Australia’s Multiculturalism – Success or Not?

The idea of multiculturalism has always been connected to immigration in Australia, but is not necessarily that. Australians of both immigrant and indigenous heritage have embraced the idea of a multicultural Australia. But others see it as dividing people into ethnic sub-divisions where their Australian identity is muted. Parnell McGuinness is a writer and thought leadership consultant. On Tuesday 9 March 2016, Parnell McGuinness joined Dr Sev Ozdowski AM from the University of Western Sydney and Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane to reflect on the success or otherwise of Australia’s multiculturalism.

AUSTRALIA’S MULTICULTURALISM – SUCCESS OR NOT?

PARNELL PALME MCGUINNESS

Is multiculturalism in Australia a success? I’m afraid not. But we have a very successful model of multiracialism that we often refer to as multiculturalism.

The discussion is hampered by the fact that the meaning of “multiculturalism” is contested. To some it means a society in which all cultures are valued equally, a very poorly thought-through concept. Australian policymakers have nudged it towards a meaning that suits them better :[i] the department of immigration uses it to mean diversity under a leitkultur.

Tonight I will argue that if multiculturalism is a success in Australia, it is due to the latter definition and that, insofar as it is not a success, it is due to the former.

What is a leitkultur?

Author and academic Bassam Tibi proposed in 1998 that Europe should adopt a clear leitkultur, or lead culture, based on western values[ii]. By western values, he meant human rights, secularism, civil society; the fruits of the Enlightenment. He emphasised the importance of upholding these values in the face of “multicultural relativism” which was incapable of resisting the “influx of undemocratic and fundamentalist forces”. In Germany, where his book was first published, this notion was pilloried by many and became associated with nationalism and anti-immigration sentiment.

But in Australia, policy makers have adopted the concept, though it is not expressed in so many words. Australia has an enviable leitkultur. We are peaceful, tolerant and democratic. We are also, to our great credit, egalitarian. These are magnificent qualities, of which we should be proud. Our values, and the prosperous and free society which they have engendered, are also the reason why new immigrants continue to seek us out.

Happily, Australian immigration policy is based around upholding the leitkultur concept within the give-and-take of immigration. But, like Europe, we are often hampered by the guilt we feel over our imperfect origins in defending the values that make us what we are today. Instead, we often need to be told by outsiders that what we have is worth fighting for.

It is significant that immigrants are often the first to wring their hands over new waves of immigration, especially from their cultures of origin. They fear that what they have left behind will follow them to the better place they have arrived at. Tibi is himself a Syrian-born immigrant to Germany, and one of many immigrants who are despairing over Angela Merkel’s open door policy.

What else makes immigration work?

Simply defining a leitkultur is of no use unless it is somehow enforced and upheld.

Selection for skills and character is generally considered key to the success of Australia’s multicultural experience. In his 2010 book, Germany Abolishing Itself, German politician Thilo Sarrazin proposes that a delay on immigrants accessing social security also has a key role to play. I propose that there are a third and fourth reason for the success of multiracial coexistence in Australia: the difficulty of obtaining entry and a high bar of expectation.

Australia has practiced selective migration since the 1830s, when skilled tradesmen and wealthy individuals were the explicit target of immigration schemes[iii]. We continue to do so, selecting immigrants who are of working age, possess skills required in the Australian economy, speak adequate English and profess to share our values. Only partial exceptions to these criteria are made for refugees, who need not speak English yet or address a skills need, but are subject to character tests. For stability and humanitarian reasons, immigration permissions are extended judiciously to immediate family[iv], but not automatic or unconditional.

As immigrants with good communication skills and economic prospects are naturally more likely to thrive in their new country, the contribution of selective immigration to the success of an immigration nation is clear.

Social security restrictions

Australia’s rules around access to social security are more generous than those of some other countries, for instance the USA. Nonetheless, there is a two-year minimum wait before a new immigrant can receive social security from the Australian government.

Contrast this with Germany, where, as Sarrazin says, “anyone who can enter…and achieve a legal status” can receive an income without working that “far exceeds what he earned in his country of origin”[v]. The problem, in Sarrazin’s eyes, is that, “immigrants to Germany are provided for – regardless of their own capacity or willingness to work”. He goes on to point out that, in the USA where it takes five years to qualify for benefits, 77 per cent of immigrants feel that they are “comfortable” or “part of the community” in under five years of arriving, with only 5 per cent saying they’ve never felt at home; by contrast, 58 per cent of immigrants of Turkish descent in Germany say that they don’t feel welcome and 78 per cent said that they don’t feel that Angela Merkel is their leader.

