Tag: australia

Race Gender and Public Policy: the struggle over the meaning of meaning

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Paper given at the Festschrift for Prof Devleena Ghosh

University of Technology Sydney

24 November 2023

Abstract: A fierce debate is growing about how to describe and intervene on issues associated with the measurement of cultural diversity and “race”. This paper explores the interests promoting various “takes” on the issue, in the lead-up to determine what questions will be asked in the 2026 Australian Census. Gender, differing colonial histories, and the varieties of lived “realities” of  prejudice and discrimination underpin the passionate but competing perspectives. In the wake of the 1950s decision of UNESCO to abandon “race” as an anthropological concept, and the late 1960s  Australian government decision to abandon “Race” as a statistical category, a battle  emerges for the heart of “woke”.

Bio: Andrew Jakubowicz, emeritus Professor of Sociology at UTS, provides consultant sociology services to clients in government and community sectors. Over the past three years he has been involved with the Disability Royal Commission, Waverley Council, the Vaccine Task Force CALD advisory committee, Sydney Multicultural Community Services, and the Commonwealth Multicultural Framework Review. HIs recent publications include Multicultural Arc (SMCS 2023) available through sydneymcs.org.au.

Celebrating Devleena Ghosh

When Devleena joined UTS in January 1997, a decade after my move from Wollongong University, the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences as an organisation, was still very much what it had been for decades, a centre for White people talking about marginalised groups, of whom few were in evidence inside the tent.  Most organisations spend a lot of time reproducing themselves, distrusting those from outside their own bubble, to their own detriment. The Council of UTS is a prime example, with only the elected student or staff members occasionally reflecting the cultural and ethnic diversity of the university community. Having proposed during my time on the Council (which finished in 2016) that this issue be recognised and addressed, I note that nothing has been done through many cycles of appointments since that time. I am not surprised though I am disappointed by this resistance to change, though it helps illuminate why Devleena has been such an important part of the Faculty.

Devleena brought three important personal and intellectual qualities to the Faculty, helping to transform it in the longer term. As someone who came from a formerly colonised society she was aware of and sensitive to the impact of colonialism on the political, social and cultural development of societies and their citizens. Arriving in Australia from India in her young adult years she had experienced and was acutely aware of how Australia’s self-denying racism permeated the social space. As a feminist she framed her research through the grid of gender, interrogating the world by always asking how gendered relations of power revealed themselves in socio-political conflict.

These three intertwined sensibilities form the basis for my exploration today of one of the more fascinating moments in the contemporary woke wonderland. It is important as always to set context, and to specify the parameters at play.

In 2026 Australia is due for its next Census. As part of that process the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has been canvassing stakeholder views of what data might be better collected, and how this might best be acquired – conceptually and in terms of specific questions to be asked. The outcome of this process will be declared on 12 December, and unfortunately I am not privy to the decision. While there are issues around the recording of gender identity, my focus is on what until 1971 was known as the “Race” question.

For seventy years “Race” was a central concern of the Australian Government, its focus on racial sterilization a dominant part of its nation-building priorities. As with all its former colonies, Britain ceded to Australia a racialised social order, sustained inter alia by an administrative statistics apparatus in which Race played a critical part. While the First Nations suffered their own particular terrors under the White Australia colonising project, people of colour within the country and those trying to enter also faced systematic attention.

The recent referendum has revealed how the lingering mind-sets of the initial project find recurrent expression in the political moments that, as we have seen discussed, either were or were not about Race. In short the anti-referendum proponents argued that race is not in the constitution and recognising first nations would insert and solidify it there, when in fact we are “all equal”. Many pro-referendum proponents argued that the issue was not about race, but rather about ab-originality, that is the rights for recognition of the Indigenous peoples who were present in place and in control prior to the constitution that removed them.

While “race” is widely used in our political discourse, it has not been clearly defined in Australia. The Race powers in the Constitution (51 (xvii)), namely to make laws in relation to “the people of any race for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws”, does not define “race”, though prior to the 1967 referendum, did include the words “other than the aboriginal race“.

Australia signed up to the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) in 1966. Prompted by the massacres in Soweto of indigenous Africans protesting against Apartheid, and in the wake of the US Civil Rights Act, the Convention put into effect the 1963 UN Declaration against racism. However it also does not define race, using it rather to round out the protected categories of colour, descent, national and ethnic origin – suggesting that race is something other than what is covered by these terms. Racial discrimination can occur against people on the basis of any or some of these group descriptors.  The analysis critiques racialisation of people as part of a process through which discrimination, exploitation and subjugation (together or singly producing oppression), are implemented.

