Political Theory and Australian Multiculturalism

Geoffrey Brahm Levey, Geoffrey Brahm Levey

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450296
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant concerns in political theory over the last decade. To date, this inquiry has been mostly informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and increasingly, the European contexts. This volume explores for the first time how the Australian experience both relates and contributes to political thought on multiculturalism. Focusing on whether a multicultural regime undermines political integration, social solidarity, and national identity, the authors draw on the Australian case to critically examine the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies. These essays by distinguished Australian scholars variously treat the relation between liberalism and diversity, democracy and diversity, culture and rights, and evaluate whether Australia's thirty-year experiment in liberal multiculturalism should be viewed as a successful model.

Chapter 1

Multicultural Political Thought in Australian Perspective

Geoffrey Brahm Levey

The aim of this book is to explore how the Australian experience relates and contributes to political thinking about multiculturalism. Multiculturalism has been one of the dominant themes of research and reflection in political theory over the last fifteen or so years. Among other issues, attention has focused on how multiculturalism relates to liberal principles of individual autonomy, toleration, equality, and justice; where, and on what basis, the limits of liberal toleration should be drawn; and the implications of multiculturalism for current and emerging conceptions of citizenship. For the most part, these debates have been conducted at an abstract philosophical level or else have been informed by, or applied to, the Canadian, American, and, increasingly, the European contexts. Although Australia was, along with Canada, one of the first liberal democracies to commit to a national policy of multiculturalism, in the 1970s, political theory has devoted scant attention to Australia’s experiment in multiculturalism. The considerable scholarly literature on Australian multiculturalism has tended rather to come from cultural studies and the empirical social sciences. Indeed, it is fair to say that aside from the recent attention on the rights of indigenous peoples, Australian political theorists and philosophers have mostly shied away from multiculturalism and cultural rights as areas of study in general.¹

Just why this should be so when such issues are of central concern to political theorists in Canada, the United States, Britain, and continental Europe is worth pondering. But whatever the reasons, the lack of interest is doubly unfortunate. First, from an Australian perspective, the work of political theorists addresses many of the issues that routinely figure in this country’s public debate over multiculturalism as a set of ideas and policies for managing cultural diversity. Multiculturalism in Australia has always had its critics. However, since the World Trade Center attacks in September 2001 and with the rise of militant Islamism more generally, public anxieties over the meaning, value, and implications of multiculturalism are today being voiced in Australia, as elsewhere, with particular stridency. Sober analysis of what multiculturalism is and may be in a liberal democracy like Australia, of the various arguments offered to justify it, as well as of its theoretical and practical problems, is needed now more than ever. Australian public policy and debate can only benefit from having the Australian experience situated and evaluated in light of more general arguments about multiculturalism, liberal democratic values, national identity, and citizenship.

Second, from an academic perspective, multicultural political theory can in turn benefit from considering the Australian case. Early multicultural political theory was heavily influenced by the work of the Canadian political philosophers Will Kymlicka (e.g., 1989, 1995) and Charles Taylor (1994), both of whom were self-consciously engaged in searching for a just solution to minority claims as presented in the Canadian context, principally concerning the indigenous peoples and Quebecois. In terms of the sheer number of scholars and output of work, however, the center of gravity in multicultural political theory, as in so many other academic fields, is the United States. Yet such work comes with something of a self-imposed caveat: while American political theorists tend to generalize about liberalism and democracy based on American institutions and conditions, Americans also tend to believe as an article of national faith in “American exceptionalism”—the idea that the United States is “uniquely unique” or fundamentally different from all other polities and societies (Glazer 1999; Shafer 1991; Walzer 1992b).

Thus it is appropriate that recent years have witnessed a growing wariness of the “one model fits all” kind of liberal theorizing. Especially in the case of multicultural political theory, there has been increased attention to the importance of particular historical and cultural contexts in responding to what may be the same or similar questions. A recent volume on multi-cultural citizenship, for example, attempts to chart what the editors call a “European approach” (Modood, Triandafyllidou, and Zapata-Barreo 2006). And Kymlicka himself has played a key role in regional inquiries into whether and how Western models of multiculturalism may have application in Eastern Europe (Kymlicka and Opalski 2001) and in Asia (Kymlicka and He 2005). Similarly, in his contribution to this book, Philip Pettit argues that there is “no such thing as the nature of citizenship in general, only the nature of citizenship under one or another civic structure.” As Martin Krygier notes in his comment on Pettit’s chapter, the same can be said of the “nature of multiculturalism.”