Sarrazin draws the conclusion that only those immigrants who believe they can achieve something, move to the USA (or Canada or Australia, which also have restrictions on welfare access). And those that then succeed in integrating themselves and making a go of it – “at whatever social level” – feel pride and gratitude to the society, which has given them that opportunity.

Difficulty: we value what we earn

While both of these arguments are persuasive, I am struck by the readiness with which people who would usually distrust the omniscience of bureaucrats accept that they are able to see into the hearts and minds of strangers from another culture.

I would therefore suggest that the real reason for the effectiveness of selective immigration rests heavily on the second factor, “effort and achievement”. The truism that we don’t value what we don’t have to work hard for might offer a clue to the effectiveness of immigration criteria. In this case, having to navigate layers of bureaucracy and, in the process, familiarise oneself with the laws and customs of the land, as well as demonstrating competency within the language, might contribute materially to the “sunk costs”, or psychological investment, in the new country, which causes people to feel from the outset that they have obtained something worth having

Finally, though it’s often taboo, it is relevant to mention the behavioural bar on immigrants.

The Australian government made a great show last year of revoking the visas of non-citizen immigrants who had broken the law, including New Zealanders. This seems harsh to many Australians, but the message arrived at its intended audience, the non-citizen population of Australia, loud and clear: you are here on sufferance; you had better behave.

In Germany, the bar was much lower until just a few months ago. Before the New Year sex attacks in Cologne, the law in Germany was that legal immigrants could not be deported unless they were sentenced to a crime carrying a sentence of greater than three years. Combined with Germany’s sentencing doctrine which prefers non-custodial remediation[vi] over incarceration, the bar for deportation was very high and hence the bar for behaviour was set low.

Does that mean that multiculturalism has succeeded in Australia?

Despite the strength of the Australian model of multiple ethnicities living within a leitkultur, the Australian experience has not been unequivocally positive.

There are inevitably difficulties for any immigrant settling in and large intakes of homogeneous groups have caused pockets of trouble. Nor have we entirely avoided cultural ghettos and welfare dependency, both of which are often attributable to the inward focus of women in cultures which discourage work outside the home.

We are all familiar with the case of the Lebanese refugee intake under Prime Minister Fraser, in which the selective process broke down, delivering to us a large number of migrants who might have been filtered out under the character requirements later enforced. This intake is often used as an example of bad immigration practice and the need for selective immigration. But even the subsequently enforced robust filtering process has not prevented the Vietnamese crime gangs of Cabramatta, the Sudanese troubles in Victoria or the ongoing tensions around Muslim communities.

The separatism championed by “multiculturalism” rather than the reality of multiple ethnicities, has often exacerbated these issues.

In his essay “The case against Multi-culturalism” for the 1982 volume, The New Conservatism in Australia, Frank Knopfelmacher argued that “mismanaged ethnicity, rather than class war, is the major curse of the [20^th] century”.

Knopfelmacher, a Jewish refugee of the Holocaust, thundered against those who “favoured the fragmentation of the political and cultural unity of Australia’s anglomorph culture into diverse groupings, based on ethnicity, in the name of multi-culturalism”, because “the practical alternatives to assimilation are ghettoisation, apartheid, with all its attendant misfortunes of ethnically fixed systems of disprivilege, and eventually civil war”.

Just to be clear, because those who argue the case of assimilation are often accused of it, Knopfelmacher was no racist. He believed that “the best and, indeed, the only way of overcoming non-anglomorph ethnocentrism is by a liberal policy of absolutely open access to all levels of Australian society”. But racism, he contended, “will not be discouraged by unintelligent defamation of Australia’s proper pride in its British-Irish ‘heritage’.”

Knopfelmacher deplored the “multi-cultural gimmicks” which may “accentuate and overdramatise ‘otherness’ among anglomorphs and ethnics alike, and actually hinder politically effective but financially much more expensive ways of improving an ethnic’s lot, such as the provision of appropriate education for high achievement in anglomorph society”.

Where Knopfelmacher got it wrong, is that we have managed to find much more expensive ways of achieving the same poor outcomes. We have provided appropriate education for low achievement[vii] by channelling funds to corrupt school boards[viii].

But while Knopfelmacher’s fears that multiculturalism would be a cheap gimmick were unfounded, his concern that it might accentuate and overdramatise otherness have been vindicated. The celebration of a separatist vision of multiculturalism has put one section of Australia on a direct collision course with the leitkultur concept which Australia’s multi-racial success is based on.