In its 1966 opening statement the UN asserts that “any doctrine of superiority based on racial differentiation is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous, and that there is no justification for racial discrimination, in theory or in practice, anywhere”. That is, the process of racialisation has no scientific justification, has no moral basis and generates social injustice. But what counts as “racialisation”? Is it the use of race categories to distinguish between peoples only in order to discriminate, so that the naming of races and allocating people to them per se, even if anthropologically outdated, is not problematic? Are races real and if so, in what way? Or is it only the process (wrongly) of claiming that races are real rather than imaginary and socially constituted categories, that generates a political problem?

A personal example if I may. I am the child of Ashkenazi Jews from Poland who made it to Australia as almost the sole family survivors of the Holocaust during Nazi invasion and occupation. If the Nazis had caught them (as they did my father’s parents) they would have been annihilated. However they made it in 1939 to Lithuania where their Polish passports were replaced by identity papers over-stamped to prove authenticity by the British Embassy. The documents noted their nationality (Polish) and their religion (Mosaic) despite them being non-believers. Soon after their arrival there, the two allied but soon to be warring empires just to the South, Nazi Germany and the USSR, declared the Polish nation extinct. To the Nazis they were now members of a race (Juden) to be exterminated, while to the Soviets they were potential members of a national minority (Jews) separate from the Polish ethnic groups who were being forcibly absorbed into the extended Byelorussian SSR. The USSR let them out because they were Jewish, their exodus supported by global Jewish organisations, until they were trapped in Japan. For the Japanese their Jewish religion was fairly much unimportant though their ethnicity or participation in a global diaspora would have been more useful; their nationality as Polish mattered because despite the destruction of the Polish state in 1939, a Polish embassy continued to operate in Tokyo until July 1941. In coming to Australia in 1946, my family’s  designation as Jewish was important as an ethno-religious category and their Polish national identity also helped. After 1948 their Jewish identity line would however have served to prevent their entry to Australia, as new laws limited the number of Jews on a ship as they had Chinese in the previous century. How does all this work? My typical Ashkenazi DNA has similarities in part with the ancient inhabitants of Iberia and in part with inhabitants of Palestine, though the admixture is uniquely “Jewish”. But I look like an old White guy suffused with white privilege and the category of Other for all those protesting that #BlackLivesMatter. What is my race?

It was only in 1971, on the brow of multiculturalism that Australia abandoned the official concept of race – with the Australian Bureau of Statistics noting in its report of the 1966 Census results (the last time Race appears) that

the use of self-enumeration methods in Australian censuses has repeatedly produced problems….[due to] the inability of most people to readily identify themselves with a particular race defined in ethnic terms. [Even so the Census instructed people to] state each person’s race. For persons of European race, wherever born, write “European”,… Otherwise state whether Aboriginal, Chinese, Indian, Japanese etc., as the case may be. If of more than one race, give particulars, for example ½ European-1/2 Aboriginal, ¾ Aboriginal-1/4 Chinese … (O’Neill, 1966)

The results of this enumeration were then tabulated into one of two races or racial groups, “European” or “non-European”. To be European one had to be more than half “European blood”, while people with more than two racial ancestries were described as “mixed blood”.

The 1966 Census also provides a table of races from 1933 to 1966, with all Europeans placed in a single category, one which included all Australians of European descent. The non-Europeans consist of “Australian Aborigine” half castes (about half the numbers of all remaining males and three quarters of females) and small numbers of other races – though the definition melds country of birth, ethnicity, and ancestry, producing races such as “Asiatic Jew”, “Negro” and “Indefinite”.   Given that the Nazis described Jews as an Asiatic race, it was quite confusing, though Jews could pass as European in Australia for a while.

From 1971, following Australia’s accession to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (ICERD)(1966) and the referendum on recognising Aboriginal citizenship through their removal as a  constitutional exemption to the wide Race power (1967), the approach was modified to retain a question about Indigenous status, while asking an ancestry question (self-identified) rather than one requiring a racial self-identification. An alternative focus on criteria such as country of birth, language spoken at home, and competence in spoken English was seen as more scientific while being less socially dangerous and threatening to harmony. Race and colour were effectively removed from Australian statistical discourses on population diversity at that time. Racism however remained and remains an omnipresent element in Australian society, widely recognised as such. However official data makes it almost impossible to generate a statistical picture of how racism works.

The 1975 the Racial Discrimination Act also does not define “race” though the process of oppression based on racialisation seems to be the point of the law, not race as an objective scientific concept. The Human Rights Commission describes the law as promoting “equality before the law for all people regardless of race, colour or national or ethnic origin. It is unlawful to discrimination against people on the basis of race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin.”  Religion is not included and religious discrimination has been a problematic interface, and remains so. However my mob, the Jews, are deemed to be covered by the RDA, though Muslims are not. So we are carrying the continuing imprint of the Nazi use of race to define us as a group, transposed into our own consciousness and Australian law.

