Want to paint your naked body blue and mock Jesus? Do it on your own dime
Labor’s flawed multiculturalism report coincided with the demented Last Supper event at the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris, where ‘diversity’ didn’t include respecting Christians.
Money. Money. Money. Despite a few hundred pages of fine-sounding words about diversity and inclusion, belonging and fairness, this report is best captured by the ka-ching sound.
Never mind the money wasted on commissioning and producing the report. Towards Fairness: A Multicultural Australia For All misrepresents this country. Those behind the report demand more money to fulfil an elite project that sits at odds with the real story of our history, our success. Released over a week ago, the report shows no understanding of why migrants came to Australia or why they still come. It is summed up by its two-page introduction, by the one-page letter to the minister by its authors and by their 29 recommendations. If you cherish your time on this mortal coil, skip the rest.
The authors – human rights lawyer Nyadol Nyuon, bureaucrat Christine Castley and former SBS chairman Bulent (Hass) Dellal – have confirmed that multiculturalism should become an even bigger rights-based industry dependent on money from taxpayers. They want a new federal multiculturalism bureaucracy: a new multicultural affairs commission and commissioner, a new stand-alone multicultural department, a dedicated minister for multiculturalism. They also want “an expanded role” for SBS and the ABC.
That last demand alone tells you how misguided this report is. There is a serious argument to be had as to whether SBS is past its use-by date. Sure, it airs some great foreign dramas, but is it worth more than $300m a year in an era of more media choices than ever? Alas, that debate about the multicultural broadcaster is not in the report. And why would we give the ABC “an expanded role”? The taxpayer-funded media organisation gets more than $1bn from us annually, only to embrace every kind of diversity – except of opinion. The report missed an opportunity to remind the public broadcaster to add that last bit of diversity to its programming; in other words, to meet its charter on its current funding before getting any more.
Even former ABC chairwoman Ita Buttrose told her former colleagues to “have both sides of the story – it’s much better”. It raises the question of what Buttrose did when she led the organisation.
In fact, this Multicultural Australia report reads as if it were written by a handful of overpaid ABC journos. Stretching to 204 pages of slick production, lovely photos and children’s artwork, it manages to overlook a whole other side to the story about multiculturalism. The parts that matter, that don’t require a huge expenditure of scarce public resources, or a new nest of bureaucrats, or a federal minister, or a department, or a bigger role for our anti-intellectual Aunty.
Let me add a short chapter on what should have been in this report. First, a section about the real story of Australia captured by Noel Pearson a decade ago when he said: “Our nation is in three parts. There is our ancient heritage, written in the continent and the original culture painted on its land and seascapes. There is our British inheritance, the structures of government and society transported from the United Kingdom fixing its foundations in the ancient soil. There is our multicultural achievement: a triumph of immigration that brought together the gifts of peoples and cultures from all over the globe – forming one indissoluble commonwealth.”
The report says multiculturalism – meaning Indigenous people and migrant cultures – is “the foundation of our shared identity”. It gives short shrift to our British heritage. To the extent that this part of our story is mentioned at all, it is mostly presented as something bad. Are we to believe that in 10 short years our British heritage is no longer one of three strands of our national story? Of course not. Instead, the report’s authors simply decided it wasn’t important to them. Alas, that British heritage, our adaptation of it over 200-plus years, is important to Australians, migrants included.
As University of Sydney history professor James Curran wrote in an opinion piece last week, those institutions that Britain brought to our country – parliamentary democracy, the rule of law, an independent judiciary and a free press – are the institutions that have allowed multiculturalism to flourish. This latest report’s refusal to place our British heritage in its rightful place confirms that multiculturalism – as an elite project – remains infected with a self-loathing virus, where the only culture routinely condemned, mocked and misrepresented is our own.
This flawed report coincides with the demented Last Supper event at the Olympics opening ceremony in Paris last week where “diversity” doesn’t include respecting Christians. My colleague Greg Sheridan asked, “If you want to celebrate transvestites, why is it necessary to spit on Christianity?”
