From workshop 5: Multiculturalism after 30 years - Why Australia Failed the Refugee Test. Now We The People conference, 23.8.03 University of Technology, Sydney

Dr Jock Collins

What I'd like to do initially is to sketch what I think is a crisis in Australian multiculturalism. It is really at a critical point. Then I will talk a little bit of the critique of multiculturalism from both eh left and the right. Then I want to do a stocktake on multiculturalism, because in my view it is a contradictory phenomena. There are weaknesses in it. I will finish with my main argument, which is that we should be defending multiculturalism from its rightwing critics, but at the same time extending multiculturalism to important areas where it is weak. It seems to me that if we are to take on the agenda of some people of the 'post-modern left', then we would ditch multiculturalism, but for what? I'm not sure. But politically, the most important thing is to defend multiculturalism because it has been eaten away. It has been disemboweled, and this is a critical moment.

So let me talk about the crisis first of all.

When the Howard government was first elected, one of the first things it did was to begin to axe the fabric of multiculturalism. On the one hand, multiculturalism is a demographic reality - we are one of the most cosmopolitan nations on earth, we have more first generation immigrants than any other country other than Luxembourg and Israel. We have immigrants from all over the world, despite having an immigration history of racial exclusion and preference. It is also a philosophy about settlement, about how we respond to controversy, about the rights of new people in our society. It is also a set of programs and services to respond to difference. This programmatic element is very critical. So multiculturalism has many facets and can be a slippery concept.

Basically, when the Howard government was elected, its stand on multiculturalism was unambiguous. It axed the Bureau of Immigration, Population and Multicultural Research, and since that time there has been very little research money for immigration, very little central organising of immigration conferences and debates. It has almost disappeared from the agenda.

As a corollary of that, the Howard government moved the Office of Multicultural Affairs, which was institutional body within the state apparatus with the responsibility to deal with settlement issues related to cultural diversity and immigration. That was previously under the Hawke and Keating governments a fairly big unit within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. It was a very intellectual place, with lots of resources and money. Now under Howard it is virtually a cupboard, a small unit, within the Immigration Department, with very little money, people or influence.

Howard has really lost his appetite for multiculturalism, if he ever had one. In fact, I will argue that if you look at the 1988 Bicentennial Year, when Howard was Opposition Leader, in the run up to the election he hoped to have with Hawke, his stance was to reduce Asian immigration on the one hand , and to end multiculturalism on the other. That was his political stance in 88. He was actually axed as Leader of the Opposition, because the Liberal Party recognised the contradictions of that position. Big business was trying to get into bed with Asia, while he had an anti-Asian immigration policy. And by axing multiculturalism, he may have alienated some working class right wing votes and supporters, including conservative Asian voters, that he might have otherwise attracted.

Since the time he has been in office he has hardly used the word 'multiculturalism' - except to introduce his Minister. He has no enthusiasm or appetite for it, in the same way that he has no appetite for reconciliation.

In addition to that institutional gutting, the policy content has been largely eroded. One of the first things the Howard government did was to introduce the two-year waiting period for new immigrants before they could access programmatic services - unemployment benefits and basic welfare rights. For 50 years of post-war immigration, new immigrants had all the rights of other Australians, other than the right to vote, which was attained after citizenship.

In the last few years, that has been removed. Unfortunately it was the Labor Party that first threw the wedge in under Kiting - he introduced the six months waiting period for new immigrants. Now, the Conservatives have whacked that wedge in much more heavily, as they have done on education and other areas. These two years are the years of greatest need for settlement assistance. Why would you remove this help, unless you thought immigrants were ripping off the system?

While that does happen, the overwhelming bulk of the research tells us that most immigrants are very good compliers with welfare, and take less welfare than other groups.

That two year waiting period is a critical situation for immigration and multiculturalism. The grassroots immigration agencies - the Migrant Resource Centres and Ethnic Community Organisations - are under stricter funding, no regularity, threatened with funding cuts if they speak out. There is a crisis at that grassroots level of multiculturalism.

Labour market programs were axed by the Howard government, and are not on the agenda at all. Education has been cut, the welfare state pared back and privatised. All these things impact on immigrants as well as others.

