The missing ingredient - assimilation

When Al Grassby was Immigration Minister in the Whitlam government in the early 1970s, he announced that multiculturalism was to be Australia's future policy. Assimilation was over.

There was a time when Australia actively promoted assimilation. It was the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and applied to Aborigines, varied by state and location, involved the removal of vulnerable children from families, included an obligation to learn English, discouraged speaking local languages, and prohibited certain customary practices – particularly those involving violence.

But Grassby was not referring here to Aborigines or to policies from the distant past. Nor was it a reference to the White Australia policy, which the Whitlam government had officially ended. His comment was about new immigrants and implied that they had been subject to a policy of assimilation.

In the generally accepted meaning of the word, this was complete nonsense. What Australia had was a policy of promoting integration. And, as history shows, it had been remarkably successful.

Mostly European and British, Australia's post-war immigrants were referred to as "New Australians". Although encouraged to learn English, they were never asked to disown their origins. There were free English classes for adults, and parents were required to send their children to school, like everyone else, where lessons were conducted in English. The kids often became interpreters for their parents.

Most immigrants became Australian citizens relatively quickly, the only negative being they had to renounce the citizenship of their original country; Australia did not permit dual citizenship until 2000.

If the immigrants themselves had mixed feelings, the second or third generations saw themselves as Australians first and their country of origin second. Immigrants married other immigrants, their children married other immigrant children, and many went on to be highly successful.

The Whitlam government also began to admit significant numbers of people from Asia, initially Vietnam and Cambodia. And while there were pockets of resistance to this, with Whitlam himself wary of accepting anti-communist Vietnamese refugees, these also integrated well. Later waves from places such as Sri Lanka, Mauritius, Hong Kong, Malaysia and India were equally successful.

But then something changed. Certain immigrants began to form enclaves and avoid contact with other AustraliansThey also made minimal effort to learn English. The men often went back to their country of origin to find a wife, even if they were born in Australia, refusing to contemplate finding one locally.

Most importantly, they became contemptuous of Australian culture and values while demanding respect for their own. This was not about football, music or food, but core aspects of liberal democracy: equality before the law, presumption of innocence, respect, democracy, free speech, economic opportunity, and tolerance. This was accompanied by a major upsurge in violent crime and welfare fraud.

While it obviously reflects a failure to integrate, this is nonetheless multiculturalism. The culture of these people is maintained in parallel with Australia's traditional culture.

After several decades of this, Australia's laidback 'live and let live' culture is now under serious challenge.