Anthony Moran

Multiculturalism as nation-building in Australia: Inclusive national identity and the embrace of diversity

Abstract This article discusses the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity, focusing on the Australian context. It argues that inclusive national identity can accommodate and support multiculturalism, and serve as an important source of cohesion and unity in ethnically and culturally diverse societies. However, a combative approach to national identity, as prevailed under the Howard government, threatens multicultural values. The article nevertheless concludes that it is necessary for supporters of multiculturalism to engage in ongoing debates about their respective national identities, rather than to vacate the field of national identity to others.

Should the nurse change the light globe?: Human service professionals managing risk on the frontline

Over the last two decades New Public Management, de-institutionalization and the growth of community care have radically altered the landscape of human service delivery in Australia. As a consequence of these changes, human service agencies have been compelled to develop mechanisms for regulating and managing the risks involved in frontline community care — and the management of risk is now pivotal to the practices of professional workers in this field. British research suggests that the emphasis on risk gives rise to greater monitoring and administrative supervision of workers and a focus on managerial rather than therapeutic skills. This article presents some early findings from an Australian study that finds a very different picture. Based on interviews with 24 social workers and nurses employed in community care, we found that these workers expressed a strong sense of agency when interpreting and negotiating the risk management policies of their respective organizations, and were focused primarily on the needs of their clients rather than bureaucratic procedures.

Multiculturalism and Australian National Identity

This chapter focuses on the relationship between multiculturalism and national identity, and challenges the claim that these are opposed. It argues that multiculturalism constitutes an important aspect of contemporary Australian national identity, and that part of multiculturalism’s success in Australia has been its articulation with a continually evolving, increasingly open and inclusive national identity. Comparisons are made with Canada and Quebec, the USA and the Netherlands. It is clear that nationalism in some of its guises (ethno-nationalist, assimilationist nationalist) can be inimical to multiculturalism, and the chapter explores examples of this negative relationship. The chapter also discusses ongoing debates about Australian identity, especially between more ethno-cultural, liberal and civic national versions. This taps into broader debates about multiculturalism and national identity in the international context.

Multiculturalism as Social Justice: The Hawke and Keating Governments

This chapter stresses that “social justice” framed the multicultural policy developments of the Hawke/Keating Labor government era (1983–1996). Policy innovations occurred in the context of polarising race and immigration debates, and general conservative critiques of immigration and official multicultural policy, including by Opposition leader John Howard. The chapter shows that multiculturalism withstood strong attacks on its credibility in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The chapter concludes with an examination of 1980s and 1990s right-wing and left-wing critiques of multiculturalism, including critiques of “liberal multiculturalism” voiced by critics of “whiteness,” which became an important discourse among intellectuals (e.g. Ghassan Hage) in the Australian context in discussions of multiculturalism and racism from the late 1990s onward.

Aboriginal and Multicultural Imaginaries: Tensions, Accommodations, Reconciliation

The relationship between Australia’s Indigenous peoples and multiculturalism has been fraught, with Indigenous people generally resisting incorporation within multicultural debates and agendas, asserting instead distinct Indigenous rights and claims in relation to the Australian settler state. In this chapter parallels with the Canadian and New Zealand experiences are discussed. Australia’s multicultural policy discourse has been mainly focused on immigrant diversity, but it has also attempted to draw Indigenous people into its broader framework. The decade-long official Aboriginal reconciliation process of the 1990s represented an attempt to broaden the understanding of nation and heritage to accommodate Indigenous demands, and to an extent this involved an expanded notion of multiculturalism that recognised the unique position of Indigenous people. While emphasising the ongoing tensions between multicultural and Indigenous imaginaries, the chapter discusses examples of Indigenous leaders and scholars who have attempted to reconcile the two. Will Kymlicka’s formulation of multiculturalism in multi-nation states, which shows the contribution of Indigenous people and claims to multicultural thinking and policy, is discussed.

Post-Multicultural Australia? Cosmopolitanism Critique and the Future of Australian Multiculturalism

Some scholars and politicians have argued that we have entered a post-multicultural era, globally and also in Australia. Has the multicultural agenda run its course? This chapter discusses and assesses different arguments advanced about the future of multiculturalism in Australia. Tapping into the “cosmopolitan turn” of the social sciences since the 1990s, some have advocated a cosmopolitan stance, and policy approach, that would, its proponents argue, overcome the limitations of multiculturalism and multicultural policy. As the chapter shows, this involves a partial misreading of official Australian multiculturalism and has thus far failed to produce practical alternative policies.