We also have the playing of the racist card by Howard, not only in his previous incarnation in 1988. When he wanted to get rid of multiculturalism, he wanted to replace it with something called 'One Australia'. The resonance of that with Pauline Hanson's One Nation is strong. It is not surprising that in the last election, the Howard government stole the political ground from One Nation. Pauline Hanson said that the refugees should be met by the Navy and their boats turned around and headed out to sea. That is exactly what happened in the Tampa affair, immediately before the election. For 50 years, boats had arrived from various places, and for the first time, three months before an election, a boat is stopped and turned around. This was a clear play of the race card in the election, and unfortunately a card that won popular support.

Part of the problem about its popular support is the lies in the 'children overboard - truth overboard' events, surrounding the Peter Reith argument about photos of these people throwing their children overboard, and Howard saying, 'How un-Australian! We can't have people like that. We won't let them enter.' He maintained that anti-refugee stance right up to the day before the election in interviews with John Laws and others. And we know now that there were never such photos, it was all a fabrication, it was all a lie.

That helped to garner major support for him against the refugees. At the same time, unfortunately, the Labor Party refused to take an independent stance, capitulated and lost its way. It had its head so far up the government's posterior on that question that it lost any credibility and independence.

As a consequence of a federal party breaking the bipartisan approach on immigration and playing the racist card for political opportunism, albeit successful - in 1988 he played the racist card and didn't get to lead in the election - we are in a crisis period.

If we look at the critics of multiculturalism from the right, we have Blainey. In 1984 he said that we had too many Asian immigrants, blood on the streets because of cultural diversity. He had eager amplifiers in Bruce Ruxton and others, running around telling us that message. Then we had Howard in 1988. And then Hanson in 1996 picked up that agenda - anti-Asian immigration, anti-Aboriginal. She was initially very successful, but then her party collapsed, and it may be resurrected now with her as a martyr in jail.

There are also a number of academics that have pushed this line. Paul Sheehan, with his book Among the Barbarians, was a populist take on these issues, an attempt to be more reasonable, but the content was the same as Blainey. We've had academics like Bob Birrell and Katherine Betts who continuously say there are too many immigrants destroying us. There is a class of left-wing academics who are making all this change against the will of the people. There are groups like Australians Against Further Immigration and other population groups. That stretches into the green, environmental critique, which is more subtle and dangerous. They are not riding an explicit racist card. They are people who for all other purposes are progressive, and we are all rightly concerned about the environment. But this is a very simplistic equation - population equals environmental destruction, immigration increases population, save the environment - stop immigration. This is a very simplistic view of a complex relation between immigration and environment, in Sydney or elsewhere.

This blaming of immigration detracts from the genuine causes of environmental problems, half of which is a market which in the pursuit of profit undervalues environmental assets and systematically exploits them and deteriorates them. We don't look at the lack of investment in public transport. We blame immigration. Migrants become the scapegoats for environmental problems just as they've been the scapegoats for economic problems, now crime, next terrorism, and whatever else we want to add to the list. This green critique of multiculturalism is a new problem, as is the Labor-green critique advanced by Bob Carr.

If I was to ask who is the most outspoken critic of immigration since Pauline Hanson, the answer is unambiguously Bob Carr. Time after time he criticises immigration on environmental grounds. His critique is as shallow as the critique of immigration from Paul Erlich and other green movements. If you look at the parties who wanted zero immigration, they weren't only One Nation, but also the Democrats and the Greens, but from a different angle. But it is a dangerous development because it is coming from people whom we would see as allies in the fight against racism.

The old left has also never been very happy with immigration. I mean the ACTU, the union left and Martin Ferguson, who have got this old labourist worry about immigrants taking our jobs. They have never really come to grips with that.

At the same time we have a post-modern left. Ghassan Hage's book White Nation has been popular, but at the book launch, Meagan Morris, perhaps Australia's most famous cultural commentator, talked about the 'multicultural industry', exactly the language of the right about this subject - all these people thieving in the name of multiculturalism.

A real part of the crisis of multiculturalism is the collapse of the industry that never was is also being decimated. Ethnic communities are not getting funding and ethnic leaders are losing power and influence. It is a myth that there is such an industry engaged in social engineering to get us to cultural diversity. Remember that we became one of the most cosmopolitan nations on earth by accident, not design. Calwell wanted nine out of ten immigrants to be British. We didn't get that because there were never enough British - if we could have, we would never have the cultural diversity of today. We got this with reluctance, because we always wanted the labour more, even if it couldn't be white or British. This fundamental change in Australian society in such a short time is a fundamental feature of our nation. Despite the contradictions of the racism and the White Australia and the prejudice that went with our nation until the 1970s - the one thing our founding fathers agreed on at Federation was White Australia - we took people from a greater variety of countries than any other country, and by and large, we've actually managed pretty well.

