Multiculturalism was always a bad idea. Not all cultures have the same values

Kevin Andrews I 1 June 2024 I The Spectator Australia

The brand of multiculturalism that has been manifested in Australia for the past five decades died this year. Its outward expression is to come, but its core has been exposed as empty and hollow.

Lest my argument be misunderstood, Australia is and will continue to be a multi-ethnic nation. This is not new. Immigrants from all over the world flooded to the colonies during the gold rushes and in the subsequent decades. Most were from Europe, but from many different continental countries. Of my great-grandparents, two were from Scotland – the north and the south, two from Germany – Prussia and Bavaria, two from Ireland but different counties, one from England and another from the Netherlands. Until recently, immigrants have mostly lived in harmony.

During the term of the Howard government, it became clear that many people immigrating to Australia either didn’t understand or didn’t share our values, more often the former. There was no simple solution to this issue, especially if the nation maintained a non-discriminatory immigration policy and accepted refugees from all parts of the world, based on the greatest needs.

A response adopted by many jurisdictions was to introduce a citizenship test. While the overwhelming majority of the Coalition supported the idea, there were objectors, such as Petro Georgiou. Petro was a strong advocate of multiculturalism and had served as Director of the Australian Institute for Multicultural Affairs in between his various roles as a Liberal party adviser. He was elected as the Member for Kooyong in 1994. Petro contended that the immigrants who arrived in the 1950s and 1960s did not need a citizenship test or other measures such as English lessons to share our values. He would cite the example of his mother, who spoke little English.

‘Petro, the immigrants you speak about shared the same culture,’ I recall saying to him when I was the immigration minister. ‘They have different cuisines, languages and folk cultures, but they were from the same Western, Christian culture, whether they came from Greece, Italy, Poland or the UK. Now we have people from different cultures – from Africa, Asia, the Middle East and elsewhere.’

My argument didn’t convince him. He was stuck, I believe, in the concept of multiculturalism that had been propagated since the Whitlam and Fraser years. But our immigration patterns have changed significantly. Many people with little or no connection to our Western culture were immigrating to Australia. It was not about singling them out as ‘different’, but acknowledging that many of the values underpinning the Australian way of life were alien to them. Surely, we had a responsibility to explain our values to them?

Petro’s attitude was also shared by many on the left of the Labor Party. It reflected the power of various ethnic communities and organisations that exercised substantial clout in the ALP. Labor believed John Howard was trying to play a ‘race card’, so were very wary of a citizenship test. Ever since the ‘Tampa affair’, their suspicion was that anything related to immigration was being used by the government for electoral purposes. Nonetheless, Labor did not oppose the Bill. Nor did it abolish the test when it won office.

Multiculturalism as an ideology was always built on weak foundations. At its core, multiculturalism is inconsistent with liberalism. It gained support, especially in the UK, as an antidote to racism. There were various events that exposed the shallowness of the concept in practice, the reaction to Salman Rushdie’s?Satanic Verses?being one of the most notable.

While the meaning of multiculturalism has been altered significantly since its formal introduction to Australia – from accepting that immigrants came from different cultures to claims of a separate cultural identity – it has largely served as a political construct. The latest manifestation is the denial of an integrated society. In the most extreme cases, the common expression that, ‘I am an Australian of such and such an ethnic background’ has been replaced by the claim that ‘I am a (ethnic background) who lives in Australia.’

As the late Professor John Hirst, who authored the Australian history section of the citizenship materials, observed twenty years ago, ‘As a serious historical or sociological analysis [multiculturalism] is nonsense. To found policy on it may be perilous.’ It denies the very notion of a host.

More than ever, we need a shared national identity, not a collection of tribes sharing a land. Twenty years ago, Jonathon Sacks observed that ‘Liberalism is about the rights of the individual, multiculturalism about the rights of groups, and they are incompatible…. There is a conflict between solidarity and diversity. So long as liberalism prevailed, we could think in terms of the individual as such, the universal human condition. But multiculturalism is the opposite of universalism. It is, as it were, a new form of tribalism.’

Since Sacks wrote these words in 2007, multiculturalism has morphed into the new identitarianism. It is what we see playing out at our universities today; what was on display in all its ugliness in celebratory demonstrations against Israel only days after October 7.

It is no accident that liberal democracy grew from a Christian culture that proclaimed the dignity and liberty of the individual based on the belief that each human person is created in the image and likeness of God. It was St. Paul’s radical claim that ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female…’ which, in turn, reflected the Imago Dei of the first chapter of Genesis.

What can be seen clearly is that multiculturalism – as it has developed in Australia – now undermines the integration and cohesion that a successful society requires. More and more Australians recognise the inherent contradictions of the policy of multiculturalism and want nothing of it.

Author: Kevin Andrews