Does Multiculturalism Inhibit Intercultural Dialogue? Evidence from the Antipodes

In recent years, an international debate has erupted over whether and how interculturalism differs from multiculturalism as a response to cultural diversity. An influential argument in this debate is that multiculturalism itself militates against intercultural dialogue. This article scrutinises this argument and challenge its applicability in the Australian context. I examine two case studies of fraught intercultural dialogue: the 2006 clash between the Howard government and the Ethnic Communities’ Council of Victoria over the proposed introduction of a citizenship test; and the Abbott government’s proposed reform of the anti-vilification provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975 (Cth) during 2013–14. The cases suggest that far from undermining intercultural dialogue, respecting the terms of Australian multiculturalism would help to make it possible. Moreover, the cases suggest that if pursued genuinely, intercultural dialogue could contribute improved policy outcomes.1 1This article is a revised version of Geoffrey Brahm Levey (2017) ‘Intercultural dialogue under a multiculturalism regime: pitfalls and possibilities in Australia’ in Fethi Mansouri (ed) Interculturalism at the crossroads: comparative perspectives on concepts, policies and practice, United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, France, pp. 103-2

Secularism as proto-multiculturalism : the case of Australia

Institutionally and culturally, Australia bridges Britain and the United States, the Old and New Worlds. Its federal parliamentary democracy borrowed aspects from both Westminster and Washington. Yet, Australia rejected both England’s established church and the US’s ‘high wall of separation’ between church and state. Australia is often compared with the US and Canada as one of the great immigrant democracies. Like Canada, it adopted multiculturalism as state policy in the 1970s. Yet, it more closely resembles many European countries and perhaps even Québec in the precedence it grants to the established (Anglo-Australian) majority culture. Australia thus combines Old and New World patterns and concerns, offering a unique vantage point on the governance of religious diversity in relation to secularism. We are accustomed to thinking that political secularism and multiculturalism – arguably, the two greatest liberal responses to religious and cultural diversity – press in opposite directions. Whereas secularism separates state and religion, multiculturalism involves the state affirmation of cultural identity. Australia presents a case where these two models genuinely complement and indeed begin to merge into each other. Indeed, I argue that Australian multiculturalism extended the approach to diversity already established by Australia’s version of secularism. However, secularism and multiculturalism in Australia face a common challenge from attempts to reassert national identity. Perhaps unexpectedly for the twenty-first century, religion has become the favored vehicle for this reassertion. The paper begins with some remarks on the constitutional context and the operative political culture. The second section discusses the place of religion in multicultural Australia. The third section canvasses how religion has been reasserted in recent years as a trope for reinforcing Anglo-Australian institutions and culture as the core of Australian national identity. The paper concludes by identifying some of the key challenges these dynamics pose for Australians

The antidote of multiculturalism

A cruel irony has marked recent Australian social policy. Reconciliation between indigenous and settler Australians –which involves a concept and a process that are essentially symbolic – was made "practical", limited to policies aimed at improving Aboriginal living conditions that the government should have been pursuing anyway. At the same time, multiculturalism – a set of practical policies aimed variously at improving the absorption of migrants and harmoniously integrating a culturally iverse society around liberal democratic values – has come to acquire powerful symbolic significance in debates about what it means to be Australian. Indeed, so laced with symbolism has “multiculturalism” become that the Howard government is now considering its own symbolic gesture of simply removing the word from governmental use