The Galbally Report of 1978 describes ethnicity as a concept the attributes of which are culture and race. Culture it defined by drawing on Taylor’s 1911 book Primitive Cultures, as that “complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs, and any other capabilities acquired …as a member of society”. The concept of race the Report states “is clear”, which of course it is not. If Galbally in 1978 uses a definition of culture going back to 1911, then that was a period when race was understood through a classification system of the races including “Caucasoid”, “Mongoloid”, “Capoid” , “Negroid”, and “Australoid” (Harman, 1987), suggesting “colour” (White, Yellow, Black, Brown, Red).

As the multicultural debate developed in the mid 1980s, the ABS established an advisory committee on ethnicity, which drew out what it identified as the subjective and objective dimensions of the social realities. W.D.Borrie who chaired the group, was a demographer at the ANU well known for his work on migration. The subjective element reflected the ways in which people identified themselves, while the “objective” referred to groups characterised by a range of shared qualities – including a shared experience which was memorialised in the culture, sustained cultural and religious traditions, a common geographic origin (at some point prior to the diaspora), a language and literature, a sense of minority status, and being “racially conspicuous”. 

It is not clear what makes people racially conspicuous, though it would presumably relate to some physiognomic features. The merriam-webster dictionary defines “conspicuous” as obvious to the eye or mind, attracting attention, or “marked by a noticeable violation of good taste”. Conspicuousness therefore lies in the eye of the beholder, suggesting race is a quality of the viewer’s interpretive framework, rather than an essence of the person being viewed. Leaving the philosophical quibbling aside, ultimately the committee argued that ethnicity could involve ancestry, personal identity and group recognition.

By the time ABS was ready to move forward, the 1996 Census had passed, and the Government had changed from ALP to Coalition. It was now led by the man who on 2 November 2023 said he always ”had trouble” with the concept of multiculturalism (https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/nov/02/john-howard-multiculturalism-comments-alliance-for-responsible-citizenship-conference-london). While his goal was the closure of the multicultural agenda, in the time remaining the head of the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multicultural and Population Research Dr Bill Cope, pressed ahead with a revamping of the data priorities of the “ethnicity” area.

It was in this context in 1999 that the ministers of multicultural affairs or similar agreed that the new framework would be called “cultural and linguistic diversity” (shortened colloquially but never officially to CALD), with four core criteria, and an additional five features collected on the Census. A “race” criterion survived, framed as Indigenous or non-Indigenous (though as the Referendum debate exposed, Indigeneity may or may not be considered a “race” concept). The remaining core categories were country of birth, proficiency in English, and language used at home. There are no “colour” proxies, with only Ancestry providing a potential insight into the “race” issue from the additional questions. 

The previous single factor label of non-English speaking background (NESB) had been deemed discriminatory and confusing. CALD as its replacement was to face further criticism especially from African and Asian perspectives, which were concerned that it avoided “race”, by linking together many groups that shared nothing other than not being White or English-speaking Australians.

Also “Ancestry” dealt with the past – so what of ongoing ethnic diversity? Or identity? What of identities that were “civilisational” rather than national or linguistic? Asian Australians who were uncomfortable about reasserting a racial identity gravitated towards argument that a voluntary self-identification with an ethnicity should be part of the Census, with a revised Australian Standard Classification of Ethnic Groups providing the framework. African Australians who spoke fluent English or came from English-speaking countries were less drawn to linguistic categorisation, and more concerned to confront racializing barriers.

The Diversity Council of Australia has become the most ardent advocate for the use of “race” as a concept in understanding and resisting discrimination. While “racism” and “race hate” have been well-tested though also contested in Australian political life (as through the attempts to modify the hate speech provisions of the RDA a decade ago), the DCA call to name racism has heightened another dimension of the issue (https://mailchi.mp/dca/inclusion-matters-enewsletter-715084?e=eefcb4569d). In its 2022 Racism at Work report (https://www.dca.org.au/research/racism-at-work?utm_source=DCA+Updates&utm_campaign=f812f704d0-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2023_07_12_05_41_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-9b648390fd-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D) the DCA and its partners sought to increase racial diversity in the workplace. Racism is produced in a process of racialisation – which is understood as a process of marginalisation. While race is not defined, race is exemplified: marginalisation means racialisation as non-white, where examples are “Black, Brown, Asian or any other non-white group … who face marginalisation due to their race”. “Culturally” is added because culture may extend discrimination already present due to race and/or religion.