If comparison and contrast are essential to the quest for understanding, as they surely are, then it is appropriate that the Australian case also be included in our store of political thinking on multiculturalism. Australia has had a generally successful experience with creating and managing a culturally diverse society based on liberal democratic norms. It also occupies an intermediate position—politically, institutionally, and culturally—between the dominant Western spheres of “Old World” Europe and the “New World” of North America, and thus affords a unique vantage point for considering wider debates on multiculturalism.

This book, then, seeks to bring the Australian context into the discussion of multiculturalism in contemporary political theory. It critically examines the challenges, possibilities, and limits of multiculturalism as a governing idea in liberal democracies, with special attention to the Australian case. Some contributors draw on Australian examples to make or evaluate general arguments, some consider the implications of a particular philosophical argument for Australian democracy, while others evaluate official Australian multiculturalism directly. All, however, are concerned with the theoretical implications of Australia’s attempt to manage an immigrant-rich, culturally diverse population and thus address some of the central questions of concern to political theorists and liberal democracies today.

In the remainder of this chapter, I will briefly profile Australia’s multi-cultural society and move to adopt multiculturalism as official policy; identify some normative features of the Australian policy; consider the Howard government’s apparent retreat from multiculturalism in its final year in office; and outline the contents of the book.

MULTICULTURALISM FOR A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY

Australia was home to a culturally diverse population even before European settlement. Indigenous Australians comprised hundreds of distinct tribal groups and languages. The First Fleet of European settlement in 1788 also included a variety of ethnic backgrounds among its assortment of officers and convicts. The gold rushes of the nineteenth century along with the opportunities of a new society attracted Chinese, Afghanis, and Italians, among others, in search of better lives. Religious intolerance at home saw German Old Lutherans establish a significant presence—and one of Australia’s renowned wine-growing regions—in South Australia from 1838. Nevertheless, multiculturalism as a political idea and public policy regime is a latter twentieth-century development. The term multiculturalism entered Australian parlance in 1973 following its introduction some years earlier in Canada.² Whereas Canadian thinking revolved principally around bilingualism and long-established cultural communities, multiculturalism in Australia developed as a response to post–World War II immigration.

From Federation of the Australian colonies in 1901 until World War II, Australia dealt with cultural diversity fundamentally through exclusion. The first act of the newly established Australian Commonwealth was the Immigration Restriction Act (1901) or “White Australia” policy, which defined the country as an outpost of the “British race.” Under economic imperatives to “populate or perish,” the policy’s restrictive provisions were progressively loosened in the postwar period. The end of the White Australia policy was foreshadowed in 1966 when the Liberal coalition government admitted a small number of well-qualified people from Asia. However, the policy formally ended only in 1973, when the Whitlam Labor government removed all remaining vestiges of a racially discriminatory immigration policy.³

By any standard, the ensuing transformation of Australian society has been remarkable. In 1947, the Australian population stood at 7.6 million. This included some 87,000 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (compared to an estimated 314,000 prior to European settlement), with the rest mostly the descendants of people from Great Britain and Ireland. Almost 10 percent of the total population was born overseas, with three quarters of these coming from the British Isles. As of the 2001 census, the Australian population had grown to 18.8 million. Now 22 percent of the resident Australian population was born overseas, and 43 percent was either born overseas or had one parent born overseas. These figures have continued to increase since 2001. Thus, for many years now Australia has been even more immigrant rich than the other major “immigrant democracies” of Canada (19.3 percent circa 2000), the United States (12.3 percent), and New Zealand (19.5 percent), and it far exceeds, in this respect, the former imperial powers of Europe now coping with immigration, including Britain (8.3 percent), France (10 percent), and the Netherlands (10 percent) (ABS 2001; OECD 2006). Apart from Israel, no other country has virtually doubled its population through immigration in the space of half a century. James Jupp (2003, and this volume) rightly cautions against overstating the cultural diversity associated with some of these figures. Although immigrants to Australia hail from some two hundred countries, as of 2006, the two main source countries of Australia’s overseas-born, for example, remain the United Kingdom (24 percent) and New Zealand (9 percent). By comparison, the main non–English-speaking source countries are Italy with 5 percent, and China and Vietnam each with 4 percent of the overseas-born (ABS 2004–5: 6).⁴ Still, overall it is clear that Lord Campbell of Croy had a point in offering a personal recollection in the House of Lords: “My late wife once described [the United States] as the only country in the world where the majority of the population is homesick. They might dispute that in Australia.”⁵

