Tribe trumps nation in this new multicultural missive

Tanya Plibersek (L) and Tony Burke (R). Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

Ministerial reshuffles are normally about removing duds and promoting talent. Not so with the Albanese government’s frontbench shake-up this week that has shielded the duds and given Labor freer rein to exploit the ethnic vote.

In its almost breathtaking cynicism, it will reinforce voter disillusion and confirm the decline in our polity. In particular, moving Tony Burke into the sensitive home affairs portfolio will likely mean our immigration program is driven by “blowouts and cave-ins to the ethnic lobby” (as Hawke government minister Peter Walsh once described it) given that his electorate of Watson is 55 per cent overseas born and 25 per cent Muslim.

It was Bob Hawke who said: “If the bell tolls for Israel, it won’t just tolls for Israel, it will toll for all mankind.” By pressuring his colleagues to change Labor’s once rock-solid support for Israel’s right to exist behind secure borders, Burke has already shown his willingness to put the long-term national interest behind short-term electoral considerations.

And in his previous stint as border protection minister in the dying days of the Rudd government, more than 83 illegal boats with more than 6600 passengers arrived here in just 80 days.

But instead of accepting that Labor, collectively, has failed monumentally on this issue, in defending Burke’s appointment Anthony Albanese bizarrely insisted that Burke had succeeded in every portfolio he’d ever had.

As workplace relations minister, Burke moved with almost indecent haste to abolish the Australian Building and Construction Commission, the tough cop on the beat that had prosecuted dozens of CFMEU officials and imposed $16m worth of fines on the rogue union.

By shifting him to home affairs, the Prime Minister has ensured he can’t face parliamentary questioning over the intimidation, thug­gery and organised crime links exposed since the last parliamentary sitting. Given the enduring animosity of dumped ministers (hence all reshuffle losers were moved sideways but not sacked) and the government’s slide into danger territory in the polls, you’ve got to give Albanese credit for political cunning, whatever his failings as a national leader.

Apart from keeping people smugglers at bay and thwarting the further release of foreign criminals into the community, another big early challenge for Burke will be dealing with the multicultural report the government commissioned and sat on for four months before releasing it to the public late last week.

The report’s title, Towards Fairness, gives the game away. Australia’s treatment of migrants from “culturally and linguistically diverse” communities leaves a lot to be desired, it claims. In particular, the citizenship test that the Howard government first introduced needs to be changed, we’re told, because of its “underlying principle of ‘conditional inclusion’ ”, and it should be available in languages other than English, even though it’s hard to see how any such test could be meaningful except in the national language. As well, there needs to be a multicultural commission, a multicultural commissioner, more funding for multicultural services and more respect shown for minorities within minorities such as LGBTIQ+ individuals from immigrant communities.

Anthony Albanese holds a full ministry meeting inside the cabinet room at Parliament House in Canberra. Picture: NewsWire / David Beach

In her introduction, federal Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar writes that “multiculturalism is Australia’s founding, most enduring and uniting strength”. However, we also “grapple with a reckoning of the parallel, powerful history of our often violent attempts to eradicate anything deemed counter to Western Anglo society. Through legal and political structures, processes both overt and subtle have enabled Anglo dominance while reducing the significance of other cultures”.

“This shadowy history,” she claims, “began almost immediately in 1788” with Indigenous people “seen as less than human by the British”. A view that is at odds with the Crown’s written orders to Arthur Phillip to “live in amity” with local inhabitants.

The consequent conflict and massacres, says Oscar, plus assimilationist policies, “plays out in the systemic and institutional racism experienced by First Nations and racially marginalised and minoritised people today”. And yet only last year we were told by the Prime Minister that to make Australia fair, we had to divide citizens along racial lines in our Constitution. Thankfully, the majority of voters in every state rejected Albanese’s divisive proposition.

June Oscar

While the report is less brutal and less factually questionable than Oscar’s foreword, as may be expected in a document to mark the 50th anniversary of Whitlam-era immigration minister Al Grassby’s first enunciation of multiculturalism and that plainly represents Labor’s instinct, Australia’s positive story is seen in terms of moving away from an oppressive British monoculture to the sunlit uplands of cultural and racial diversity. This is despite the reality that it is our British-originated legal institutions and cultural norms that have delivered us the freedoms and equality that too many of us appear to take for granted.

The report accepts that “commitment to democratic values is an obligation placed on all Australians”. Even so, it deprecates a response to the rise of Islamist terror that, it claims, “prompted a national narrative … on ‘acceptable’ cultural behaviours” and “ ‘shared Australian values’ that all groups were expected to follow to integrate into Australian society”. That we should be admonished for wanting newcomers to sign up to a common set of values is extraordinary, given the risk is that a country made up separate ethnic tribes, with no established shared foundation, is no nation at all.

The report denounces the idea that multiculturalism is “fundamentally incompatible with a unity based on what its adherents call Western or liberal values” on the grounds that “proponents of this incompatibility refuse to accept that Australia’s shared identity could ever derive from its multicultural character”.

With a perhaps unexpected magnanimity, the reports says such an attitude “can, but does not necessarily, entail racist sentiments”.

Predictably, though, the report sees the fact almost a million Australians speak English “not well’ or “not at all” not as a lamentable failure of integration but as proof that we need to spend more money on translation services.

Arthur Phillip

While the report is right to note that national identity evolves over time and that Australia’s linguistic diversity is a potential asset in dealing with other countries, its underlying theme that “our diversity is our unity” is simply incoherent. Instead of joining Team Australia where everyone accepts that Australia is home and strives to be part of a cohesive Australian community based on giving and getting a fair go, the report thinks we should live in Hotel Australia, where all we have in common is a current geographic location.

Sure, successive waves of migration have added to our numbers and our cultural richness, but all of them have built on the British foundation of the rule of law and respect for the equal rights and responsibilities of all. The vast majority of migrants instinctively grasp this because they’ve come voluntarily to join us, not to change us. But does Labor?

Already, under the Albanese government, more than 2000 people from Gaza have been accepted to enter Australia even though polls show that two-thirds of Palestinians support Hamas and approve of the October 7 atrocity.

Although this is hardly compatible with the commitment to democratic values that even Towards Fairness acknowledges, we can expect more of them given the local electoral pressure that the new minister is under and the identity politics that grips modern Labor.