James Morrow: We have to ask the hard questions about multiculturalism, no matter what Q&A says

Mind your manners, because Q&A viewers are upset. But there was nothing racist about an audience member’s question.

• Q+A audience left speechless by question

Mind your manners, everyone.

The (dwindling) viewership of the ABC’s Q&A is offended.

And they would like a quiet word to anyone who thinks that this is a free country where the right to disagree is respected, particularly when it comes to multiculturalism.

On Monday night, you see, studio audience member Jenny Carroll committed a thought crime, telling he panel she did not believe multiculturalism was “a great thing” (strike one!) and claimed that the culture of the “original British/Irish majority has been demonised constantly for the last three decades” (strike two!).

Then, to round things out, she backed up her argument with evidence, saying “Case in point – frequent vandalism of memorials to Captain Cook. How does democracy fit into this atmosphere of beat up the white guy?”

Jenny Carroll did not please the Q&A viewership when she asked whether multiculturalism was all to the good. Picture: ABC

Strike three, and one can only imagine the panic stations in some ABC control room after this question.

The whole incident, unsurprisingly, caused a number of home viewers to choke on their vegan lasagne.

“Slow clap to the producers for allowing a blatantly racist question be aired,” said one commenter.

Captain Cook statue in Sydney's Randwick defaced amid the Black Lives Matter Movement. Picture: 2GB

“If that question was vetted then I’d like to know who’s doing the vetting,” wrote another.

And on and on it went.

The question was, of course, smacked down by the panel, with youth minister Anne Aly who said that multiculturalism “the character of our nation … not a policy that was foisted on anyone.”

Well, it’s a bit of an open question as to how much debate went into Australia’s official policy of multiculturalism, which was inaugurated in 1978 by then-prime minister Malcolm Fraser.

But, more to the point and with apologies to the delicate flowers who get their weekly talking points from Q&A, there is no better way to ensure that Australian multiculturalism falls over in a flaming heap of division than to say we are not allowed to talk about multiculturalism.

As awful as recent anti-immigrant riots in the UK were, their genesis could also be traced directly to years if not decades of an officially sanctioned silence about the negative side of diversity.

At its most horrific, this saw police and council workers fail to act on gangs of largely Pakistani migrant men engaging in the mass sexual abuse of girls and young women in northern English towns because they did not want to be thought of as racist.

A protester holding a piece of concrete walks towards riot police as clashes erupt in Bristol on August 3 during the Enough is Enough demonstration held in reaction to the fatal stabbings in Southport. Picture: AFP

These are the sorts of things that happen when people aren’t allowed to talk about multiculturalism, diversity, immigration, and how bringing in (as we are now) historic numbers of newcomers is not just about gorgeous new cuisines.

Because even if phrased less than artfully, Jenny Carroll’s Q&A question contained a broader truth.

Sure, key institutions like our parliament and legal system are all more or less directly descended from centuries of British history, thought and tradition.

But no one can claim with a straight face that there is not an effort in some segments of society to run our British heritage down at every turn.

Anyone with children knows that from preschool on, kids are regularly taught that Australia was unjustly taken.

The block of Australian history from the arrival of the British to the advent of multiculturalism is treated as an aberration and a vague source of shame.

Twenty years ago British demographer Eric Kaufmann coined the term “asymmetrical multiculturalism”, to describe how in a “multicultural” society every ethnic and racial identity is celebrated, with the exception of what in Australia we would call our “Anglo” heritage.

Could there be a better description of the way multiculturalism is put into practice in so many of our institutions, from academia to the ABC?

And while Aly unsurprisingly backed in multiculturalism, saying democracy is “more resilient” and “better for it,” this is not necessarily so.

In 2006 Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam found that at least over the short and medium term, increased diversity leads to lower social trust, social capital and neighbourliness.

People in diverse communities, he found, tend “to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more but have less faith that they can actually make a difference.”

Putnam was hesitant to publish his findings at the time because he was afraid of how they might be used by the political right – exactly the sort of self-censorship that has led to tragedy elsewhere, and which ABC fans would seem to encourage.

But we will never determine whether he was right or not if we are not allowed to talk about it.

Originally published as James Morrow: We have to ask the hard questions about multiculturalism, no matter what Q&A says