While I understand the DCA argument in relation to the othering produced through “racialisation”, what are we to make of the recognition that it is actions that occur by others as a consequence of racialisation that need to be addressed? Racialisation occurs “in response to people’s arbitrary physical characteristics” as well as accent, language, name, religion, and clothing (clearly all cultural). Race references “colour” as well as geographic origin (though Asia is a European concept). Suddenly we are back in 1911, well before the UNESCO debates of the 1950s and 1960s, and the Australian decision to do away with race as a meaningful (or even comprehensible) social concept over fifty years ago. As Amrita Mahli noted last year, race categories do not reflect the natural world, rather they help create social divisions (https://theconversation.com/should-the-census-ask-about-race-its-not-a-simple-question-and-may-reinforce-racial-thinking-185295).

This may all appear a rather woke exercise in navel gazing if it did not have two consequences. Just before the election the now Immigration Minister Andrew Giles voiced his concern about the lack of adequate data about race during the pandemic, which led to racist targeting of some communities through serious inequities in attitudes of surveillance and security authorities, the health and social care provided, and mortality/morbidity among different “races”. Giles has instituted a “data framework review” within his Department, which seems to have slowed down (partly as key staff in his office are engaged with the fall-out from the Israel-Hamas conflict).

Giles had excluded data (and research) from the much more public and full-steam multicultural framework review (MFR); the MFR has commissioned from me its own external report on research strategy and institutions, which has been asked to reflect on the data question and its importance in developing a national multicultural research plan. The research report went to the MFR in mid-October and the report of the MFR is to go to the Minister any time now.  The Review and the Ministerial response will be public in March 2024, as will its research chapter based on the commissioned submission.

The second consequence lies in how the broader public policy discourse will be reshaped by the campaign developing through the DCA. By reintroducing and asserting “race” and limiting marginalisation to a cultural frame, while specifically excluding language diversity, a whole range of major policy questions are diminished in importance. In the language patch alone emerging questions about how cultures are sustained through language, the importance of ancestral language learning for inter-generational cohesion and the survival of primarily oral languages, and the critical role of literacy in accessing accurate and comprehensible information in this time of digitally mobilised pandemics, require a recognition of both linguistic diversity and linguistic marginalisation. In 1911 the Census asked people whose first language was not English whether they were literate in any other language – this concern for literacy has been expunged from current data sets for at least quarter of a century. During COVID,  data available to community health teams was based on a question about the proficiency in spoken English (so not literacy) and the “use” of other languages at home ( no question of literacy).

As we meet today to celebrate the career and contribution of Professor Ghosh, I am reminded of our many engagements over the years around issues of imperialism, colonialism, racism and sexism. I can feel her presence in my interrogations of the questions I have been pursuing in recent years, as the diasporas from outside European imperial metropolises surge forward into the fabric of contemporary Australia. The agendas continue to be transformed as new perspectives and pressing priorities outweigh those of earlier generations, where the demanding hashtag of #BlackLivesMatter requires a sustained and effective response that doesn’t by accident (or worse than that, by design) hurl us back into a time when the five races of 1911 and the hierarchy of global power they sustained once more shape the edges of identity and conflict.

Is it multiculturalism for all Australians or just some of them (us) (you)?

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

The Multicultural Framework Review was launched on Friday evening, June 2. It raises the question, is multicultural policy something that should be “for all Australians” as was declared in 1982, (http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/auscouncilpop_1.pdf)  or just to ensure, as the announcement of the Review put it in February  “no one is left behind, and everyone feels that they truly belong”( https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/reports-and-publications/submissions-and-discussion-papers/multicultural-framework-review ) ? The Albanese government’s Multicultural Framework Review, shepherded by Immigration and Multicultural Minister Andrew Giles,  has possibly been set the more modest goal, despite a recognition by one of its panelists, Melbourne lawyer Nyadol Nyuon, that the original multicultural policy developed fifty years ago by the ALP’s Immigration Minister Al Grassby “had a far-sighted vision of what this country could become”.

The government has identified the triggers for the review – “nine shameful years of fear-mongering and division… failures to translate vital health information during the pandemic, and government support and grant programs inaccessible to emerging migrant groups”.

The revised Terms of Reference (https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/about-us/our-portfolios/multicultural-affairs/multicultural-framework-review note that the Review is designed to help ensure a government that works for a multicultural Australia. While it eschews a human rights perspective it does identify discrimination, systemic barriers and gender intersectionality.

While the ALP won the 2022 election with seats gained by “multicultural Australian” candidates, it also lost the most multicultural electorate of Fowler to a local candidate Dai Le who campaigned successfully against the marginalisation and abandonment of those multicultural voters during the pandemic and the parachuting in of a White candidate. With the opening up of borders and the resurgence of the issues raised by immigration, multicultural policy is once more critical to wider social well-being.

