Multiculturalism in Australia

Multiculturalism in Australia has a special cultural status.

Australia is often considered to be the only other country to have fully adopted Canadian-style multiculturalism.

Changes to policy

Many similar policies were put in place, for example the formation of the Special Broadcasting Service. While the White Australia Policy was quietly dismantled after World War II by various changes to immigration policy, the full political introduction of official policies of multiculturalism was not until 1973.

Social importance of immigration

The overall level of immigration to Australia has grown substantially during the last decades. Net overseas migration increased from 30,000 in 1993 to 118,000 in 2003-04. During the 2004-05, total 123,424 people immigrated to Australia.

Of them, 17,736 were from Africa, 54,804 from Asia, 21,131 from Oceania, 18,220 from United Kingdom, 1,506 from South America, and 2,369 from Eastern Europe. 131,000 people migrated to Australia in 2005-06 and migration target for 2006-07 was 144,000.

In 2008-09 about 300,000 new migrants are expected to arrive in Australia, the highest number since World War II.

Thai Food Festival held at Wat Dhammadharo, Canberra, 2009-04-19

National Multicultural Festival

The national Capital city, Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory, has developed a tradition of the National Multicultural Festival, held over a week in February. Additionally, Canberra has numerous other inter-cultural events, such as the Thai Food Festival held at Wat Dhammadharo, Canberra's Thai temple, on 2009-04-19.

Cultural identity of migrants

The meaning of multiculturalism has changed enormously since its formal introduction to Australia. Originally it was understood by the mainstream population as a need for acceptance that many members of the Australian community originally came from different cultures and still had ties to it. However, it came to mean the rights of migrants within mainstream Australia to express their cultural identity. It is now often used to refer to the fact that very many people in Australia have, and recognize, multiple cultural or ethnic backgrounds. The Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs in Australia estimated that, in 2005, 25% of the Australian workforce was born outside of Australia and 40% had at least one parent born outside of Australia.

Following the initial moves of the Whitlam Labor government in 1973, further official national multicultural policies were implemented by Malcom Fraser's Liberal Government in 1978. The Labor Government of Bob Hawke continued with these policies during the 1980s and early 1990s, and were further supported by Paul Keating up to his electoral defeat 1996.

Role of indigenous people

Prior to settlement by Europeans, the Australian continent was not a single nation, but hosted many different Aboriginal cultures and between 200 and 400 active languages at any one time. The present nation of Australia resulted from a deliberate process of immigration intended to fill the "empty" continent (also excluding potential rivals to the British Empire). Settlers from the United Kingdom, after 1800 including Ireland, were the earliest people that were not native to the continent to live in Australia. Dutch colonisation (see New Holland) and possible visits to Australia by explorers and/or traders from China, did not lead to permanent settlement. Until 1901, Australia existed as a group of independent British settler colonies.

While there was never any specific official policy called the White Australia policy, this is the term used for a collection of historical legislation and policies which either intentionally or unintentionally restricted non-European immigration to Australia from 1901 to 1973. Such policies theoretically limited the ethnic and cultural diversity of the immigrant population, and in theory facilitated the cultural assimilation of the immigrants, since they would come from related ethnic and cultural backgrounds.

Taken from a historical perspective, however, this was not a matter of cultural diversity or otherwise, but an attempt to preserve the British ethno-cultural identity of the Australian nation. It was official policy for much of the 20th century to promote European immigration and to keep out those who did not fit the European, predominately Anglo-Celtic, character of Australian society. As the Twentieth century progressed and the number of migrants from the United Kingdom became insufficient to meet planned quotas, immigrants came increasingly from other parts of Europe, such as Italy, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, and Yugoslavia.

Criticisms

Main article: Criticism of multiculturalism

Howard government

The election of John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition government in 1996 was a major watershed for Australian multiculturalism. Howard had long been a critic of multiculturalism, releasing his One Australia policy in the late 1980s which called for a reduction in Asian immigration - a policy he later retracted, citing his then position as wrong. Shortly after the new government took office, the new independent member Pauline Hanson made her maiden speech in which she was highly critical of multiculturalism, saying that a multicultural society could never be strong. Notably, despite many calls for Howard to censure Hanson, his response was to state that her speech indicated a new freedom of expression in Australia on such issues. Rather than official multiculturalism, Howard advocated instead the idea of a "shared national identity", albeit one strongly grounded in certain recognizably Anglo-Celtic Australian themes, such as "mateship" and a "fair go". While Howard changed the name of the Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, the policy of multiculturalism has remained intact, with the Howard Government introducing Dual-Citizenship rights at the turn of the Century.

Intellectual critique

One of the earliest critics of multiculturalism in Australia was historian Geoffrey Blainey, who wrote that multiculturalism threatened to transform Australia into a "cluster of tribes". In his 1984 book All for Australia, Blainey criticized multiculturalism for tending to "emphasize the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority of Australians" and also for tending to be "anti-British", even though "people from the United Kingdom and Ireland form the dominant class of pre-war immigrants and the largest single group of post-war immigrants." According to Blainey, such a policy, with its "emphasis on what is different and on the rights of the new minority rather than the old majority," was unnecessarily creating division and threatened national cohesion. He argued that "the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high", and warned that "we should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world."

Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism into the 1990s, denouncing multiculturalism as "morally, intellectually and economically ... a sham".

Following the upsurge of support for the One Nation Party in 1996, Lebanese-born Australian anthropologist Ghassan Hage published a critique in 1997 of Australian multiculturalism in the book White Nation. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Whiteness studies, Jacques Lacan and Pierre Bourdieu, Hage examined a range of everyday discourses that implicated both anti-multiculturalists and pro-multiculturalists alike.

See also

• 2005 Cronulla riots