Tolerance Is A Fragile Flower

by Jim Forrest - Sydney Morning Herald

Recent events in Sydney have done little to enhance Australia's reputation as a tolerant and successful multicultural society. Instead, they highlight the existence of tensions between British-Australians ("Anglos") and those from non-English-speaking backgrounds, at all levels of society.

Tensions between assimilation, or conformity to the dominant - Anglo - ethnoculture, and multiculturalism, or promotion of ethnic diversity, have been an important part of national debate since the ending of the White Australia Policy in the early 1970s.

Under multiculturalism, the Anglo population has faced dilemmas about maintaining a national identity they largely shaped. State support for a culturally diverse immigration program has, since the 1980s, tended to generate a "discourse of decline" among a large cross-section of the Anglo population.

An inevitable backlash took two main forms. One was Pauline Hanson's One Nation party. One Nation associated Asian immigration with multiculturalism as a harbinger of social conflict and division which, says a 1998 policy statement, "if continued as it is, will lead to an ethnically divided Australia". The other was the election of a Coalition Government under John Howard in 1996.

Howard did not initially favour multiculturalism, although he later accepted it as a means of retaining "common values". A National Multicultural Advisory Council, reporting in 1999, developed a new form of Australian multiculturalism, defining the nation's British and Irish heritage as the foundation on which Australian multiculturalism is built. Effectively, assimilation was reasserted, replacing the multicultural policies of the previous Keating and Hawke governments.

Keating argued that Australian society was being fundamentally reshaped by ethnic diversity. Howard, then Opposition leader, was very critical of this position, arguing that multiculturalism benefited only special interest (ethnically based) groups.

The effect of the new policy initiatives was to produce a decline in the level of concern for multicultural values. Instead, there was a resurgence of notions of "out-groups", those which are seen as not fitting into Anglo views of national identity and nation building.

Out-groups have been part of the Australian scene since the relative decline of the British and Irish immigrant stream in the late 1940s. In fact, of course, each new wave of immigrants was initially disparaged by those which preceded them, by host society members and earlier immigrant arrivals alike.

In the 1950s and 1960s, Italians and Greeks were seen as other, identifiably different and set apart from the Anglo majority. A 1989 Australian National University study, by Ian McAllister and Rhonda Moore, provided a ranking of ethnic immigrant groups as socially distant from the host Australian population. Most distant were Muslims, then refugee groups from Vietnam and Lebanon, Asians generally, then Greeks and Italians and, least socially distant, British immigrants. In short, the social distancing of Muslims long preceded September 11, 2001, and the war on terrorism.

A later survey by human geographers James Forrest and Kevin Dunn in 2001 confirmed the status of Muslims as the main out-group, with Aborigines and Asians less distant, then Italian and British immigrants only minimally distant.

In the recent battles to reclaim "our" beaches, the main protagonists were white Anglos and Australians "of Middle Eastern appearance" (code for Lebanese-Australians). But the majority of Sydney's Lebanese (57 per cent) are Christians, most of whom arrived in the 1960s and 1970s.

The arrival of Lebanese Muslims has been spread fairly evenly over the past 40 years. Most Lebanese-Australians have occupations which are scarcely different from those of the Australian-born. However, a difference is the very high (about 20 per cent) unemployment rate among Lebanese Muslims. This economic imperative represents a major social issue for the community, and for state and federal governments.

Tolerance is a fragile flower. From the Forrest-Dunn survey, 83 per cent of respondents agreed there is racial prejudice in Australia, and 85 per cent supported multiculturalism. This compares with 75 per cent and 80 per cent in a recent Herald Poll.

These findings seem inconsistent, but they are not. One view expresses a concern. The other indicates a consensus about how to deal with the problem.

Looking ahead, in Queensland, the State Government introduced Local Area Multicultural Partnerships programs to encourage multicultural development in areas of tension. This could apply to Sydney, where overt racism is most prevalent.

We need tolerance-building among Anglo and non-Anglo groups. The aim must be to create a new Australian identity and a new multicultural nation which does not separate people into Anglo and hyphenated Australians.


Jim Forrest is associate professor in human geography at Macquarie University.