Over the past decade perhaps the biggest sleeper issue has been the massive increase in extremely insecure temporary migration, sometimes used as a subterranean route to permanent settlement. However public policy has assumed that “temporary” means “not requiring support”, so the level of services – from housing to transport to education to employment protection to health – have not factored in these supposedly temporary but very real residents. They were the ones most abandoned during the pandemic, when they were told simply to “go home” or to survive on the streets. Now they’re coming back.

There are three broadly intertwining spheres of policy that require major refreshing – multicultural policy (including language policy, intercultural relations, cultural recognition, employment policy), settlement policy (focused on new arrivals both refugees and others, including trauma recovery), and community relations (covering discrimination, anti-racism, diaspora continuity and social integration, and the all-important dimension of settler-Indigenous relations).  These are serious dimensions of governance that have been left to decay for the past generation, including during the ALP inter-regnum from 2007 to 2013.

Multicultural policy reached its apogee in 1989, with the Hawke government’s National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia. It began to decline under PM Keating who did not implement key elements of the policy. It was picked apart by PM Howard for whom multiculturalism was an anathema. Most of the damage done by Howard has been let lie.

In order to see what was lost and what now might be worth reclaiming, we can identify the targets of the Howard attack. While driven by the 1984 Blainey critique of Asian immigration and the 1988 Fitzgerald review of immigration and multiculturalism (Fitzgerald was a fervid but not successful opponent of the multicultural agenda under Hawke), the accelerator for the bonfire came from the impact of Pauline Hanson on the conservative parties in 1996.

Howard’s most critical move was the effective abolition of the Office of Multicultural Affairs, the co-ordinating policy section in Prime Minister and Cabinet. This was closely followed by the closure of the empirically-focussed Bureau for Immigration Multicultural and Population Research, condemning policy for the next generation to hyperbole based on prejudice, ignorance and ideology. In the wash the National Language Policy also dissolved, reducing the bilingual capacity of the country for decades to come. Keating had already given up on any attempt to introduce a Multicultural Act as in Canada, focusing instead on Access and Equity in government, while deeding the country the fairly toothless Racial Hatred amendments to the Race Discrimination Act (so called 18C).

How open is the the power hierarchy in Australia to non-European Australians? Addressing this issue remains a major challenge – best seen in the make-up of the High Court, the members of the Board of the ABC, the Vice Chancellors of the Universities, and the Boards of the major ASX companies (https://apo.org.au/node/140206).  

The Review will consider the Commonwealth’s activities and will be able to make recommendations on legislation, policy settings, community relations, and government services including state and local. Importantly it will consider the role of the Commonwealth as an employer, as recent studies have pointed to the under-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse groups in government at both Commonwealth and state levels. Better put, well-paid White monoglots run the services in the broad, and non-White multiglots deliver them – in greater proportions the lower the pay levels.

Unfortunately the Review is not asked to take notice of the poor state of Australia’s data on diversity and its appalling consequences, most significantly in the pandemic https://johnmenadue.com/a-tale-of-two-cities-same-pandemic/  and https://theconversation.com/we-need-to-collect-ethnicity-data-during-covid-testing-if-were-to-get-on-top-of-sydneys-outbreak-164783)but also today in terms of mortality from COVID, now particularly destructive among older “multicultural Australians”.  Neither is it asked to consider how to rebuild the depleted state of Australian research in the area, a central recommendation (at page 123) of the last ALP-led parliamentary committee review of multicultural policies in 2013(https://www.aph.gov.au/parliamentary_business/committees/house_of_representatives_committees?url=mig/multiculturalism/report.htm)  (and totally rejected by the incoming Abbott government).

The Panel chair Dr Bulent Hass Dellal, is well-blooded in these debates. He has held to a sensible course as a government advisor throughout the Abbott/Turnbull/Morrison period, and also has the confidence of the new government. Interestingly Giles has chosen two Victorians and a Queenslander for his team, leaving NSW to two people on the Reference group, with someone from Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia.

There are no First Nations people, or people with mixed First Nations and non-Anglo heritage, though they will be invited to contribute their perspectives. As the Voice debate has shown,  multicultural Australia wants to engage with the Indigenous peoples (https://theconversation.com/will-multicultural-australians-support-the-voice-the-success-of-the-referendum-may-hinge-on-it-199304) .

The government has appointed no academic researchers to either the panel or the reference group, though Queensland’s Christine Castley is a former Deputy Director General of Premier and Cabinet, a Board member of the University of Queensland Institute for Social Science Research, and currently CEO of Multicultural Australia, a service delivery conglomerate heavily funded by the government.

