In August, the Albanese government released Towards Fairness: A Multicultural Australia For All, the new ‘framework’ document for multiculturalism and only the second reframing since the policy arose as the official approach in the 1960s. Two quotations, one from the Foreword, one from the Introduction, illustrate a new and distinctive approach. In the Foreword, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner June Oscar writes:
At heart, the concept of multiculturalism is not foreign to this great and expansive land. For 60,000 years … this continent has held the sovereignty of … language and kin groups … First Nations … the oldest and most intricate kinship system [that] can act as our foundation, scaffolding, and inspiration for a multicultural framework today.
The Section entitled ‘A multicultural framework for Australia’s changing population’ notes:
Communities across Australia conveyed to the Panel a strong desire for Australia’s diversity to be recognised and fully embraced, including through highlighting the significance of First Nations histories and integrating them into the education system for new arrivals in Australia. This emphasis on acknowledging and celebrating the cultures and languages of First Nations peoples is seen as essential for genuine reconciliation and the need to achieve equality for all, without which multiculturalism is incomplete. In short, the Panel witnessed a maturity and willingness in community and across the country to embrace a much more nuanced and sophisticated approach to multiculturalism as part of the Australian national identity, when compared to the approach reflected in current government policy, institutional arrangements and service delivery models.
This is presented as a bold approach, linking disparate parts of Australian life. In fact, it illustrates profound confusion and fuzziness about key aspects of Australian history. It attempts to collapse Indigenous history into a mishmash that supports strategies for ‘multiculturalism’, thus concealing the true meaning of multiculturalism’s recent emergence as a cultural strategy of a very different kind. As such, it manages to weaken the significance of Indigenous history for the social composition of Australia while also giving no meaning whatsoever to what it means to be a nation grounded in migration.
The citizens of the Australian state formed in 1901—which excluded the members of Indigenous cultures—have always taken migration for granted. This is not to suggest it was constructed in the first place as an explicit policy choice. Rather, it was a true and necessary assumption that followed from the state’s colonial formation. It did not require explicit spelling out. And while there are, no doubt, differences between the Anglo culture that grew out of early colonial times and the multicultures that came into being after the great expansion of population through migration that emerged post-Second World War, both share an orientation towards migration as a social logic. If this is obvious in the social formation after the Second World War, it is also unavoidable for any society that seeks to start again, treating all prior Indigenous cultures as unworthy of respect.
Most long-established cultures, including the ‘old world’ cultures of Europe and Asia, are not strongly oriented towards migration. This is because a social orientation to place and others is usually built up over time and then taken for granted. Settler-colonial countries are of a different order. They are a function of imperial history and imperial practices that take it for granted that cultural invasion is a right that then gains expression in the ‘innocent’ denial of the cultural other. When one lives within the social framework of such a setting, established relatively recently, there arises a social logic with multiple effects—such as a relatively weak dependence on the past as a guide for how to act, and a great reliance on the individual as a social actor, whose character and habits are not formed by the patterns and obligations created by growing up in societies founded on the bonds of kinship—as developed over many generations in one place, and in a relatively unchanging way of life. This loss creates the modern individual, capable of breaking kinship ties and habits with relative ease. Such a rupture is largely ignored in the discussion of modernity. But it is the foundation for an orientation to migration.
All the settler-colonial countries—Australia, the Americas, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand, Israel—are joined in this assumption about migration. Typically they ignore the claims of their Indigenous populations until they can no longer do so; Indigenous culture, grounded in place and generational relations, is substantially displaced and lowly regarded, or relegated to the category of the ‘exotic’. Often Indigenous peoples are subjected to destructive and dehumanising practices.
The culture of a population composed of migrants has basic differences from other cultures. It is typically more strongly based upon the individual—John Gray refers to the United States as the first culture/state based on individualist Enlightenment principles—and the consequent restless movement of the population is regarded as a good, although often with the implicit idea that the source of new arrivals will be an ethnically specific one. In such a context, individual life histories are relatively easily punctured by breaks, or what is sometimes called ‘starting again’. There is no larger cultural context that shapes and overdetermines how one lives over a lifetime, except for one orientation: openness towards social movement. The main aspect of these logics is that cultural development of any depth that requires time—generational time—is blocked by the disruption of the new. Cultures typified by movement tend to give less significance to the concerns of most historical cultures: the formative issues around birth, generational relationships, age and death expressed in ceremonies and customs central to social life, with everyday life being shaped around them and around questions of kin loyalty and conflict.