The left's critique ignores this. Ghassan Hage and others of the post-modern left, when they refer to multiculturalism as ceremony, dance, dress, diet, and dialogue - ephemeral stuff that doesn't matter - they forget the assimilation period. Then immigrants were supposed to be exactly the same as us, their difference shouldn't be acknowledged, no ESL classes or special schools. They said assimilation was working, but we knew that kids were failing dramatically in school, there were problems in the welfare, legal and health systems, there was no translation staff, no attempt to engage with the diversity in Australian society in any real way and that led to dramatic problems.

Ethnic communities and activists, in association with trade unions like the Teachers Federation and other progressive forces fought against assimilation and for a better deal, which is what multiculturalism was.
So the ability to speak another language was not available under assimilation in the 1950s and 60s. You were told to shut up and speak Australian on the bus or in the street. Now that has changed completely. People do celebrate in their dances. That didn't happen because under assimilation your cultural baggage had to be left at the docks.

Some parts of the left have this conspiracy theory: how did we get to multiculturalism? - because the state imagined this was a better way of containment of cultural diversity. There is an element of truth in this - multiculturalism, by giving power to particular conservative ethnic organisations and particular conservative male individuals, tried to control the whole thing. But at the same time, multiculturalism emerged because to the action of immigrants trying to shape and get a better situation for themselves.

So the whole thing we dismiss as dance, dress, diet and celebration is a space created by people that wasn't there 20 or 30 years ago, a terrific achievement that we should never underestimate.

At the same time there are problems with multiculturalism.

For a start, where do indigenous people fit it? In New Zealand, they have bi-culturalism, one leg of which is Maori culture, and the other is the rest. But they don't differentiate in the 'rest' between the white anglo-celtic domination and the other immigrant minorities. That is a weakness. But we really need to think about this issue. An irony of Pauline Hanson is that she really brought the multiculturalism forces and Aboriginal people together. Racism is the common factor.

Multiculturalism has had much more success in the areas of dance, dress, diet, and language, than it has had in the economic domain or the domain of political power. Much more needs to be done. But it has had achievements in that area that are easy to dismiss.

One thing that happens with the left is that it seeks new trends overseas, in France and the UK. An multiculturalism in France and the UK have been completely different from multiculturalism in Australia - different history, origins and programmatic content.

While I agree with the critique of multiculturalism in the UK, because it is a conservative replacement of what is required - anti-racism. That is not the same as multiculturalism in Australia. People love to borrow these new critiques, just as they borrow the jargon of the latest French theoretical trend. Yet they forget to look at the context. In particular, Ghassan Hage criticises white multiculturalists because they are really bed fellows of Pauline Hanson. That is nonsense. We should extend the support for multiculturalism, not narrow it, by saying that three quarters of you white multiculturalists and you should go and vote with Pauline Hanson while we have a little group of pure multiculturalists. That is political nonsense, despite Ghassan being a friend of mine who does a lot of good things.

Multiculturalism is not just for wogs but for all Australians. There is this cliché - 'multiculturalism is for all Australians' - the challenge is to make this cliché a reality. We have to look at the cultural heritage of both the ethnic minorities and the ethnic majority. On multicultural days at school we should also celebrate the Anglo and Irish heritage, it shouldn't just be for wogs. That can make multiculturalism have a wider support base.
Some versions of multiculturalism do embody a cultural homogeneity that is just not there. But it need not embody that. We should reject the versions that do and embrace the versions that reject simplistic homogeneity. We should continue to push for minority communities to have access to power structures, continue to fight racism and prejudice, and continue to demand more funding for multicultural programs and services. We need to re-empower the ethnic communities, and youth and women should be the activists in running the organisations, rather than aged men who see it as a trapping of power and privilege.

This is one of the great challenges of Australian society, may be our greatest challenge, because we are the most cosmopolitan nation on earth today. Yet in terms of political leadership, state or federal, we don't have that image, vision and sense of responsibility about leading a culturally diverse society. To me a multiculturalism program is the centre of any future Australian society that can engage with its cultural diversity in an effective way.

Dr Jock Collins is a Professor in the School of Finance and Economics at the University of Technology, Sydney



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