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Multiculturalism in Australia

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Matt Smith:

Welcome to a La Trobe University podcast. I would be your host Matt Smith and with me today is Larry Marshall, a projects manager at the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University. Thank you for joining me Larry.

Larry Marshall:

A pleasure to be here.

Matt Smith:

Now, you're here today to talk to me about multiculturalism in Australia, so could you give me a bit of a background on it.

Larry Marshall:

There's a couple of ways of looking at multiculturalism. One is the fact that it's a reality, seven million of us have actually come to this country over the last five decades, six decades, since the Second World War, that makes up about 44% of us who were either born overseas or who have a parent born overseas, and 22 million of us who were actually born overseas ourselves. So we are a nation of migrants. But it goes back way before that because Australia is a settler community, a migrant community, we are only two hundred years old and the first settlers in a sense were the first boat people, coming on boats to this country. It's very important to remember about boat people, I think at this stage. And then there was the gold rush, in the 1850s, after the first prisoners, convicts and settlers had arrived. And the gold rush brought people from all over the world, trying to make a buck here and trying to find some gold. And a large number of Chinese, and the first good evidence of old fashioned racism after of course the massacre of the aboriginal people which had already taken place. So the racism that goes hand in hand with our multiculturalism is evident from the very beginnings of our history. Then of course we had a long period, from 1901 when we became a country, Australia, the first ever law that we passed – the Restriction of Immigration Act or the White Australia Policy as it came to be known, which basically said, we don't want people of colour in this country – not Asians, not Africans, not people who are not Anglo-Celtic, even Europeans were quite suspect, from other countries. And that went on for about fifty years, but post-war there was the notion that we had felt extremely vulnerable with the attacks by the Japanese, the Pacific war, Darwin being bombed and a Japanese submarine in Sydney Harbour. There was a notion which was called "Populate or Perish". Either we fill this country with people who can give us some security of numbers, or we will perish. And that's when immigration really began – after the Second World War, a Labor Government under Calwell. And then immigration had to be sold to a country that had become to see itself as white and superior. So people of other colour were considered quite inferior and second class. So it became quite an issue because there was this strong underlying racism and that issue has been maintained over the last fifty years as well while multiculturalism has slowly taken root in our country.

Matt Smith:

Is that in some ways an aspect of what it means to be an Australian? That we've always needed that concept of us and them.

Larry Marshall:

It's a good question. I think it's more that Australia has always struggled with its sense of identity. We have seen ourselves as white and lost in this part of the world. The tyranny of distance which has been spoken of by Geoffrey Blainey in his famous book, or this sense that we are somehow out of place – a white offshoot of Europe stuck at the arse end of the world, as Keating said, in Asia. That has confused us and worried us and I guess you're right to some degree, that we've identified ourselves as what we are not, as much as what we are. But again, I think there's a growing up that happened after the Second World War, partly out of this fear, partly out of economic need to find the workers to work in the boom times in the economy, when we had full employment. We needed new people to do the work. It was another very powerful reason for migration. But also I think with that there was a sense that there was something ugly about the racism of Australia at that time. And there was a real shift in our thinking in the 60s and then in the 70s. There was the civil rights movement going on, there was movement for black rights in the States, there was a women's movement happening and we'd watched what happened with the Holocaust and what had happened to the Jews. We were uncomfortable as a nation, I think, with our racism. It's there still, and it was there in a strong way. I'm myself a migrant to this country – I came here from Sri Lanka, arrived in the 60s, and Australia was a very, very different place in the 60s – very parochial, very white and if you were new to this country you were called a New Australian, which may have been fine if you were ever allowed to be an Australian, or an old Australian. You remained a New Australian for all of your life. So that exclusion in a sense is what you were talking about – the othering of people. I think what multiculturalism, not just as a fact, but as a policy, means, is that we invert that. We actually begin to celebrate the diversity that is multiculturalism. To celebrate it, to say it is not a problem, but something that actually adds to the mix. And I think it adds to our cultural mix. That's what I mean. It's a very deep thought and it needs a lot of work to untangle what that actually means, not just a superficial multiculturalism of some pizza and good food and some Thai curry, but a much deeper understanding of people's identity that they bring to this country, their roots, their traditions, their cultural mix, their histories, their language, their religion, and a sharing of that on the table so that we can all get richer from that sharing.