There have been significant changes also in religious affiliation. In 1947, 39 percent of the population identified themselves as Anglican, 21 percent considered themselves Catholic, and 28 percent aligned themselves with other Christian denominations and beliefs.⁶ By the time of the 2001 census, those declaring a Christian faith had fallen from 88 to 68 percent (21 percent Anglican, 26 Catholic, 21 other Christian). Those identifying with a non-Christian religion had climbed from 0.5 to 5 percent, with Buddhism (2 percent), Islam (1.5 percent), Hinduism, and Judaism (each 0.5 percent) being the main minority faiths. While Christianity remains the most common religion among the overseas-born, growing numbers of immigrants from Asia and the Middle East have led to a stronger presence of non-Christian faiths. Indeed, between the 1996 and 2001 censuses alone, the number of persons affiliating with Buddhism increased by 79 percent, with Hinduism by 42 percent, and with Islam by 40 percent. Perhaps equally significant is the growing secularity of the population, with a fifty-fold increase since 1947 in those citing no religious affiliation or beliefs, from 0.3 percent to 15.5 percent in 2001.⁷

Officially, Australia is a monolingual country, recognizing English as the sole national language. However, in 2001, one in six Australians age 5 and above spoke another language at home. The majority of these (73 percent) were overseas-born, among whom the main languages spoken (in descending order) were Chinese, Italian, Greek, Vietnamese, and Arabic/Lebanese. Among the Australian-born (typically children of immigrants), the main languages spoken were Italian, Greek, Arabic/Lebanese, Aboriginal languages, and Chinese (ABS 2006: “Languages”).

Like Canada and the United States, Australia explicitly managed its cultural diversity up until the mid-1960s through an assimilationist approach aimed at “Anglo-conformity.” This approach had more to do with declaratory expectations and the absence of provisions for minorities than with formal legal sanctions. Arguably, much more powerful was the informal censuring that an overwhelmingly Anglo-Celtic society applied to new immigrants who exhibited their linguistic and cultural difference too conspicuously. By the 1950s, some sociologists were warning that assimilationist policies and norms were exacerbating rather than alleviating the problems of immigrant absorption (Lopez 2000: 54–55). Government documents claim that a new policy approach of “integration” replaced assimilationism from the mid-1960s, where the settling and servicing of large numbers of immigrants were emphasized, rather than the loss of their original language, culture, and identity (DIMA 2006b). Beginning in the 1970s, multiculturalism developed as a series of tentative ideas and piecemeal reforms sponsored by successive Labor and Liberal coalition federal governments. Unlike Canadian multiculturalism, which emphasized linguistic and cultural maintenance from the start, Australian multiculturalism first took shape as a program of immigrant settlement and welfare support for people from non–English-speaking backgrounds or so-called NESBs (Jupp 1996; Lopez 2000). Some commentators nevertheless see in the multicultural approach during the Fraser government years (1975–83)—and, especially, in the Galbally Report (1978) that gave it direction—an emphasis on cultural pluralism, ethnic groups as distinct and homogeneous cultures, and a neoconservative inclination to privatize welfare services (Castles 2001: 808; Kalantzis 2000: 104). Ethnic Communities’ Councils were among the first nongovernmental institutions established to advance the multicultural agenda, beginning with the Victorian branch in 1974, followed by a New South Wales office in 1975. An overarching national association, Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia (FECCA), was established in 1979. Publicly funded English-language instruction, translation services, immigrant resource centers, grant-in-aid programs to community groups, facilities for recognizing overseas trade qualifications, and the establishment of ethnic television were among the main initiatives of this early period.

By the early 1980s, the ambit of multiculturalism had begun to be framed in terms of addressing “all Australians” rather than only immigrants and “ethnics,” and had crystallized around the themes of social cohesion, cultural identity, and equality of opportunity and access. By the end of the 1980s, the first overarching national policy statement of Australian multiculturalism—National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia (OMA 1989), inaugurated by the Hawke Labor government—identified four main planks: the right of all Australians to maintain their cultural identities within the law; the right of all Australians to equal opportunities without fear of group-based discrimination; the economic and national benefits of a culturally diverse society; and respect for core Australian values and institutions—reciprocity, tolerance and equality (including of the sexes), freedom of speech and religion, the rule of law, the Constitution, parliamentary democracy, and English as the national language.

Subsequently, there have been two further national policy statements, A New Agenda for Multicultural Australia and Multicultural Australia: United in Diversity (Commonwealth of Australia 1999, 2003)—the latter a self-declared “update” of the former—both launched by the conservative Howard government.⁸ These documents have further refined the policy’s emphases and presentation of principles, although the 1989 provisions have essentially endured. If the Hawke government’s National Agenda advanced a social justice-cum-citizenship model of multiculturalism, the New Agenda put greater stress on national identity, social cohesi...