Germany, in rejecting the leitkultur concept, has suffered

Bassam Tibi denies that his leitkultur thesis was based on the German experience and insists that his argument is for all of Europe.

But the terrible problem of Turkish ghettos in Germany arising from a deliberate choice not to assimilate the guest workers brought in to rebuild Germany after WWII is a case study in the failure of separatist multiculturalism. Here an underclass has developed, of an ethnic group functionally illiterate in two languages and entirely unable to help themselves out of the trap which cultural relativists and welfare generosity has lowered them into. It is a sad example of what Martin Luther King Jnr called the “soft bigotry of low expectations”, echoed across the banlieus of France and Belgium.

As the example of Europe makes clear, big picture values alignment is essential to the success of a social grouping. The “ism” tacked onto the multicultural descriptive is used to mean that we must insist on our cultural differences rather than seeking a common ground. But while diversity of experience and perspective within a group is enriching, dogmatic preservation of parallel cultures is unconstructive and ultimately corrosive.

For the same amount of time that multiculturalism has been used to justify cultural separatism, business has been developing a theory of cultural fit. Recently, perhaps in the face of increasing workforce diversity due to globalisation, the theory has become intensely fashionable.

The arguments in favour of cultural fit in the workplace would horrify many if they were expressed by a politician. And yet, precisely because business has been developing and articulating the theory well away from the pious and poisonous battle fields of the culture wars, they shine a useful light on the issue.

The theory of cultural fit

A recent article on HBR.org (the online publishing platform of the venerable Havard Business Review) described cultural fit as “the likelihood that someone will reflect and/or be able to adapt to the core beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors that make up your organisation”[ix].

The author points to a 2005 analysis from the University of Iowa, which revealed that “employees who fit well with their organisation, co-workers, and supervisor had greater job satisfaction, were more likely to remain with their organisation, and showed superior job performance”. She addresses a common criticism of cultural fit, that it can lead to discrimination against candidates and a lack of diversity, arguing that hiring for a “key organisational value” does not exclude candidates from diverse backgrounds, that is, not only “people who come from one particular background or have one particular set of experiences” will hold certain values.

The article concludes that, if you hire for cultural fit, “you will hire professionals who will flourish in their new roles, drive long-term growth and success for your organisation”.

It’s important to note that hiring for “cultural fit” is as much about the success and happiness of the individual as the success and growth of the organisation. Transpose this argument onto the multiculturalism debate and you have the clearest non-ideological argument you will hear in favour of “recruiting” only immigrants who will subscribe to the leitkultur, regardless of the diversity of their background, the colour of their skin or the religion they practice.

A successful immigration nation needs to be sure enough of its own values to define and uphold a leitkultur, to which immigrants are expected to subscribe.

Australia’s multicultural success is based around the idea that the rights and opportunities extended to immigrants of all kinds are coupled with responsibilities. As Germany’s contrasting experience shows, lowering the bar of expectations set for immigrants does not increase their gratitude to the host country, and the satisfaction they find living in it, but lowers it.

We, in turn, as a wealthy and safe country, have a responsibility to both humanitarian and economic refugees. Paramount to meeting this responsibility is preserving the leitkultur, which offers protection against persecution, tolerance and the opportunity of prosperity. The better we do on this front, the more refugees of all kinds we will be able to offer safe haven and opportunity in a prosperous Australia.

The ideology of multiculturalism is a failure because it works against this goal. If we need to bin multiculturalism to uphold our large and successful immigration program, we should be prepared to do so.

Endnotes

[i] https://www.dss.gov.au/our-responsibilities/settlement-and-multicultural-affairs/programs-policy/a-multicultural-australia/national-agenda-for-a-multicultural-australia/what-is-multiculturalism

[ii] http://www.nbc-pfalz.de/pdf/religionen/tibi_multikultureller-werterelativismus.pdf

[iii]https://www.uws.edu.au/equity_diversity/equity_and_diversity/tools_and_resources/reportsandpubs/australian_multiculturalism_the_roots_of_its_success

[iv]http://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp1314/FamilyMigration

[v] Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland schafft sich ab (translations mine)

[vi] http://weblaw.haifa.ac.il/he/Events/Punishment/Documents/Hans-Joerg%20Albrecht.pdf

[vii] Only about half of the students at Fadkh Islamic College achieved their HSC

[viii] http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/education/afic-chief-faces-expulsion-over-schools-crisis/news-story/680c2c4da9ab097bd7f5cfa3dd3649ac

[ix] https://hbr.org/2015/07/recruiting-for-cultural-fit