Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
oversee the implementation of arts policies and express an ‘Australian identity’, but the presence of migrant communities within this expression was missing (Blonski 1992, p. 3).
A positive move occurred in 1975 when Grassby initiated SBS – the world’s first station to develop multicultural public service broadcasting (Ang et al. 2008, p. 4). SBS was designed to provide important government information to migrants in their own languages (pp. 9–10). Nevertheless, the artistic work of migrant communities remained cut-off from institutionalised art practice and policy. By the end of the 1970s, the Australia Council was under attack for the lack of support it offered ethnic artists (Blonski 1992, pp. 2–3). These artists were ‘challenging the notion of a universal aesthetic and demanding a renegotiation of what constituted “Australian” art, “ethnic art” or indeed, the very use of the designation “ethnic”’ (p. 3). The council thus began to adjust and the 1980s saw what Ang et al. (2008, p. 19) describe as an ethno-multiculturalism in the arts: a focus on ‘catering to the special needs and interests of migrants and ethnic communities’.
This ethno-multicultural mode of arts management and practice was mirrored in national policy at large, as Australia moved into a model of multiculturalism that Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2011, p. 150) term the ‘cultural pluralist model’. The Fraser Liberal government of 1975–82 continued the work started by Labor in the early 1970s and in 1977 institutionalised multiculturalism as an official national policy. It commissioned two reports in 1977 – the Australian Ethnic Affairs Council’s (AEAC) Australia as a Multicultural Society and the Galbally Report. Based on the reports’ recommendations, the Fraser government extended the notion of multiculturalism from a minority-needs basis to a more overt recognition that cultural diversity was both implicit in and valuable to Australian culture. The AEAC report concluded rather ambitiously that ‘Australia should be working towards […] not a oneness, but a unity, not a similarity, but a composite, not a melting pot but a voluntary bond of dissimilar people sharing a common political and institutional structure’ (1977, cited in Jupp 2007a, p. 83). This period thus saw greater institutional recognition of ethnic rights and representation, so that cultural diversity was not simply acknowledged as existing in Australia, but as being valuable and in need of integration into systems and organisations (Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 150).
Working towards such an ambition was, however, slow going, with relatively few programmes implemented to specifically address the report’s principles of plural composition (Jupp 2007a; Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, pp. 150–51). In the first instance, funding was siphoned off to ethnic advisory organisations who could help provide resources and assistance to specific ethnic groups. Ultimately, the management of multiculturalism continued to be structured by a centralised white Anglo-Celtic value system. Ethnic boards were appointed but always reported to the white managerial centre, rather than being actively involved within it (Jupp 2007a, p. 43; Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, pp. 150–51). Moreover, it was argued that this model of multiculturalism neither practically managed the various differences it aimed to consolidate nor allowed for an accommodation of those differences that people wanted to maintain as distinct. Indeed, arguments abounded about the entrenched racism of the policy, with some claiming that multiculturalism was a neocolonialist system, the contemporary version of Australia’s assimilation or White Australia Policy (Armitage 1995; Ashcroft et al. 1998, p. 163). Multiculturalism was seen to welcome difference so long as such difference was prepared to change, or ‘melt in’ to, the dominant, white culture. In other words, if said difference was prepared to be less different.
These debates were on the priority list of Paul Keating’s agenda when he was elected as the new Labor prime minister in 1990. This election foresaw a new era in Australian politics and a new deployment of ‘cultural diversity’ (Ang 2001, p. 153). Renewed policies and initiatives were established that encouraged the celebration of difference as opposed to the maintenance of a unified identity.
Once again, the use of cultural difference in this manner was evidenced clearly in the arts, a long-time contributor to renegotiations of race, ethnicity and the white-European canon of modernity. The Australia Council Multicultural Advisory Committee – initiated and chaired by cultural theorist Sneja Gunew – attempted to move away from an arts movement that had remained in the 1989 Arts for a Multicultural Australia Policy about ‘social harmony’ and ‘unity’ towards an openness to diversity and fragmentation (Blonski 1992, p. 10). Such work greatly contributed to research and policy directives that critically engaged multiculturalism and the arts. At the end of the 1980s, the notion that Australians should celebrate cultural diversity and work from models of pluralism rather than commonality became popular and prevailed into the 1990s (Ang et al. 2008, p. 20). This period is thus described by Ien Ang et al. as one of ‘cosmopolitan multiculturalism’ – a time which encouraged Australians of all backgrounds to embrace a ‘global cultural diversity’ (ibid.).
Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos (2011, p. 151) define this third model of Australian multiculturalism as the ‘universal rights model’, in which the historic linking of ethnicity with citizenship becomes systemically abandoned. The Labor Party’s National Agenda of the 1980s reframed ethnicity as one of several choices for Australian citizens, thereby generalising service delivery to all citizens, regardless of their ethnicity. Simultaneously, ethnic community organisations and boards were co-opted into amorphous State services, leading to their depoliticisation (Jupp 2002 and Castels 2000, cited in Nicolacopoulos and Vassilacopoulos 2011, p. 151). A range of arts programmes and initiatives were (and continue to be) implemented under the banner of cultural diversity. At a governmental level, however, the cosmopolitan period of multiculturalism was short-lived.
The election of the conservative Howard Liberal government in 1996 foresaw a renewed assimilationist discourse and an overall retraction of multiculturalism from the national narrative. For Prime Minister John Howard, multiculturalism was less important than ‘One Australia’. This conception of Australia acknowledged that Australians came from various parts of the world, but required a fervent loyalty to Australian ‘institutions […] values and […] traditions’, in a way that transcended ‘loyalty to any other set of values’ (Howard 1999, cited in Jupp 2007a, p. 106). Multicultural policies established during this period focused on security, border control and ‘appropriate levels’ of immigration; proposals based on diverse rights and pluralist values were often not endorsed (Koleth 2010, p. 13).
The common public sentiment of this time was that Australia had been too lax and too embracing and was now ‘paying the price’ in the form of a loss of Australian values. Indeed, for those Australians Hage (1998, p. 189) labels as ‘Hansonites’ – supporters of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party2 – there wasn’t so much a fear that Australians were losing control of their nation to ‘foreigners’ as there was a fear that they had already lost control. This concern was exacerbated in the early years of the twenty-first century. During this time, terrorist attacks in the United States, London, Bali and Spain and an increase in asylum-seeker arrivals and crimes by so-called ethnic gangs provided props for validating the government’s position, namely, to proceed with caution with regard to Australia’s ethnic constitution (see Poynting et al. 2004). These mainstream reactions were mirrored in the United Kingdom and other Western European countries (see Vertovec and Wessendorf 2010; Nayak 2017), evincing a type of ‘emotional geopolitics’ (Pain 2009, cited in Nayak 2017, p. 297) that defied national borders.
The return of Labor to power in 2007 brought about the possibility of change in this area. However, under the leadership of Kevin Rudd (2007–10), Julia Gillard (2010–13) and Rudd once more (June 2013–September 2013), multiculturalism was politically managed in more or less the same way as the previous Liberal government. The Gillard Labor government reinstated multiculturalism in its immigration policy portfolio in 2011 and expressed a much greater affiliation with ‘multicultural Australia’ than Howard. But while this government’s approach to multiculturalism softened in some ways, it remained aggressive in many others and tended to mirror the discursive tone of Howard. In particular, it echoed Howard’s suspicion of non-white Australians, and his nationalistic emphasis on a united, patriotic nation,