of non-English speaking background, but in selective schools where students are chosen on merit, 46 per cent are of NESB. In NSW, the Higher School Certificate results, which determine university entry, are dominated each year by NESB students. First it was Greeks and Eastern Europeans, now it is students from China, Indo-China and Korea.

The same trends are shown in university entrance scores. The Australian Council for Educational Research has pointed out that for university entrance scores, for Australian students, the average is 70. For Asian students it is 79, other Europe 72, English-speaking 69 and NESB 72.

Integration into the global market is helped by 17 per cent of our population fluently speaking a language other than English. This is essential with Asia now taking 57 per cent of our exports. Our tourism industry has also benefited from new people with new skills.

Problems

Australia’s achievements have not come without problems. Opinion polls show that multiculturalism is clearly favoured, but this often seems contradicted by opposition to further migration. An AGB/McNair poll in 1996 showed that 70 per cent opposed the abolition of multicultural policies, but the same percentage supported at least a short-term freeze on immigration and a reduction on Asian migration. A closer examination indicates more opposition from newer arrivals than older Australians.

In times of uncertainty and change the focus on outsiders or newcomers is an unfortunate feature of the human condition. Concern about immigration in times of unemployment has also been exacerbated by at least initial concern about Asian migration, particularly following the Indo-Chinese refugee intakes of the late 1970s.

It is interesting that opinion polls in the past few months, as Professor Murray Goot of Macquarie University has highlighted, suggest that with unemployment declining, support for immigration is growing. I assume that this is the reason for the Howard Government’s increased migration intake this year. The public’s growing support for immigration is probably also a consequence of John Howard’s border-protection policies. The public feels more confident that our borders are not being overrun.

Another problem with recent boat people and asylum-seekers is that they have been described quite widely, but incorrectly, as ‘illegals’. As a result, they have been associated in the public mind with a broader concern about law and order generally. In fact, boat people and asylum seekers are not illegal. Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, we are legally obliged to provide protection to people coming to Australia who claim to be fleeing persecution. They remain legally in Australia while their claims are being investigated. If their claims are found to be valid, they continue to attract our legal protection until such time as they are resettled in Australia or elsewhere – 90 per cent of Afghan and Iraqi persons coming to Australia and claiming our protection have been found to be genuine refugees. If, however, their claim is rejected, they then become illegal and can be deported, subject to due process. But in the public mind this is sophistry. They must be illegal if they arrive uninvited by ship or by air, and the Prime Minister, the Minister for Immigration and talk-back radio hosts fail to correct the error of the ‘illegal’ tag.

Australians clearly support multiculturalism if it is taken to mean tolerance of diversity, providing means for different groups to interact with the remainder of society. However, if multiculturalism is taken to mean cultural separatism – which is a ‘straw man’ often erected by critics – then the majority of Australians are opposed.

Australia’s greatest failing is that our multiculturalism has failed to embrace Aborigines, although Aborigines have quite clearly expressed their view that they don’t want to be part of multicultural Australia. They see their rights and position being singularly different. This unresolved issue remains ‘whispering in our hearts’.

The other continuing issue is our relationship to certain modern expressions of Islam within Australia. It must be addressed with cool heads and warm hearts. I flag it as a concern, but I am very conscious of the great damage it could cause if it is not carefully and wisely addressed. We won’t find satisfactory answers without a carefully crafted discussion.

Boat People

The Government claims that its policy is successful because no more boats are coming. I reject that proposition. The Government over-reacted to a small problem, both in world terms and in Australian historical terms, for the sake of party political advantage.

The outcome over the past 12 months has been achieved at great human cost – punishing and demonising the most vulnerable people on earth. The clear sign of a civil society is how it treats its most vulnerable. We each have an element of concern for the humanity of others which can be snuffed out if we can be persuaded that certain people are not really human, e.g. that asylum seekers are blackmailers, queue jumpers, cheats or terrorists, and are so barbaric that they will throw their children overboard or stitch their lips together.

