Last week was a historic moment for multicultural Australians, a day for which we have waited and fought for five years. When migrants were targeted in the last elections and when some Australian voices joined the chorus of multicultural indictment in Europe, we despaired and thought the day would never arrive.
Last week in Sydney, Minister Chris Bowen announced that Australia has a new Multicultural Policy.
Australia’s last national multicultural policy expired in 2006. The lack of a national government affirmation of Australia’s multicultural reality has allowed divisive and racist voices to gain legitimacy. The statements of European leaders, which in actual fact spoke more about the failure of their own vision, seemed to fuel abhorrent sentiments in our country.
Minister Bowen’s announcement is timely and urgent. It indicates that Australian public policy, at least under this government, will not be making easy judgements which deny the reality of increasingly culturally diverse nations.
By boldly retaining the world multicultural, the policy draws upon an international philosophy and movement and aligns itself with the history of Australian multiculturalism itself. This is significant in the context of the fact that there has been an increasing tendency in Australia to shirk away from the “m” word. Terms like social inclusion and social cohesion were used as euphemisms, thus equating culture with the spectrum of vulnerabilities such as disability and gender.
The role of government in setting the tone for a society’s attitudes is not to be underestimated. There is enough evidence to show that the countries which declare themselves to have failed as multicultural societies are also those where there have been mixed signals from the government in the public sphere about the status of multicultural citizens.
Bowen’s policy pays considerable attention to “celebrating” culture. It focuses on the strengths of cultural diversity and broadens this from the earlier policy discussions of purely economic advantage to other areas such as innovation, international positioning and cultural enrichment. Particularly in a context where there is disproportionate attention being paid to the costs of Australia’s humanitarian migrants, this emphasis on celebration is timely and strategic.
The multicultural policy’s strong commitment to an Anti-Racism Strategy sets this government’s tone for its expectations of all Australians. The complexity of increasingly diverse societies means that all sides will have to pay equal attention to this strategy. It implies that reform is possible on all sides and those actions that undermine legal and constitutional frameworks of Australia cannot be condoned.
It can be argued that the policy did not go far enough in some areas. There are some difficult conversations which have been left untouched. The absence of issues of interfaith dialogues and of the lack of cultural diversity perspectives in the architecture of our infrastructure and systems point to the fact that we still have difficulties in accepting the equality of all cultures.
The positioning of faith in the public sphere will become a key issue. Currently it is enmeshed in discussions about security and terrorism. For many communities that live in Australia, religion is not optional; it is a fundamental part of their identity. At some point, we will have to engage with this fact in our policy frameworks and make decisions about how we can protect religious and cultural rights within our liberal democratic system. In doing this, we will also confront the particular cultural biases of our own political ideologies, which we currently assume to be universal.
The avoidance of some difficult conversations does not take away from the fact that Australia’s Multicultural Policy 2011 is the end of an era marked by avoidance. Where we once showed leadership in the formulation of multicultural policies, Australia was recently shamed at the United Nations human rights reviews which criticised us for the lack of a national multicultural policy. There is an inextricable link between a multicultural policy and human rights; without a policy there is no point of reference to recognise culture as a factor of human experience.
At the heart of the new Australia’s Multicultural Policy is the essential factor that makes us human - culture. At the very least, in bringing culture back into the public sphere, we have restored some humanity to our public debates.
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