Enduring in Practice if Not in Name?—Official Multiculturalism During and Beyond the Howard Government

Many claim that the Howard government (1996–2007) was anti-multiculturalist, but an examination in this chapter of political discourse and policy history reveals a more complex story. In the late 1990s the Howard government forged its own version of Australian multiculturalism, emphasising citizenship, social cohesion and commitment to Australian values, while continuing to publicly accept, and at times celebrate, the benefits of cultural diversity. The chapter examines key moments when multiculturalism was challenged—the rise of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party in the late 1990s, the confrontation with global Islamist terrorism, the impact of the London Underground bombings of July 2005 and the Cronulla riots in Sydney of December 2005. It emphasises the importance of the symbolic language of multiculturalism, and not only policies and institutions, for multicultural societies. It was in this area of multicultural symbolism after 2005 that the Howard government most significantly retreated from multiculturalism, articulating a more assimilationist nationalism emphasising unchanging traditions that were less inclusive of more recent arrivals, including Muslims. The final section of the chapter discusses the renewed national embracing of multiculturalism under the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, including the setting up of a national inquiry into multiculturalism.

Multiculturalism, Australian Style: Official Multiculturalism from Whitlam to Fraser

Australia’s official model of multiculturalism involves both acceptance of ethno-cultural difference and an emphasis upon unity and loyalty to Australia. A close reading of policy documents and political speech challenges claims by critics that it is a policy that promotes ethnic separatism and strong cultural relativism. It is argued that Australian multiculturalism is liberal rather than communitarian, egalitarian and strongly framed by democratic principles and the continuing quest for national unity and social cohesion. Australia’s official multiculturalism began with the Whitlam Labor government in 1973, and was consolidated in a bipartisan environment under the conservative Fraser government. The chapter discusses the historical development of the key institutions and policies of multiculturalism up until the fall of the Fraser government in early 1983. The last section addresses late 1970s and early 1980s right-wing and left-wing critiques of Australian multiculturalism.

Is trans-race possible in an era of unsettled identities?

ABSTRACT Brubaker’s book Trans is an important intervention in debates about sexual/gender and racial/ethnic identities in a period of generalized identity unsettlement. It challenges us to think precisely about identities and social categories. Thinking with trans proves to be intellectually productive, showing us the similarities and differences between transgender and trans-race. This contribution to the book symposium raises questions about the specificity of Indigenous identities framed by settler-colonial relations. It also discusses transgender in a global context where non-Western identities have been challenged, and where non-Western protagonists have responded to cultural liberalization at times with forms of gender and sexual repression.

Protests, land rights and riots: postcolonial struggles in Australia in the 1980s, by Barry Morris

and various forms of coerced migration in Bangladesh, Malaysia, India, and Australia as a result of land policies, infrastructure projects, historic dispossession, and displacement over generations arising out of broad economic processes. Many of the displaced are described as existing on the margins of mainstream society including indigenous, minority, and low-caste populations, those living in areas that are scheduled for development and land-use change, natural resourcedependent communities whose livelihoods are under threat, and those occupying economic niches that are increasingly squeezed by globalisation and by what are described as ‘neo-liberal development’. The collection, therefore, ranges widely across the domains of displacement (conflict, generalised violence, development, economic and environmental change, and the political discrimination of social groups) and rather than relying on the categorical distinctions commonly made in the forced migration literature between displacement or migration ‘types’, an argument is presented suggesting a continuum of human movement that reflects current conditions of globalisation that are in turn characterised by a common experience of marginalisation, vulnerability, and coercion. In so doing, the volume to some extent builds on Anthony Richmond’s view that contemporary global systems and the interdependence of economic, social, and political factors shape all population movements. Such a totalising explanation of displacement and migration carries the risk of painting the world’s uprooted as merely flotsam and jetsam washed along by the tides of globalisation; in a bid to avoid such reductionism, the editors emphasise human agency in migration decision making and in identity reformulation in new locations as part of a diaspora experience including new ways of thinking about place, belonging (termed ‘placement’), and connectedness. Intellectually, the book contributes to the ongoing critique of Refugee or Forced Migration Studies, a debate taking place mainly within the sub-discipline’s scholarly community, and responds to criticisms that it is dominated by western academics and academic institutions, too in thrall to policy makers and not sufficiently independent, deficient in cultural and economic analysis, and stymied by rigid categories of analysis. Though now somewhat old hat, such criticisms have some validity though even a cursory glance through the past few years’ issues of the Journal of Refugee Studies (OUP) would show that Forced Migration Studies is aware that people do not suddenly become a ‘refugee’ or an ‘IDP’ with a fixed identity, a readily mapped history and a predictable life trajectory. Scholarly research is fully aware that a displacement event is a culmination of complex local, regional, and international political and economic processes that combine to create a situationof insecurity and vulnerability that makes displacement more likely. The observations made in Rethinking displacement have been made elsewhere but they are worth repeating, and bringing together a wide range of displacements across the Asia Pacific region shows the diversity of the displacement experience and goes some way to explaining the common roots of insecurity and vulnerability that severs people from the land and homes. Unfortunately, the collection is marred by an editorial blunder which allowed the mislabelling of the people of Afghanistan in the final chapter as Afghanis, the Afghani is the currency of the country, its people are Afghans.