Xenophobia, patriotism and defence of borders will always drown out for a period at least, compassion for the foreigner. It is one of the indelible stains of history. It is so easy to provoke hostility against the foreigner, the outsider and the person who is different. We each have a dark and fearful side and in my lifetime I have never seen it so blatantly exploited as it has been during the past year.

Government policies have also damaged our own sense of worth. Confidence and a sense of self-worth gained during community participation in the Olympics, fighting bushfires and in our response to the cries of the people of East Timor has been compromised by our demonisation of the boat people.

There has also been a cost to Australia’s international standing. Even the United States is finding that military and economic power on their own are not sufficient. Overwhelming military power did not stop the attacks on America on September 11. A successful foreign policy requires countries to be able to persuade and not just coerce others. Paul Kelly in The Australian pointed out that ability to persuade is linked to values that command respect and attention. Countries such as Canada, the Netherlands and Scandanavia are able to influence and persuade beyond their economic and military power by projecting values. Australia's ability to project values associated with its open and strong economy, limited military capability and unified, tolerant and multicultural society has been put at risk.

National borders will always be porous, as the Aborigines found when Captains Cook & Phillip landed in the 19th Century. At the end of the line and with no land borders, Australia is better protected than most. So our problem with boat people and asylum-seekers is relatively minor in world terms.

We should maintain a sensible perspective. Refugee flows are usually intense and brief and are driven by push factors of war, rape and persecution in a country, rather than by the pull factors or barriers to entry in recipient countries. Desperate people will always try to escape persecution. Now that the Taliban regime has been overthrown it is not at all surprising that the outflow from Afghanistan has stopped. The cessation of the outflow has nothing to do with Australia’s border protection policy.

As the Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs states on its website on unauthorised arrivals, the majority of smuggling into Australia and other countries occurs by air. In seven out of the past ten years, more unauthorised arrivals came to Australia by air than by sea.

As one door closes for unauthorised arrivals, another door is prised open. If there is a demand, people smugglers will turn to entry by air and to the counterfeiting of travel documents. When I was Secretary of the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, I saw almost daily new counterfeit documents produced by people smugglers.

In highlighting illegal boat arrivals for electoral benefit, Government rhetoric has conveniently ignored the 60,000 illegals in the country, mainly UK and USA visitors who have cheated by overstaying their permits and are much less deserving than most of the desperate people that come unauthorised by boat.

Finally, the handling of the Indo-Chinese outflow by the Fraser Government in the late 1970s and early 1980s, demonstrated that it is possible to conduct a humanitarian policy while maintaining the integrity of our borders. At that time, more than 4,000 came by boat but were managed carefully and firmly. The major difference between Malcolm Fraser and John Howard is that Malcolm Fraser did not attempt to exploit the problem for party-political purposes, although he did come under quite severe criticism by some unscrupulous people on the left in Australia.

The refugee numbers that Malcolm Fraser dealt with were vastly more than the ‘threat’ that John Howard faced. At the peak in the late 1970s, there were about 400,000 Indo-Chinese in the refugee camps in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia. In one year, we took 15,000 refugees from Indo China alone. Instead of demonising refugees, we acknowledged their plight and heroism. Bogus refugees were quickly processed and deported. The rhetoric was intense at times but humanity was served. We are now proud of what we did.

Democracies are not bad at protecting the powerful and the majority. But they are not so good at protecting vulnerable minorities – children, indigenous people and refugees. In times when populism and political advantage is tempting, it is important that we hold to the international institutions and instruments whose very reason for being is to protect us from such excesses.

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This is an edited version of an address to the Boston, Melbourne, Oxford Conversazioni on Culture and Society, Melbourne on September 7/8 2002.



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About the Author

John Menadue AO is a former Australian Public Servant. He was head of three Federal Government Departments, including Immigration and Prime Minster and Cabinet. John was also a Telstra Director and Chief Executive Officer of Qantas. He is Chair of New Matilda.com, an independent online political newsletter.

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