Matt Smith:

So when did this start becoming something that Australia has embraced and become a bit proud of, because you were saying earlier that during the Howard era, that the Howard era wasn't very much embracing the concept of multiculturalism.

Larry Marshall:

Well, it's interesting actually because it was a bi-partisan policy after a while. Initially it came with the change of government in the 70s under Gough Whitlam. As I said, it had been disentangled, the White Australia Policy. We'd moved away from it, under the Liberals in the 60s, but it was the multicultural policy I'm speaking of, actually became policy under Whitlam, with Al Grassby as our first Minister of Multicultural Affairs. And it became identified, it became defined as a policy response to the reality of the ethnic pluralism in Australia, and the failure, the failure of assimilation policies, because you can't ask people of other skin colour and people with different cultures, to become Anglo-Celtic – it cannot happen, and therefore you exclude them from being Australian. Whereas what this policy was saying is, we are all Australian, all the different pieces of us. And with the election of Malcolm Fraser and the end of the Vietnam War, the Liberal Government under Fraser actually struggled against apartheid in South Africa, on the world stage, and Fraser oversaw the introduction of the Vietnamese boat people in a very organised and reasonable way, that brought almost a hundred thousand Vietnamese and Cambodians to this country in a way that defused the concern, which was voiced by people like John Howard, that it would create a problem with ghettos, that there was an Asianisation of Australia happening, even in the 80s. So when Howard became Prime Minister later on, there was a politicisation of this issue, which came up, and it was not only John Howard as Prime Minister, but also the rise of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, which suddenly, it seemed suddenly from nowhere, actually brought out in the public, a resentment that was in the population, I think linked up with the fact that suddenly there was globalisation, there was youth unemployment in the 90s in Australia, up to 10%, 11% in the early 90s, and we needed someone to blame. So it comes back to what you said earlier on, it's mixed up with issues of identity, it's mixed up with issues of economics and the easiest thing to do is say, "They're taking our jobs. They're the problem. There's too many of them." Whoever they are. What Hanson did was she articulated something about Asians, about aborigines, about those people who don't fit in to what we are. One million Australians voted for One Nation across the country. Because we have a preferential voting system, they did not win many seats, but that scared a lot of people who thought we were moving in a direction towards accepting multiculturalism as policy and a reality and doing the hard work at the local government level, the state government level, the school level – to make it a reality, that works – because there is a lot of work to be done. It doesn't happen automatically, that people fit in and relate and feel comfortable in a new culture. The English language has to be taught, people have to be told how to find jobs, how to navigate in a new society. That was being done through migrant resource centres, funded by the federal government, SBS, and understanding that people needed to hear their histories, hear the news in their own languages. These bowing to multiculturalism was seen to be as something wrong by some people. So Hanson rises in the late 90s and I think what political analysts say is that Howard felt there was a swing to that side, and that the Liberal Party in this analysis is contestable, actually brought in some of the ideas of Hansonism into centre stage and took the votes away from One Nation. And what happened in 2001 was that the bombing at the World Trade Centre. And it became an issue of race, and for the first time in Australia we had a real race election. And a race election meant that the bi-partisanship of multiculturalism was destroyed. You had a party, a government, going to the people saying "We will decide who is coming into this country and on what terms they come". That's a paraphrase of a quote from John Howard at the time. It was about boat people, it was about asylum seekers, and about othering a large group of people. And what that meant was that a whole conflation happened – asylum seekers, with Muslims, with migrants, with refugees – so that all of these issues, they became the upper, I think, and really undermined multiculturalism at that time, under the Howard regime, for ten years. And even the word multiculturalism was removed from the Ministry, so that it wasn't any more the Ministry of Multicultural Affairs – it turned into Immigration and Citizenship. And Howard refused to use the word. He said that it was problematic and that it actually didn't describe what was there.

Matt Smith:

So you're describing a mood and a political climate that was ten, fifteen years ago, but in reality you could be describing the current political climate as well, because we're still grappling with those issues.