Consequently, in a new society created by migrants, existence in place loses much of its meaning, in the sense that such a society lacks a social ground of any depth. This may not seem plausible if we acknowledge that migrants often attempt to re-enact their cultures of origin in their new settings. However, if the aim is to fully re-create the original society, it becomes a flawed process and is never successful; it often turns into a relatively rigid and deadened form of the original, simply because living cultures are an interplay of the past and the present. While the present is never simply a copy of the world of the ancestor, the interplay is crucial. And an interplay composed of largely individual, rather than collective, memories with a few members in the present is a radically reductive form of cultural renewal. The point is that objectively speaking, migrants cannot bring their living cultures with them, only personal memories and various rituals and practices. Of course, these are important, but they are also necessarily limited. It is a traumatic and flawed process of personal development.
This is not to say that this is a simple black-and-white matter. Attempts at re-creation can come to life as it were, even forming a ground for the next generation. Without wishing to dismiss what is undoubtedly an achievement, there is no structural way to overcome the limits imposed on these efforts except via generational time.
The dilemma faced by migratory cultures, especially those based on the individual, is that they are—relatively speaking, and necessarily—shallow in terms of generational depth. This is nothing to do with individual intelligence or intention and everything to do with what is practically possible when relations are significantly attenuated. Such cultures can only offer shallow life meanings to their members. Assuming that individuals are formed by internalising their others, this shallowness is set in place socially and sustained institutionally by relatively weak generational relations.
However, it must be said that cultures with generational depth are not necessarily good. They can develop in various directions, and can, for example be the source of extraordinary levels of long-term prejudice: the scapegoating and stigmatising, of designated victims in villages and tribes, for example. There is no formula for avoiding such blind alleys. For people who are locked into such situations, like that which prevailed in parts of Europe at the end of the Second World War—of bitter, unending oppression and poverty—there is no doubt about the attraction of starting again. Settler societies can offer relaxed individualist havens which migrants find life-saving.
The impact of this attenuation can be modified by stabilisation over time as well as by the presence of significant individuals. But the point is that the lack of ancestors, absent yet real, is of underlying significance. Settings composed of institutions that suffer from this attenuation are open to immigration and emigration, with multiculturalism as a variation that relies on that same shallowness.
Nevertheless, the great relief that accompanies movement out of a particular cultural setting is no way to judge the effects of a new one. In fact, as numerous histories of Australian nineteenth-century arrival and development attest, it is the very sense of arrival and new possibility through which settler societies first of all deny many rights to Indigenous peoples. This denial is often concealed from view, even for their citizens. As regards scapegoating, cruelty and victimisation, such societies also situate their prejudices within the individual rather than any collectively shared entity. This allows an illusion of openness, which can fall apart when events stimulate social stress. The United States gives a clear example of this process in periods of social panic often associated with waves of religious upheaval, and, in living memory, periods where democratic processes metamorphosed into repressive regimentation as during the communist panics of the 1950s. If it is true that settler societies can be seen as a haven, they can also turn into their opposite.
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The period that gave birth to migrant cultures was modernity. This is the period that opened towards what came to be called the New World and typified by expansion based in the possibilities of enhanced technology evidenced by print, shipping, and in the nineteenth century the telegraph and railways. It enhanced the sense of a new setting with more open, individualist possibility.
The dominant feature of migratory cultures—relatively weak generational relations—has been taken to new heights with the emergence of social relations that do not rely upon generations at all. This is especially a feature of social relations today that are facilitated by technological extension. They allow an experimentation with social development that does away with generational social relations on a grand scale.
The perspective that Arena has been developing for over sixty years is based on the transformations set in place by the revolution of intellectual practice that emerged early in the twentieth century, in which intellectual practices intervened within capitalist production and began producing value independent of the working class. A massively expanded intellectual practice, in the form of science, also takes the characteristics we find in migratory cultures to a new level because it shifts the balance of social relations from predominantly the face-to-face—where the presence of the social other is a function of the system—towards social relations that are typified by social absence in which generational relations are disposed of. This is an outcome of the emerging means of social extension, based in technology that facilitates social relations where the other is not present. Print, the computer and social media tend to displace face-to-face relations with extended relations.
