Border security plus Australian values equals social cohesion

Minister for Human Services, Alan Tudge.

Without social cohesion, economic growth will be constrained; without social cohesion, national security will be put at risk - as residents of London know too well.

But social cohesion is also a goal in its own right. Cohesive societies are ones where there is trust and concern between people; where there is a connectedness. In cohesive societies, people contribute to, as much as take from, the public good. Individuals are treated fairly and with dignity.

So how can social cohesion be maintained during a time of large-scale, diverse immigration?

Australia arguably has been the most successful at doing this.

For decades now, we have welcomed people from around the world and we have largely maintained social harmony in the process. People mix reasonably well and most Australians enjoy the cultural richness that comes from a diverse population. We are an open, welcoming country.

Moreover, newcomers succeed on almost every level: in employment, education, business creation, home ownership. On ­almost every indicator, Australian migrants are achieving at the same rate, if not better than, the home born.

Australia’s achievement is particularly remarkable given the size and diversity of our immigration program. More than 28 per cent of Australians were born overseas; another 21 per cent have a parent born overseas. The proportion of overseas born is more than twice that of Britain and the US.

This is not to say Australia is perfect. Far from it. Some of the challenges to social cohesion we face are similar to those Britain faces, such as ethnic segregation and liberal values being challenged.

There are two factors central to Australia’s success in maintaining social cohesion: careful immigrant selection and an insistence on immigrant integration. We choose who comes. We don’t outsource this choice to people-smugglers and we don’t leave it to chance. Malcolm Turnbull calls our immigration program essentially a recruitment exercise.

Controlling the borders is a prerequisite to being able to select the people that the nation wants.

But strong borders is a policy that is always under pressure from the Left.

Indeed, under the former Labor government our system was unravelled, with tragic consequences — including 1200 deaths at sea. More than 50,000 people arrived unlawfully, many of whose identities we still have not fully resolved.

Having secured our borders, Australia is able to select people to enter the country who want to become Australians, adopt our values and make a contribution to the nation.

We generally have done this well, through an emphasis on skilled migration — making up almost 70 per cent of our permanent migrant intake — and a strict vetting process.

If you cannot control and ­select who comes into your ­nation, then you put your security at risk, do not maximise the economic opportunity and make ­social cohesion harder.

We have a strong expectation of migrant integration. This is built into our multicultural policy. Our model is integrated multiculturalism. It is not an assimilationist model, where people must leave their heritage behind. But neither is it a separatist model, which we have frequently seen in Europe, where people have sometimes brought their entire prac­tices, language and culture and planted them into the new land, with little expectation placed on them to share or mix with the local community.

Separatist multiculturalism is not really multiculturalism at all — it is monoculturalism side-by-side, and can be a formula for conflict and alienation.

Ours is an integrated multiculturalism, involving several mechanisms.

We expect migrants will contribute and participate in the workforce. The nature of our policies has been weighted towards skilled migration. We do not allow migrants to access welfare payments for the first two years, with legislation in the parliament to extend that to four.

We have a challenge with our humanitarian intake in relation to work, in part because I believe we do not place the same high expectations on them to secure employment. We can do better here.

We require English to be learned for many new migrants. And we place an emphasis on Australian values as the glue that holds the nation together. We do this through requiring people to sign a values statement before coming. The weakness of this, however, is that we have few mechanisms to assess people against their signed statement.

Our challenges are made harder today because technology means that a person can communicate easily and cheaply with their birth country or within their diaspora.

In short, a person can more easily live within a language and cultural bubble in suburban Australia.

This is why we are continuing to think about this deeply and work on policies to address issues now, before they get larger. Our ship is slightly veering towards a European separatist multicultural model and we want to pull it back to be firmly on the Australian integrated path.

The obligation to integrate is not burdensome — it’s empowering. Without it, migrants are ­denied the chance to participate fully in their new country and to share in the wealth and opportunity of our vibrant economy.

Ultimately it is our values and national identity, more than anything else, that bind us together. Moreover, they are what makes us wealthy, free and consequently attractive for migrants to want to join our societies.

But in recent decades we have become more passive in defending them. Postmodern thinking, which suggests that no one set of values is better than another, has gained ground. Moreover, identity politics gives cover for practices and behaviours that should be deemed intolerable.

Hence it takes years for some Western countries to even take a strong position against something as barbaric as female genital mutilation. Identity politics can be divisive. It frequently leads to the tyranny of low expectations.

Diversity can be great, but not when it includes those who want sharia and will use violence to achieve their ends.

Similarly, tolerance is generally a good principle, but we should not be tolerant of FGM or child marriage or women being prohibited from learning English, studying or even driving.

Diversity and tolerance, by themselves, are value-free principles. They are positive principles only when they operate within the confines of an agreed set of values that we collectively hold and will not compromise.

The principle of inclusion is equally insufficient. It is of course a good principle, but it implies that all the responsibility is on the host population to “include” the newcomers, when to become a fully integrated society, newly arrived migrants also need to take positive steps.

The most important thing is the values that unite us.

We need to be confident enough in these values to call out practices that are contradictory to them, even if those practices are the “culture” of a particular group.

If we want Australia to continue its multicultural success, we must take active steps now to ­ensure that social cohesion remains strong.

Alan Tudge is the Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs. This is an edited version of a speech he delivered at the Australia-UK Leadership Forum in London last night.