Mediating Multiculturalism. Daniella Trimboli
and Citizenship.3 Gillard also readopted many of the policies installed by the former government to manage asylum seekers and refugees.
The hostility of this anti-asylum-seeker discourse intensified following the successful leadership challenge by Kevin Rudd in the weeks before the 2013 Federal election. Moving to the opposition’s agenda of tighter border control and heightened nationalism, Rudd introduced the most severe asylum-seeker and refugee policies ever seen in Australia. These policies included navy interception of all boats, offshore processing and no chance of Australian settlement for any refugee arriving by boat. Shortly after, in September 2013, the Abbott Liberal party was elected to govern. It claimed that Labor had failed to keep Australia’s borders secure and, as such, began implementing severe policies that narrowed the scope of multiculturalism further still. A colonial narrative is evident in Abbott’s pre-election speech, which asked the Australian public to decide who was ‘more fair dinkum’, and declared:
The functions of government are to deliver a stronger economy, to provide national security, and to build a stronger and more cohesive society […] One thing that’s been most dismaying about the current government is their attempts to turn Australian against Australian […] it’s extraordinary that a government which has failed to stop people coming illegally to Australia by boat has tried consistently to demonise people coming to Australia legally and working and paying taxes from day one. You’ll never find this kind of divisiveness from me. I am proud of Australia as an immigrant society, I am proud of the fact that people from all over the world have come here not to change us but to join us […] [it] will increase under a Coalition government. (Abbott 2013; italics added)
Unsurprisingly, policies towards immigration and cultural diversity subsequently became more severe than critics of other conservative Australian governments could have anticipated (Grewcock 2014). Implicit in the border security rhetoric is a debasement of multiculturalism, which has only been further reaffirmed in the successive re-election of the Liberal government in the Federal elections of 2016 and 2019.
Cultural diversity and its critics: Two key approaches to the crisis of multiculturalism in the twenty-first century
Given the many forms of government changes and multicultural resistance and criticism, it is not surprising that multiculturalism is currently experiencing an existential crisis in Australia. This is evident beyond Australia, particularly in Anglo-settler colonies, but also in other parts of Europe, as Vertovec and Wessendorf (2010) meticulously demonstrate. Changes to the way identity was understood theoretically towards the end of the twentieth century made way for a reimagining of multiculturalism and ethnic rights, but whether this has helped or hindered the so-called multiculturalism crisis is debatable. In particular, the interpretation and deployment of identity categories such as ‘ethnicity’ became much more fragmented in the 1990s. Influenced by postmodern philosophers like Michel Foucault, Jean Baudrillard and Jacques Derrida, cultural critiques began to move from investigations of identity to an elevation of difference (Ang and St Louis 2005, p. 292). Attending to ‘ethnic needs’ at large was increasingly considered inadequate for negotiating the differences between ethnic communities in Western countries, its inadequacy exacerbated by the increasing mobility of people and information across the globe. These theoretical debates translated to new approaches to studies of multiculturalism.
The first approach to multiculturalism studies in the twenty-first century retains the celebratory component of liberal multiculturalism though the terminology shifts somewhat from notions of equality and ethnic needs to one of cultural diversity. The celebratory approach is common in education literature and is associated in many ways with Charles Taylor’s (1994) liberal multiculturalism and politics of recognition. Initially, the acknowledgement of diversity was an exciting shift in art and cultural politics, welcomed by those who felt rigid identity categories failed to acknowledge the variances and tensions within and across identities. However, the meaning and use of cultural diversity has more recently come under scrutiny. While there are useful dimensions to this approach, I argue that its vehement promotion of cultural difference can enable racialisation to continue, albeit in discreet ways. I thus join a range of cultural studies academics, cultural theorists, artists and art critics who see themselves at a critical cross-road, or on the crest of a third wave of critique regarding cultural diversity (Ang 2003; Cooper 2004; Ang and St Louis 2005; Beng-Huat 2005; Lowe 2005; Ang et al. 2008; Appignanesi 2010a; Fisher 2010; Ahmed 2012a,b; Idriss 2016).
The term ‘cultural diversity’ carries with it a range of definitions and interpretations, although it has, across these variances, some similarities. First, as Jean Fisher (2010, p. 61) notes, the term is always related to notions of social justice, acting as a site of debate in nations which have a legacy of ‘injustice, inequality and discrimination against minority groups’. This dynamic is certainly the case in Australia and the greater West, where the effects of imperialism and colonialism are redistributed through its institutions and systems of knowledge. Second, it carries with it a relation to agency, or the degree to which individuals are ‘free’ to act as ‘political and legal subjects’ in any given society (ibid.). Finally, the term ‘almost always implies a majority monoculture against which all else is “diverse”, predicated on an hypostatisation of cultural and ethnic (or other) differences’ (ibid.). This latter point is crucial because while diversity certainly has and can refer to a range of identity markers, its development in the West has been in reference to racial or ethnic markers of difference. It has, in this context, emerged in societies defined as being ethnically plural, or ‘multicultural’, in constituency. Fisher’s discussion is in relation to the UK context; however, it translates usefully to Australia. Ang and St Louis (2005, p. 296) explain how ethnic, linguistic and cultural differences become officially sanctioned by the Australian State through multiculturalism: ‘The celebration of cultural diversity […] is an article of faith in self-identified multicultural societies.’
To substantiate this concern, it is useful to explore how cultural diversity is represented in the arts environment, a significant contributor to the formation of multiculturalism in Australia and beyond. According to Aaron Seeto (2011, p. 28), cultural difference in Australian contemporary art has tended to be either overly determined or entirely absent. In many cases, cultural difference continues to be unrepresented, or if it is present, misrepresented, taken up according to certain rules, which are governed by the normativity of whiteness. This point is confirmed by the major report by Diversity Arts Australia (2019, p. 4) into cultural diversity, which concluded that ‘there is a significant under-representation of CALD [Culturally and Linguistically Diverse] people in leadership and decision-making roles in every area of the creative sector’. So, even though Australia is a diverse nation, and culturally diverse artists are high in number, the core of the arts industry is Anglo-Celtic.
Many art critics agree that this issue has emerged because the application of ‘cultural diversity’ in Western society has been of a reactionary nature, that is, a mere ‘tool’ or ‘sector’ of politics aimed to address the changing ethnic constituency of Western countries (Appignanesi 2010b, p. 5; Araeen 2010a, p. 44; Fisher 2010, p. 62). This reactionary application has meant, as Seeto (2011, p. 28) argues, that cultural diversity in Australian curatorship has taken up the somewhat empty multiculturalism rhetoric of needing to ‘“build bridges”, cross cultures and engage new audiences’. Ultimately, such rhetoric serves the dominant culture, which demands that the relevance of culturally diverse art be repeatedly elucidated.
Fisher (2010, p. 63) explains that this has the potential to place the artist in ‘a straightjacket of conformity that, on one hand, risks crippling artistic creativity, and on the other, confines them to a limited range of “thematic” shows and critical discourses’. Araeen takes up a similar argument with regard to liberal multiculturalism in Australia (2003) and the Western context at large (2010a). Although he acknowledges the success of younger generation artists as a result of multiculturalism, Araeen believes it has meant their work has come to represent a ‘cultural specificity’: ‘only meant for those who are considered “others”’. Consequently, this allows for ‘the colonialist separation between people based on racial or cultural difference’ to be ‘openly institutionalised and maintained’4