From the perspective of Australia’s knowledge communities (identified in the Review as experts to be consulted) with an interest in cultural and linguistic diversity, and what the Diversity Council of Australia now refers to as “racialised marginalisation”, the commencement of the Review is disappointing. The absence of issues about data (which are currently focussing the minds of the Australian Bureau of Statistics in preparation for the next Census (https://consult.abs.gov.au/census/2026-census-topic-consultation/) ), the complete exclusion of the research structure issues, and the small passageway left open for consideration of an Australian Multicultural Act (one is already on the Senate table from the Greens dating back to 2017) and agency associated with the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, are not comforting signs of recognition of the scope that needs to be addressed.

Most unfortunately this Review is being sponsored by a junior Home Affairs Minister. In previous times multicultural policy was thought important enough to have the support and imprimatur of the Prime Minister – be it Malcolm Fraser or Bob Hawke. Not so now.

The Degradation of Data in Multicultural Australia

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ 1 Comment

The Degradation of Data: why Australia knows so little about its multicultural realities


Submission to the Multicultural Framework Review Draft Terms of Reference.

Andrew Jakubowicz PhD FRSN FASSA

Emeritus Professor of Sociology
University of Technology Sydney

Consultant Sociologist

3 March 2023

Context

As the Draft Terms make clear, it has been many years since Australia’s institutional capabilities in relation to multicultural policy have been reassessed. The Framework Review is thus a welcome initiative. As a scholar of and participant in the development of multicultural Australia since the 1970s (initially as a member of the NSW Migrant Task Force reporting to Immigration Minister Grassby) I recognise that there are many issues that will need to be addressed. However not all of these have been identified in the draft Terms of Reference, most importantly the critical role that will be played by evidence-based policy which depends on well-considered structures of data collection, analysis and application which is totally missing leaving the Terms seriously flawed.

Current Challenges in the Data field

Over the past three years as the COVID pandemic has affected Australian society, it has become clear that the knowledge base associated with multiculturalism is seriously degraded and operating with declining effectiveness; scholars in the field have long known this, identifying its inception to the closure in 1996/97 by the incoming Howard government of all the key knowledge and policy institutions created out of the 1978 Galbally review (eg Office for Multicultural Affairs, Bureau of Immigration, Population and Multicultural Research).

My comments are derived from my history of research while an academic, and my recent professional engagements as:

  • Member Commonwealth Department of Health and Ageing advisory group on COVID and CaLD communities (especially Data working group)
  • Analyst Vaccination Task Force, Commonwealth Dept of Health and Ageing
  • Senior Advisor Cultural and Linguistic Diversity, Royal Commission on Disability
  • Lead consultant Waverley Council (NSW) Cultural Diversity Policy and Plan
  • Consultant Sydney Migrant Services:  Report on Multiculturalism and the Community: looking back and looking forward
  • Author on politics of multicultural communities The Conversation (475000 reads)

There are at least four reasons for this failure in relation to Knowledge Data and Evidence that are apparent to me as a sociologist concerned with this issue. I submit that these dimensions should be addressed as part of the terms of reference.

  1. The concept of Cultural and Linguistic Diversity (CaLD) has underpinned data collection policies of Australian governments since 1999. It was designed to replace the term “non-English speaking background” which had become common after the ABS retired the concept of “Race” after the 1966 Census.  In detail,  CaLD requires four different criteria in its simplest form – born overseas in a non-English speaking country, speaking a language other than English at home, level of proficiency in English, and Australian Indigenous status. However it is rarely applied in totality leading to many mistakes in policy and practice – for instance the NDIA only discovered in September 2021 that its CaLD data included about 20% of people who were Australian indigenous language speakers and who were double counted.  Moreover the emphasis on intersectionality identified in many recent government policy papers appears totally missing from the Terms of Reference.

  2. The Racialisation of Australian policy language in the wake of Black Lives Matter has revealed other data problems. The current Terms document talks of “second generation plus migrants”, which is extremely confusing in its application, let alone what assumed model of society underpins it. It may refer to ongoing racist responses in society to inherited physiognomy, or the continuation of cultural practices brought by the migrant generation which are sustained by their descendants (eg dance, dress, language or religion), or contradictory identities experienced by descendants of immigrants, or many other possibilities. Recently the Diversity Council of Australia has promoted the idea of cultural and racial marginalisation, abandoning linguistic diversity as an issue (or implying it is included in culture where relevant). Unlike other comparable societies, Australia has no data marker for race, a consequence of a decision after signing on to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Racism in 1966 to accept the UNESCO directive to remove “race” as a social descriptor. “Australia uses “racism” in many contexts but it has never been defined, not even in the Racial Discrimination Act. The Review should address and seek to resolve this issue.