The answer is that this is the price of living in a free society. We must endure the ignorant and the wicked ignoring the fact that respecting the dignity of the individual is a Christian value. The bigger point is that it’s stupendously dumb for governments to fund these distortions of diversity that serve only to cause division. If you want to paint your naked body blue, mock Jesus and the Last Supper, do it on your own dime.
You won’t find anything so obvious mentioned in this report, not even when the authors call for the federal government to fund “arts and cultural workers” to be embedded into community groups.
The most odious flaw of Towards Fairness: A Multicultural Australia For All is that it doesn’t present the real story of Australia’s migration, the one where migrants don’t run to government for help, where they don’t sit around talking about multiculturalism or reading reports about it but get stuck into living in a new country.
When my parents arrived from Denmark in the 1960s, they were proud of their title as “new Australians”. Their new citizenship didn’t undermine their Danish culture one iota, but neither did they call themselves Danish-Australians. They needed help to learn the language, but they didn’t expect translation services every time they dealt with government or some other agency. In fact, the lack of translation services meant they learnt English quickly. Not perfectly, by any means. But fast enough to quickly make friends, get a job, join clubs and coach my brother’s school soccer team.
The transformation of thousands of poor, displaced post-war migrants into comfortable middle-class Australians in a few generations is one of the great success stories of integration. Becoming a citizen meant accepting responsibilities in return for clearly understood rights and privileges. A migrant renounced “all other allegiances” to swear loyalty to Australia. More than 50 years later, against a backdrop of identity politics, it’s a case of Australia owing the migrant. A word search of “rights” and “responsibilities” (and similar words) in this report is telling. Rights are plastered throughout. When responsibilities are mentioned, they are government ones, not those we rightly expect of every citizen, migrants included.
The report doesn’t mention that multiculturalism, as a policy, started out as a project driven by elites. It makes no mention of research by sociologist Katharine Betts, who revealed that multiculturalism wasn’t even a story of ethnic agitators: it was largely trumpeted by a group of Anglo-Australian activists so small that “most of them could and did meet in one room”.
Twenty years later – after Malcolm Fraser included multiculturalism in the Coalition platform – a Council of Multicultural Affairs poll found the rank-and-file supporter of multiculturalism was not the migrant but the well-educated Anglo-Australian living far from migrant enclaves. Underneath the flim-flam language, this report continues this great multicultural con, emphasising ethnic rights to be separate but equal, promoting cultural and moral relativism and identity politics. SBS still uses the phrase Muslim-Australians, not the other way around. Muslim first, Australian second. That hyphenated loyalty serves to undermine an obligation on migrants to embrace a common set of values.
This report has nothing to say about the dangers of cultural relativism. Last week, a Hazari woman, Sakina Muhammad Jan, was sentenced to jail for forcing her 20-year-old daughter Ruqia Haidari to marry Mohammad Ali Halimi in August 2019. The man killed his bride five months later. The judge said Jan faced cultural expectations from the local Hazara community when forcing her daughter to marry. We know about this forced marriage because a young woman died. But how many other women are forced into marriage that we don’t know about?
This report has nothing to say about the dangers of identity politics and growing sectarianism either, an extraordinary omission given rising tensions in this country – and globally – following the abhorrent attacks by Hamas on Israel last October.
As reported this week, an Officeworks employee refused to serve a Melbourne man who wanted to laminate a copy of The Australian Jewish News that featured a photo of his recent trip to Israel. The woman was captured on camera saying she was “pro-Palestine” and she was within her rights to refuse a job. “For political reasons … I’m not comfortable with doing that,” she said. Rights first. Social cohesion second.
This is what happens when the ruling class, and its commissioned reports, tells us to revere its latest incarnations of multiculturalism – unbridled diversity and identity politics. It gets ugly.
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