Why multiculturalism needs recovering, not reinventing

Australia's multicultural success now depends on reconnecting public policy with the lived experiences and relationships that gave it meaning, writes Carl Gopalkrishnan.

I HAVE WORKED in and around multicultural Australia since its inception. During that time, I have watched communities change, governments change and multiculturalism itself change.

Much of that change has been remarkable. Australia is a more confident, more connected and more culturally capable country than it was when multiculturalism first found its public voice. This essay is written from within that tradition, not against it.

Every successful area of public policy eventually reaches a point where it needs to listen to itself again. Defence does. Aged care does. The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) does. Energy policy does. Their achievements are not diminished by self-reflection. If anything, that is how mature policies continue to evolve. Why should multiculturalism be different?

Listening to the increasingly polarising discussions on identity, I have been thinking less about multiculturalism as a policy than as a language. More precisely, as a language of memory.

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When multiculturalism first entered Australian public life, people heard families, neighbours, migrants and communities speaking through it. The policy followed the memories. It translated lived experience into public life. Today, I think something has changed.

That language didn't appear by accident. It grew out of experience. Too often, families and communities watched their memories being used by others while little flowed back to them. We became more careful. More protective. At times, more doctrinal. It served us well for many years. Today, some of those same families no longer quite hear themselves in our public accent. I think there is something worth listening to in that.

Not because multiculturalism has failed, but because people are responding to an “accent” that has become familiar across government. It is not unique to multiculturalism. It is one of the consequences of success. As policies mature, they accumulate institutions, professional language and habits of speaking that gradually become further removed from the experiences that first gave them life.

Some have argued that multiculturalism has become a loaded political term, even an extreme one. I don't think multiculturalism has become extreme. I agree that its public accent has changed. In becoming an established area of public policy, it has gradually acquired the institutional language of government itself.

In that respect, multiculturalism is not unique. Across many areas of public policy, people have become wary of what they experience as a more doctrinal, less flexible public accent. Some of the families and communities that built multiculturalism no longer quite hear themselves in a multicultural landscape framed only by government policy.

I agree with part of the diagnosis. I disagree with the treatment. The answer is not to abandon multiculturalism. It is to recover it.

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That also means listening differently to its critics. Some criticism is undoubtedly shaped by racism. Australia has never escaped that history and those memories still find political expression. Yet not every criticism comes from the same place. Some people are responding to something else entirely. They no longer hear the egalitarian spirit that many migrants recognised in multiculturalism. They hear an institutional voice that seems increasingly distant from everyday life.

They, too, are speaking from memory, even if they would never describe it that way. Perhaps the more important question is not who is right, but whose memories are shaping the language we are using. If multiculturalism is a relationship between many memories, then what we are trying to recover is the capability to live well with those relationships.

Culture is not a doctrine. It is many memories held in relationship. Multiculturalism is the capability of living well with those relationships. That is why I welcomed Defence Minister Richard Marles' description of multiculturalism as a national capability, even while disagreeing with broader aspects of Defence policy.

I don't think Defence discovered something new. I think it recognised something that multicultural communities have been quietly building for more than 40 years. The significance of that recognition, however, reaches well beyond Defence. Closing the door on a good idea because you don't like the colour the house is painted is not how multiculturalism achieved its success

Every institution sees the world through its own responsibilities. Defence thinks about security because it must. Health thinks about health. Housing thinks about housing. Education thinks about schools. None of that is a criticism. It is simply how institutions work. The multicultural sector exists for a different reason.

Our work has never belonged to one portfolio because relationships do not belong to one portfolio. The trust built between communities, the translation between cultures, the ability to live with different histories without requiring one memory to erase another — these are capabilities that every institution depends upon, but none can produce on its own. That places a responsibility on us as a sector to recover what made multiculturalism necessary.

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Institutions like Defence cannot simply leave a thought bubble like multicultural capability undefined. They will interpret it through the language available to them. If the multicultural sector becomes reluctant to examine itself simply because it fears helping its critics, government will still need advice and use the doctrines even our own communities find frustrating.

That is not because governments are acting in bad faith. It is because governments have to govern. The greater risk is our silence. If we stop exploring multicultural capability beyond what we think we already know, others will define the future for us. We cannot let that happen simply because we are afraid of self-criticism.

Defence is simply the most visible example today because strategic change has made the need obvious. Tomorrow it may be aged care, disability, housing or education. Each will understand multicultural capability through its own institutional mission. Each will capture part of our memories. None will capture its full richness.

There is a consequence to leaving this work undone. Some multicultural voters are already drifting toward parties that trade in racism, not because they have forgotten what racism looks like, but because they remember it precisely. They know that life sometimes requires difficult practical choices and that survival has never been a morally tidy business.

If we can only hear that vote as betrayal, or assume multicultural Australians are politically predictable, we may be demonstrating the very deafness they are voting against.

Recovering multiculturalism is therefore not an exercise in nostalgia. It is the work of recovering our confidence to interpret the capabilities our communities have spent four decades building. That confidence has always been one of multiculturalism's greatest strengths. I think it is time we trusted it again.

Carl Gopalkrishnan is an Australian artist and policy practitioner with long-standing experience in multicultural policy, social cohesion and community engagement.