Will the new government make Australian Multicultural history?

Tired of watching organisations and communities attempt to patch up the gaps in settlement services, Sandra Elhelw Wright, CEO of the Settlement Council of Australia (SCOA), argues for a bold new vision for multicultural Australia.

I love having conversations with my elders in the multicultural space.

I came of age after the Whitlam government abolished the white Australia policy.

It was after the ‘Galbally’ report. This was a watershed moment in Australia’s history of multiculturalism. It led to the Fraser government formally conceding the right of individuals to hold onto their non-Anglo cultures, and establishing dedicated services and programs for migrants.

Slightly giving away my age, I also missed the Hawke Government’s introduction of an access and equity strategy that held government accountable for making sure all programs are accessible to migrants.

In the same way that when I’m at home I listen to my parents speaking with nostalgia about their lives back in Egypt, when I’m at work I often hear a nostalgia about these years of bipartisan progress on multiculturalism.

It’s sad to hear references to the ‘golden years’ or the ‘good old days.’ I don’t think migrants who came here imagined the next generation to experience less progress on multiculturalism than the last.

I am the generation that my elders thought this would all be (at least mostly) resolved for. I was supposed to be the generation that built on the reforms they drove.

Instead, I find myself working on patching up cracks in a structure that has been neglected and chipped away at for a long time by successive governments.

Multiculturalism has fallen out of favour as a guiding principle for how to respond to cultural diversity – the most current articulation of the Government’s official multicultural policy has been described as a ‘post-multiculturalism multicultural policy.’

Once upon a time, all Government departments had to answer to the Federal Government’s Access and Equity Policy and show how they were actively making their programs accessible. I haven’t heard a peep about the Access and Equity Policy in years.  

Whereas Australia’s federally funded settlement services were once available to all people of migrant backgrounds, their scope has narrowed in service of fiscal savings. Now, they are mostly associated with helping people who arrive as refugees, and only for their first five years after arrival.

We have a situation where most people migrating to Australia are neither given a crash course on how Australia works, nor have clear access to a service that might be able to point them in the right direction or help them get on their feet. This can have devastating consequences. One emerging example is increased vulnerability to scamming. Forthcoming research from The Settlement Council of Australia to investigate this issue revealed many stories from migrants who have been scammed, often with devastating impacts.

The answer is not necessarily to return to exactly what we had before. The Australia of today is no longer the Australia of Whitlam, Fraser or Hawke.

The Australia of today is implementing the Uluru Statement from the Heart, and the multiculturalism of tomorrow must centre the rightful place of this lands First Nations people.

The Australia of today does not have the kind of social mobility that allowed migrants to work in factories, and still buy homes and send their children to the best schools. Well-paying low-skilled jobs are increasingly hard to find. For those migrants who are skilled, working in their chosen profession requires navigating an ever more bureaucratic skills recognition system. For those who wish to become skilled, the cost of living is not forgiving for those working less so they can study.

The Australia of today is living in a world where more than 100 million people have been forcibly displaced, up from 40 million in 1991. We have a greater moral obligation to take forcibly displaced people than ever before.

The Australia of today knows better than to place people in a single box – whether that be based on their cultural background, gender, disability, class or other factors. The multiculturalism of tomorrow must be more intersectional than simply engaging with formal (often) male leaders of ethnic and religious community groups.

The latest census results show that increasingly, multiculturalism is mainstream in Australia. Today, almost a third of Australians were born overseas and almost half have a parent born overseas. Around a third of people are from the Pacific and 17 per cent have Asian ancestry. More than five million people in Australia speak a language other than English.

In our election platform, SCOA made some key asks that would see Australia better responding to our cultural diversity. We asked, among other things, that the incoming government:

• recognise settlement services (the services that support people of migrant and refugee background) as a critical pillar of Australia’s social service infrastructure similar to sectors such as disability services, housing, aged care, and others;

• expand and reform settlement services;

• ensure funding for settlement services matches current award level wages;

• embed specialist multicultural services and approaches across all aspects of social services.

I hope to see these asks come to fruition in the current term of government.

But more importantly I hope the government will revisit our multicultural policy, ensuring it is bold and fit for purpose. We do not have the right guiding framework to address our current demographic and social reality. We moved away from our early way of multiculturalism, rather than developing it along with the times, and we never replaced it with a useful alternative.

My generation is well overdue for the kind of visionary planning our elders saw. I hope this term of government will see us moving from patching up cracks, to being the architects of our own new ‘golden years’ of Australian multicultural history.