  3. Governments are apparently apprehensive about what the data would show in relation to inequities in the health and other social systems; they have no communication strategy to manage their fears and so lock down even the collection of “dangerous” data. Throughout the COVID pandemic, governments have been reluctant to use the CaLD core data points in assessing the testing, infection, morbidity and mortality of the virus on communities. Mortality data are only available far after the date on which the deaths occurred yet even so have revealed massive inequities with high multiples of deaths among first generation migrants compared to the general population. Fierce resistance by the NSW government to collecting data on language spoken by people being tested resulted in much greater infection and morbidity than might otherwise have been the case, despite pilot work in Victoria demonstrating the effectiveness of using this data to identify priority groups for contact who had low testing numbers. The dynamics of this problem, replicated in all states except Victoria (though not used, thus having the same negative outcomes) and recognised and implemented by the Commonwealth only late in the day, was revealed by the extraordinary progress made once vaccination started and the vaccination data could be enhanced by correlations with the CaLD data in the 2016 Census under the MADIP program. The AIHW used a similar approach in its latest report on chronic illnesses and CaLD health. This situation of government data hesitancy should be a matter of priority for the Review as it is the best documented expression of the degradation of data and the conscious refusal by government to collect and use data that would have had major health benefits to Australia’s multicultural communities. The situation continues, with COVID deaths currently heavily concentrated in migrant elderly cohorts, without public recognition or apparent government concern.

    4. While the Review purports to reference a national multicultural framework, it does not identify the roles of state, territory and local government as requiring specific attention. The data problem is magnified by the different attention and interest of these many spheres of government in ensuring the effective collection and application of data, and their orientation to the empowerment of multicultural communities in the conversations with government and their agencies. Having seen first-hand what the confusion, tension and impact of these un-coordinated spheres has proven to be, with destructive consequences for the well-being of communities, especially their most vulnerable members, it is imperative that the Review identify, explore and address these issues.

Summary of additional proposed inclusions

The Terms unfortunately contain confusing and limited perspectives on the issues that should be addressed. In our 2013 chapter in “For Those Who’ve Come Across the Seas…: Australian Multicultural Theory, Policy and Practice” on the still outstanding issues in multicultural Australia, Assoc Prof Chris Ho and I identified three broad issues –
·       the need for a reinvigorated and systematic Research framework and network to improve evidence, data and build deeper and inclusive knowledge,
·       a process that deals with Representation in its two meanings of political voice and socio-cultural presence, and
·       Recognition of the multicultural realities through legislative and institutional reform, including engagement with intersectionality (gender, age, sexuality, disability, social class, locality) .

The current Terms reflect some of the second two ideas, though in a far too limited and confusing way.  No reference to Research, data or evidence- based policy appears in discussion or  in the Draft Terms. While there has been a hint in pre-Election statements by the minister that this Data issue might be addressed in a separate exercise, without this Term being incorporated into the heartland of the review process, the Framework Review will most probably fail the Australian people.

 

ENDS

 

Andrew Jakubowicz BA PhD FRSN FASSA

Emeritus Professor

School of Communication
Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
University of Technology Sydney
PO Box 123
Broadway NSW 2007
Australia
+61(0) 419801102
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Recent book: Cyber Racism and Community Resilience
Blog: Andrew Jakubowicz Sociologist
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Moving on from White Australia: Election 2022?

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Despite years of critique the Australian national parliament has been overwhelmingly White and massively male, unlike the country as a whole. But something changed at the 2022 election – most clearly around racism and sexism. How might this play out in the negotiations to come?

The Whitlam government supposedly ended the White Australia policy in 1973. For fifty years though, White Australia has hung on in the elite structures –Commonwealth cabinets, the High Court and the ABC Board as examples, even while changing at state and especially local levels. Prior to the 2019 election I argued that we would realise down the track that “Election 2019 was the last White Australia election, in which Euro-Australians dominated the parliamentary seats and both major party leaderships, and where xenophobia was the insistent leitmotif of the Right“. If this election marks an ending for White Australia we would expect to see change in voting, representation and policy.

Just before the election the BBC asked why the Australian Parliament was so White (and male). Sydney Policy Lab director Prof Tim Soutphomassane noted recently that “a celebration of cultural diversity has never been accompanied by a sharing of Anglo-Celtic institutional power”. Peter Khalil, an ALP MP , said in November last year that Australian politics was still swamped by an “Anglo Boys club”. Opting to describe himself as one of the 21% of the population who were NIPOCs (non-Indigenous people of colour) he reflected on years of racism and marginalisation he had experienced and witnessed inside the ALP and outside.

