Original paper prepared for the “A Beautiful Mosaic Multiculturalism Panel Discussion” with Prof Jocelyn Chey, Jing Han, Jackie Menzies and moderated by Dr Helen Vatsikopoulos.
University of Sydney 12 May 2026
A country in the middle of rewriting itself
Sixty years ago, Australia faced a realisation. With the departure of Robert Menzies as Prime Minister in 1966, the long era of the White Australia Policy began to unravel. Some prescient members of the political class — slowly, imperfectly, and not without resistance — began asking: what kind of country do we actually want to be?
Out of that reckoning came what we now call multicultural Australia. A social movement of everyday Australians from many backgrounds drove it. Policy followed. By the early 1990s, Australia had developed one of the most sophisticated frameworks for managing diversity in the democratic world.
But as with all significant change, there were equal and opposite reactions. The resistance never went away. And today — I want to argue — we may be at one of the lowest points of the multicultural project since it began.
From Hanson to Howard: the backlash takes shape
In 1996, Pauline Hanson entered federal parliament and immediately declared that Australia was ‘in danger of being swamped’ — first by Aboriginal Australians seeking rights, then by Asian immigration. It was inflammatory language, and it worked. Within months, one in five Australians were expressing views they had previously kept quiet.
Hanson had a sharp instinct about the political dynamics at play. She said to then-Prime Minister John Howard: ‘I merely inflame what you condone.’ It was one of the most penetrating political observations of the decade. Howard’s government, rather than confronting her racism directly, instead commissioned research on attitudes to diversity — as if the problem were uncertainty about public opinion rather than the mainstreaming of race hate.
I witnessed some of this first-hand. Just after the 1996 election, I was invited to Jakarta to speak for the Australia–Indonesia Foundation, on a topic that tells you something about how we were perceived: ‘Is Australia a racist nation?’ I went there to argue that we were a nation still in the process of deciding — that the script was not yet written.
Who gets to sit at the table?
My Indonesian respondent offered me an image I’ve never forgotten. He said that nation-building is like a room of scriptwriters around a table — drawing on the past but trying to fashion a better future. The question, he said, is: who is at the table? Do newcomers get to join in writing the script, or are they simply handed lines to perform?
Today we need to ask, if they are excluded from the table altogether — what then? Do they simply comply and do as they are told? Or do they find their own table, fashion their own scripts, and disengage from the broader society entirely?
That question is not merely rhetorical. It is the central practical challenge of any multicultural society. Inclusion is not sentimentality — it is how you hold a diverse society together. Exclusion creates the very fragmentation that critics of multiculturalism claim to fear.
The nadir: from framework review to social cohesion obsession
Two years ago there was genuine cause for optimism. The national Multicultural Framework Review recommended something ambitious: national legislation, a national commission, cross-government commitment, and — crucially — the opening of decision-making to new generations of diverse Australians. The government accepted it in principle.
That momentum has since stalled. What replaced it is a political fixation on ‘social cohesion’ — a concept that sounds benign but, as it is currently deployed, functions as a constraint rather than an aspiration. The appetite for structural change has dwindled to near nothing.
The Voice referendum showed us something uncomfortable. About 60% of Australians voted No — reversing what had been 60% support. In the space of a campaign, around one in five Australians moved from passive acceptance to active hostility. Their latent anxieties were identified, named and amplified. Their sleeping prejudices were expertly woken.
This is a fact we have to reckon with. Not as an inevitable truth about human nature, but as evidence of how vulnerable democratic consensus can be — and how deliberately it can be dismantled.
Empathy exists — but it is being misused
After the Hamas attack on Israel and the murders at Bondi, there was a genuine outpouring of grief and empathy from the Australian community. That matters. It tells us the capacity for inclusive concern is real and widespread.
But that empathy has been ideologically captured. It has been channelled not into a broader commitment to pluralism and dignity, but into a demand for social conformity — for everyone to fall in behind a version of ‘cohesion’ written by the most rigid and exclusionary elements of our political class. The suffering of one community has been instrumentalised to silence rather than strengthen the multicultural project.
We need to name that manoeuvre clearly. Genuine social cohesion is not enforced uniformity. It is the outcome of a society where people from different backgrounds genuinely feel they belong — where the scriptwriters’ table has enough chairs.
Now is the time — again
A decade ago, a social movement mobilised to defend the Racial Discrimination Act from attempts to gut it. It won. That kind of mobilisation is possible. It is needed again — not merely to defend what remains, but to advance what still needs to be built.
Three things matter most. First: a settlement program that genuinely integrates newcomers — not as passive recipients of charity, but as active participants in Australian life. Second: an honest recognition that cultural diversity, responsibly engaged, is a strength — not a threat to be managed. Third: investment in intercultural relationships that build collaboration and cooperation across communities, rather than suspicion and division.
None of this is utopian. It is what a serious liberal democracy owes its members. What we cannot afford is a politics that keeps some Australians permanently squeezed to the edges of the room — too far from the table to matter, too present to ignore.
The script is still being written. The question is who holds the pen.
Andrew Jakubowicz 