The national conversation is difficult if the internet entrenches division

It is 30 years since SBS was launched as the multicultural broadcaster with a mission to nuture diversity in changing society.

It is 30 years since SBS was launched as the multicultural broadcaster with a mission to nuture diversity in changing society.

But even the prime minister responsible for establishing SBS, Malcolm Fraser, says it now no longer in any true sense multicultural – it is just another arm of mainstream public sector broadcasting.

This prompts a question: Has SBS forgotten its mission, or has something changed in since the 1980s which demands that we revisit what we mean by multiculturalism in the media?

Before SBS began, most Australians had just four television channels. Telephone calls home were a dollar a minute or more a minute via the Overseas Telecommunications Commission.

International newspapers arrived by post and the internet was science fiction. Today the digital revolution is fragmenting into smaller and smaller subsets, and the trend away from broadcasting towards micro-casting will accelerate with the spread of high-speed broadband.  Hundreds of foreign-language satellite services are available in Australia. SBS has lost its non-English speaking monopoly.

The challenge today is not too little diversity, but finding common space. It is a challenge for advertisers. But it also presents a challenge to us as a nation. As the audience becomes ever more fragmented, how do we avoid segmentation into cultural islands? Should we see a warning in the 'dish cities' of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Den Haag, as writer Ian Buruma has describes them, where the satellite aerials give immigrants the opportunity to live in a kind of virtual Morocco?

It is time to reopen the nation-defining debate about multiculturalism, not least as it applies to the media. It is time to look at the heath of the national conversation.

Australians are fortunate that a happy combination of historical good fortune, sound judgment and a garrulous national temperament has blessed them with a healthy tradition of civic debate. There are few other countries where the national conversation is as honest, open and inclusive.  And we must keep it that way.

Hills Manual to Social and Business Forms, published in Chicago in 1888, sets out rules on dinner party conversations that could equally well apply to the national debate.

Special pains should be taken that the party does not divide itself up into cliques, twos, threes or more, leaving a number out who seem to possess no power to get into conversation. While it is not always advisable to break up a pleasant conversation between two, three or four, care must be exercised that those inclined to drop aside and spend time in conversing with each other are prevented by the hostess, as much as possible, from so doing.

A single unifying conversation if less likely if multi-culturalism becomes “a community of communities” or what nobel laureate Amartya Sen describes as “plural monoculturalism”.

Plural monoculturalism  is a community of tribes. There may be lively discussion within each tribe, but the tribes never talk to one another. We start to live, in a very real sense, in parallel universes.

Tribal life is comfortable and reassuring living with like-minded individuals with whom we never seriously disagree. But if you never leave your own tribe, you never have to answer the hard questions. You are never obliged to seek accommodation with other Australians who may have a very different take on life, different values, different moralities. The nation becomes polarized, resentful, and narcissistic. Each community looks after itself, and no one looks after the national interest.

But at the opposite extreme to plural mono-culturalism is something I would describe as romanti-culturalism. Tolerance is simply an essential pre-condition for any civil society, a lubricant that oils the wheels. But for the romanti-culturalists, tolerance becomes an end in itself.

It invites conversations where we politely agree on everything. I agree with you that you agree with me and we both agree that everyone is in agreement that we must avoid disagreement. Again, beneath a veneer of civility, the genuine and legitimate conflicts of difference are never addressed. 

Differences of opinion are a way of testing our own assumptions, and improving our ideas. All of us must approach with a sense of their own fallibility, and with minds that are willing to change if contrary arguments are persuasive. In politics, robust debate and a frank and fearless exchange of views are the best ways to arrive at sensible policy. And it is the only way to deliver policy which enjoys a consensus.

Australia has always been a country of agreeable disagreements, which generally resolve into a modus vivendi, if not a consensus, without resorting to violence. Yet without wishing to be unduly alarmist, I have sensed in the internet era a coarsening of public debate, a polarization of views, and a hardening of opinion.

There is a paradox at the heart of this inter-connected, digital world. The internet’s globalising promise to bring us closer together by linking us into some grand world-wide community has not, and never will be fulfilled.

In fact quite the opposite has occurred; the internet is entrenching division. The democratic potential of the internet has been overestimated. Democracy relies on trust, and trust is not something that’s easily transmitted in digital form.

This is not however reason for moral panic. I’m not a believer in technological determinism. Machines do control our behaviour; it’s the other way round.

Tim Soutphommasane, author of the book Reclaiming Patriotism and columnist for The Weekend Australian, puts it this way:

The real test of a democracy is not whether it can overcome its disagreements, but how it conducts itself in light of them. The manner in which our open, honest national conversation proceeds will say a good deal about our democratic maturity.

I would go further and say that the existence of disagreements in itself is a sign of health. Providing, of course, that we respond to disagreement with reasoned discussion, and not by throwing shoes.

Nick Cater is the Editor of The Weekend Australian. Adapted from an address to the Community Relations Commission, Marketing Multiculturalism conference November 1, 2010