Bring a plate, barrack for the team - don't care where you come from ...

The answer, unfortunately, is pretty simple. John Howard hates multiculturalism: always has, always will. He’s on the record as decrying the concept as “divisive”, although he has learned to temper his rhetoric somewhat since his disastrous 1988 statements about the need to limit immigration from Asia.

Howard’s not a racist, in the old-fashioned sense of the word. There’s little to suggest that he would condemn someone purely on the basis of his or her skin colour. More accurately, Howard is a cultural imperialist. He sees white, western culture as superior to all other cultures, and hasn’t the generosity of spirit or imagination to appreciate the benefits of other world-views, nor the lessons that could be learned from other cultures. He’s a “my way or the highway” kind of guy.

This is an inherently illiberal position, as our last true liberal prime minister, Malcolm Fraser, has repeatedly pointed out.

Australian multiculturalism, insofar as it was a policy rather than a state of mind, never sought to undermine the central tenets of Australia’s liberal democracy, such as the rule of law, the equality of men and women, and the freedom of speech. Rather, it recognised that people’s personal identities were complex, multi-layered things, informed by their ancestry and cultural backgrounds as much as by their current lives and recent experiences.

That everyone has an inherent right to his or her own personal identity, and to form that identity without fear or favour, and free from the intervention of the state, is the very basis of liberal ideology.

If John Howard can’t refrain from imposing his own personal cultural identity on the rest of the nation, then he’s no business calling himself a liberal any more.

Moreover, if he isn’t proud of Australia’s achievements in building a harmonious, multicultural society, and insists on referring to the ideas of our former colonial master, Britain, and, more recently, bending to the will of the great western superpower the USA, then perhaps he’s no business being the Australian prime minister, either.