Time to end the fetish of diversity

This determination to promote diversity has become an obsession and driven hard multiculturalism beyond a concern to eradicate racism. It has begun to cast doubt on the very idea of a core national culture.

Diversity is no longer something that exists naturally, as you might expect in a country that by 2010 had become the third-most culturally diverse nation in the world (after Singapore and Hong Kong).

Instead, diversity has become a moral objective promoted as an end in itself – precisely what is intended in the proposed Multicultural Act.

This narrow focus on promoting diversity threatens individual liberty by promoting the interests of particular groups over those of the individual.

In doing so, it diminishes the liberty of every citizen. As former Keating government minister, Gary Johns, has noted, "To legislate for multiculturalism is to introduce the potential for different rules by which behaviour should be judged."

The debate about hard multiculturalism is about the weight it is deemed appropriate to afford cultures other than the prevailing Australian one.

It is time for the fetish of diversity to end and the advance of hard multiculturalism to be checked. In pursuing a vested notion of social justice, the demand for equal recognition should not trump the demand for liberty.

Hard multiculturalism is nothing less than a doctrinal opposition to social integration that pursues a program of cultural diversity intolerant of any divergent points of view.

The fairest way to accommodate differences is not by eradicating perceived inequality as a matter of public policy. It is by maintaining a stable framework of laws and institutions to guarantee the freedom of the individual.

Australia does not need a Multicultural Act. Australia already has a stable and well-developed legal system that governs the behaviour of its citizens. The rule of law is the only acceptable basis for a healthy, descriptively multicultural society.

Once the rule of law determines the extent of permissible behaviours, the state should get out of the business of supporting or maintaining the cultural, ethnic or religious components of identity.