Australia is the proof multiculturalism works

Australia's history, economy and global achievements show that multiculturalism is not a weakness but one of the nation's greatest strengths, writes Wayne Hawkins.

THE ARGUMENT goes like this: no multicultural society has ever truly succeeded.

Real cohesion, they tell us, requires a shared heritage, a common ancestry, a single thread running through the national fabric. Look at Japan, they say. That's what works.

It's a seductive argument. It's also empirically wrong. And we don't need to look far for the evidence — we're standing in it.

Australia is home to 27.6 million people. More than 32 per cent of us were born overseas and close to half of all Australians have at least one parent born in another country. We speak over 300 languages. By the standards of the monoculture advocates, we should be a basket case — fractured, directionless, ungovernable.

Instead, we are one of the most stable, prosperous and punching-above-our-weight nations on Earth.

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Our per-capita Nobel laureate count outstrips nations many times our size. The medical breakthroughs that have saved lives globally – the bionic ear, the cervical cancer vaccine – came from Australian labs, many of them staffed by people or the children of people who arrived here with nothing but ability.

Ian Frazer, who developed the HPV vaccine that has protected millions of women from cancer worldwide, was born in Glasgow and immigrated to Australia in 1981. Our Olympic medal tallies embarrass nations with ten times our population. Our cultural exports, our diplomatic reach, our economic resilience through the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, while the rest of the developed world buckled — none of this happened despite who we are. It happened because of it.

So when someone tells you no multicultural society has ever succeeded, ask them what they call this.

The Japan comparison deserves a closer look, too, because it does a lot of work in this argument and doesn't hold up under scrutiny. Japan is held up as the model of monoculture cohesion. But Japan gave us KFC on Christmas Eve — the result of a 1974 fast food marketing campaign so successful it became a national tradition.

Japan absorbed baseball, whisky culture, Valentine's Day, Halloween and Western fashion wholesale, made them distinctly Japanese, and nobody calls it a cultural failure. Japan is a masterclass in cultural confidence and selective adoption — not a sealed vault.

And it still ranks poorly on press freedom, LGBTQ+ rights and criminal justice protections that Australians would find alarming if proposed here. Orderly is not the same as free.

The deeper problem with the monoculture argument is that it's not really an argument at all. It's a feeling dressed up as policy. The feeling is genuine — many Australians feel displaced, uncertain, left behind. That feeling deserves to be taken seriously.

But its cause isn't the family from Vietnam who runs the corner bakery or the Sudanese nurse working the weekend shift at the local hospital. Its cause is 30 years of policy decisions that gutted wages, inflated housing beyond reach, hollowed out regional communities and handed the returns of a resources boom to a handful of shareholders instead of the public who owned the ground it came from.

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Multicultural Australia didn't create regional economic anxiety. Negative gearing did. Privatisation did. Wage suppression did. A sovereign wealth fund that doesn't exist did.

Redirect the anger upstream, to where it actually belongs.

There's also a basic historical problem with the claim that no multicultural society succeeds.

The United States built the dominant economy and cultural force of the 20th Century on mass migration. Canada consistently ranks among the highest quality of life nations on Earth. The Roman Empire at its peak was a multicultural project — that was a feature of its success, not a flaw. Medieval Moorish Spain produced breakthroughs in mathematics, medicine and philosophy precisely because of the collision of cultures within it.

The claim only works if you define “successful” to exclude every example that disproves it.

Australian identity is already a synthesis. The culture people are trying to protect includes tea from India, football codes from Ireland and England, wine traditions carried from Europe, a pub culture built substantially by Irish Catholics and an emerging spiritual relationship with this land drawn increasingly from 65,000 years of Indigenous custodianship. There is no pre-migration Australian culture to return to. There never was.

What we have instead is something rarer and harder to build: a society that takes the best of what people bring, shapes it into something new and keeps getting better at it. Twenty-seven million people. Three hundred languages. One of the most successful nations on Earth.

The proof isn't theoretical. It's here. We're it.

Wayne Hawkins is the owner of Crisp N Sweet bakery and café in Claremont, Tasmania, and an independent candidate for the federal seat of Clark at the 2028 Election.