At the 2022 election the trajectories of change differed from each other along almost every conceivable parameter that was not old White male: middle aged well off White women took the elite Liberal urban seats from men. Younger people of colour, usually women, took many of the new Labor seats. Smart mainly young White people took the seats that were turning Green. White Australia was fragmenting along race and gender fault lines. The LNP was left with almost only older White guys in the House.

Voting

The election demonstrated the salience of specific ethnicity in contributing to voter-decisions in many seats, while the more general concern about rising racism played out for a more diverse electorate. “The Chinese vote” has been a focus for interest with many newspaper articles reflecting on the impact of the bellicose rhetoric of the LNP towards China and its impact on the “safety” that Chinese-ancestry voters felt with the conservatives. The Tally Room blog has argued that there was a significant shift towards the ALP (or better put, away from the Liberals) in electorates where the China-ancestry vote was significant. Where the opportunity existed for a potentially-successful Asian or Chinese candidate for the ALP, they were usually successful.

In Fowler, which is a very multicultural electorate with a large Vietnamese community (many with Chinese ethnicity) where the ALP ran the seemingly-resented candidate Kristina Keneally, the ALP vote dropped by nearly 19%. The local Independent Dai Le picked up all nearly all those previously ALP votes, while also taking nearly all the votes that left the Liberals (13%). The Senate vote in Fowler for the ALP also dropped significantly (8%) from 2019, while the Liberal vote rose slightly. In effect the ALP’s safest seat in NSW most likely cost the Party a secure majority.

The key electorates where an apparent anti-Liberal shift in the Chinese-ancestry vote was determinate included Bennelong, Reid and Parramatta in NSW, Chisholm, Higgins and Kooyong in Victoria, and Tangney in Western Australia (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/chinese-australian-vote-election-swing-labor/101091384). Some benfitted the ALP, some the Independents.

Representation

Peter Khalil (Wills, Vic) and Dr Anne Aly (Cowan, WA) had been fairly lonely non-European members of the ALP Caucus until the election. Aly (her origin is Egyptian Muslim) worked tirelessly during the long COVID lock-down in Perth to build opportunity for candidates of colour. In Perth Sam Lim (a Malaysian-Chinese immigrant) took Tangney with a 11% swing, building on his deep links with communities throughout Perth as a key police liaison person during the lockdown. Zaneta Mascarenhas, born in Kalgoorlie, whose parents arrived from Goa in 1979, took Swan with a 12% swing. Aly herself increased her vote in Cowan by nearly 10%.

In NSW the 9% first preference swing against Liberals in Bennelong was achieved by Jerome Laxale,the popular Labor mayor of Ryde, whose parents were Francophones from Mauritius and Le Reunion. He repeated the victory that Maxine McKew had achieved against John Howard in 2007, also with strong Chinese and Korean support. McKew though was another outsider Capatain’s pick, and could not hold the seat against John Alexander. Kristina Kenneally tried to take it as a Captain’s pick in a Section 44 by-election, but did not get that local support and failed. In Reid a popular local candidate, Sally Sitou, of Lao Chinese background, reclaimed the seat for the ALP with an 8% swing, on the base of very strong Chinese support.

In Victoria both seats that went to the ALP were won by “ethnic background” candidates. In Chisholm Greek-background Carlina Garland saw a 7% swing away from Gladys Liu, though only 4% went to the ALP. In Higgins Dr Michelle Anada-Rajah, a Tamil born in Sri Lanka, saw a 5% swing away from Liberal Dr Katie Allen bring her 3% of first preferences.

In summary of the ten or so seats the ALP won from the Liberals across the country, six were won by “ethnic candidates”, four of whom were people of colour. On the other hand the seven new “teal” seats, though all won by women, are all now represented by Euro-Australians (aka Whites). So how might this matter?

Policy

The ALP released its Election Statement on Multiculturalism under the names of Katy Gallagher (Finance) and Andrew Giles (Multicultural Affairs) two days before the vote and well after most of the pre-polls and postal votes had been cast. The Statement appears pulled out of the 2021 Multicultural Engagement Taskforce Report chaired by Peter Khalil. Two critical additions include a commitment to a Multicultural Framework Review, which will have to consider whether Australia should have a Multicultural Act (which is Green’s policy), and a re-assessment of the standards for measuring Australia’s diversity. The COVID pandemic and the failures to protect multicultural communities have foregrounded the urgencyof these issues .

It is unlikely the LNP or the Teals will have an interest in or an appetite for pushing these concerns to the top of the food chain. However the new ALP NIPOCs and the Independent Dai Le will have a major investment in exactly that dynamic, creating with Aly and Khalil a significant bloc. The new government’s best-known leaders are Albanese and Wong, two surnames drawn from the deep hinterland of multicultural Australia. Farewell White Australia?