While social relations based in absence are hardly new, the generality of this development in human history that we see today is truly unprecedented; it is epochal. It is a combination of the rapid acceleration of change in the technology of social relations, via networked computing and Moore’s law, and its spread into every corner of the globe and social life. A development of pre-existing technologies, it is also a development beyond it. It is one that explores the possibility of going beyond culture grounded in place or the presence of others in predominantly face-to-face social relations. This is a step completely into the unknown: a step beyond how homo sapiens has previously always been formed. Sold to us as beneficial, taken by many as necessary, it has been radically un-thought-through in terms of its breaking out of the basic ‘envelope’ of human ways of living, as dictated by our evolution. In other words, the effects of migrant cultures are enormously enhanced when combined with this larger cultural revolution that increasingly shapes our world today. Migration and movement are supercharged beyond anything we have known, by volume and velocity.
It could be argued, of course, that this radical step is a justifiable revolution in social formation. However, there is no evidence that it has been thought through in terms of consequences, because there is no serious consideration of the implications of homo sapiens lacking a ground in the sensual world of others and tangible nature. This is truly a step outside of the evolutionary process as such, grounded as evolution is at all levels in an interplay between the new and the conserving past, as argued by Lynn Margulis in her work on biological evolution. Generational relations have the effect of grounding people in a taken-for-granted, tangible world. This process has historically been crucial for the formation of homo sapiens, and the onus is on radicals who dismiss this core element of social formation to propose alternatives that achieve this effect. There are probably none. There is no reason to believe that social formation within relations devoid of the face-to-face is sustainable over time, and every reason to believe it will produce monsters who lack rounded senses and deep feeling for others.
In other words, the effects of migrant cultures are enormously enhanced when combined with this larger cultural revolution that is increasingly shaping our world today.
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In Europe and the United States, migration has a definite history within the political realm. It is positively welcomed within the progressive emancipatory Left and usually given the opposite treatment by the Right. For some decades the Right has been split on this, with the forces of capital seeing short term advantage through an expanded workforce. The theme of defending existing culture—the culture of tradition—or re-creating a past culture has been especially attractive to sections of the Right, however, with some horrible outcomes that continue to mark our history.
Today we live in times of such upheaval that the simple left-right political division often does not particularly help in social analysis. Large sections of the Western working class have gone to the Right precisely because left-wing parties will not offer policies limiting immigration, or put in measures to stop the erosion of traditional cultural forms. Are such questions only to be raised by those on the Right?
At this time in Australia, migration is partly the cause of much pain, with no housing or stability for large segments of the population. The anti-migrant ethic in some circles is also often ugly and joined with an anti-refugee rhetoric. In part related to the COVID-19 pandemic, these reactions are also associated with a more general global reconstruction, in which the destruction of local economies by globalisation has systematically broken the attachment to place and others. The Left has for a long time tried to both maintain a radically pro-migration, anti-borders politics along with one that has incorporated the critiques of settler colonialism as to the radically illegitimate nature of the post-1788 state, wholly built on migration, and develop the ethos of mobility that underpins it. These would eventually come together in an absurdity—and that is the Multicultural Framework document—in which Indigeneity is held to be a form of multicultural existence. This, for Labor and the Left, is the ultimate cop-out on these difficult questions.
Migration is a profound cultural issue: one that bears on ways of life. Anyone who wants a genuine politics of real change in a settler-colonial society needs to turn Australia’s attitude to migration on its head. This must include real reductions in the entry of points-based economic migrants while at the same time significantly strengthening (within bounds) our capacity for generosity towards those in need. While I am certainly not suggesting that Australia should shut its doors to immigrants, there is a need for a more informed and mature debate about how to handle core cultural questions if we are to develop as a nation that respects others in the round. We must also mentally prepare for the unprecedented and long-term pressures for migration arising out of climate change, as large numbers of places, one by one, become unliveable. These are all extremely difficult matters to handle while retaining a proper regard for others. But that needs to be the core concern if we are to be responsible in the circumstances of our times. Labor’s Multicultural Framework document is the very opposite of that. It is a denial that there is any conflict or contradiction in our ways of thinking at all.