Larry Marshall:

I think you're right. I think the leftover issues from Cronulla, the riots in Sydney on the beach between white Australians and those others, the Lebanese, and linked-in Muslim, some of the vitriol poured on the Muslim community – I guess what I'm speaking from is the Centre of Dialogue spending five years now, working on a leadership training program in the community, supported by the State Government, by Federal Government, DEFAT, bringing Muslims from Sydney, Melbourne and South-East Asia together to travel in Sydney, Canberra and Melbourne to look at leadership, and how they can lead in the community towards a more, if you like, integrated community, that gives them a voice. There was a great fear that this attitude we had of othering the Muslim community in such a drastic way – yesterday they were just one of the many communities, prior to 2001. Suddenly, after 2001, they were the other – they were possible terrorists. They were to be feared. So in working with the Muslim community and understanding and researching and listening with them, what we are finding is that the Muslim community is integrated into Australia. There is an issue for some of the young ones who are suffering with extreme racism, or who are being excluded by the colour of their skin, but the fascinating thing about it is the diversity within the Muslim community. Maybe fifty different cultural backgrounds make up the Muslim community. And the reality that the biggest Muslim nation on earth is our neighbour – Indonesia – with 220 million people, which is more than many of the Arab world nations combined. So this reality and these dialogues that we've been having with Indonesians, Thai, minority Muslims, Malaysians, Philippino minority Muslims in Australia, has enriched us I think in terms of seeing Islam as such a positive side of our growth. And these young Muslims who go to the football and many of them are born here, and yet they are still seen as outsiders, because they happen to wear a hijab, or they look dark-skinned and they wear a beard, and meeting with Jews and Christians, who also have been in the past, ostracised. So to sit in these interfaith dialogues, to actually listen to people who can laugh that off and who are sure of who they are, is really fascinating.

Matt Smith:

So that's coming at it from the point of view of trying to give Muslims a control of their own destiny to some extent and giving them leadership. But how would you go about trying to get understanding and change from perhaps a place where it's needed the most?

Larry Marshall:

I think it's these one hundred alumni that we now have, as young leaders who are confident, not only confident in themselves but are confident that large slices of the Australian community they've met, from federal parliamentarians and state parliamentarians to nuns and priests and community workers that they've met in this course we run for two months, are onside with them, are appreciative, are energised by our multiculturalism – want it to work, and are willing to work with them hand in hand, to make it better. That minimises the damage of these rather racist articles, and these rather misinformed articles, and so on. But it also encourages them to debate a dialogue on these issues. So groups have been set up to tussle with the media, not in an antagonistic way, but to sit with them and inform them about the realities of these issues. But I think more importantly in the last six months, the federal government has gone back to saying "Multiculturalism is a reality and we want to make a policy framework which actually says to the people of Australia – this is something we treasure and we want to grow". Now these are signs that, yes, we're having this conversation but in a more dignified, reasonable way. This is the reality. We live in a multicultural world. The Premier of this state was from the Lebanese community, Steve Bracks. The Mayor of Melbourne from the Chinese community. Julia Gillard proudly says that she's from a migrant background herself, and that that is a reality for all of us – that we are all migrants in this community. And we must remember the aboriginal community. That's suffered so much as well. We have an opportunity as a country that is looked up to around the world. It isn't happening very well in Britain, as David Cameron has said, multiculturalism has failed in Britain. Or in Germany under Angela Merkel, where she has said it's failed there. I think it has failed to an extent and what's failed is the government's real efforts to make migrants feel at home and part of the community. It's worked better here, but it's a work in progress. One thing that Victoria does better than any other state is to work in a variety of ways with civil society, with government, local government, with academe, like ourselves, to make multiculturalism zing. If we gave up all these little efforts, it would start to be really difficult for people from newly emerging communities, Sudanese, Somalis and so on. This is our reality. We are a multicultural society.

Matt Smith:

That's all the time we've got for the La Trobe University podcast today. If you have any questions, comments or feedback about this podcast or any other, then send us an email at podcast@latrobe.edu.au. Larry Marshall, thank you very much for your time.