Reflections on a multicultural nation

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.