Liberal Party fails to recognize multiculturalism
The Liberal Party suffered a massive defeat in the federal election, with Leader Dutton losing the Dickson seat he held for 24 years. The Liberal Party elected Sussan Ley as leader and Ted O’Brien as deputy. Ted O’Brien, who has lived in Taiwan for many years to learn Chinese and managed his family’s business in China, is one of the few Liberal leaders who is familiar with Chinese culture. After his election, Ted said that the Liberal Party needed to renew itself and propose policies that would meet the needs of modern Australia, including rethinking its policies on youth, women, migrants and the environment, or else the Liberal Party would be unable to build a relationship with the Australian electorate and its survival would be in doubt.
The Labor Party, which aims to reform the society, regards migrants, especially those from poor countries, as a disadvantaged group. Therefore, the Labor Party’s policies occasionally help migrants to adapt, and most of the leaders of the Labor Party have a more open attitude towards supporting migrants. The Liberal Party has always emphasized on small government and fairness of the system, and its leadership has little experience with immigrant communities, and basically has little understanding of the difficulties migrants encounter in adapting and integrating into the society, and therefore is not enthusiastic in supporting migrants in its policies.
Over the past two decades, Australia has absorbed more than 200,000 immigrants every year. These new migrants have found that the Labor Party has more policies that benefit migrants, and this has been reflected in the fact that migrants have been more supportive of the Labor Party’s governing in the past elections. In this year’s federal election, the Liberal Party’s Dutton blamed migrants for Australia’s economic pressures and housing shortages, and demanded a drastic reduction in the number of migrants, and senior Senator Jane Hume called Chinese Australians “spies”, which made many migrants detest the Liberal Party. If the Liberal Party still fails to recognize and respond to the reality that Australia has become a multicultural society, we can foresee that the Liberal Party is likely to disappear from the Australian political scene.
Lack of multicultural experience among societal and political leaders
Before the abolition of the White Australia Policy in the 1970s, Australia was a white society, and even the Aboriginal people, who were the owners of the land, were denied and ignored. The Chinese used to make up more than 15% of Australia’s population during the Gold Rush era, but under the White Australia Policy, less than 1% of Chinese Australians remained in the 1970s. In terms of today’s universal values, the Australian government had implemented a “non-violent” policy of genocide. In fact, the Stolen Generation’s policy of handing over Aboriginal babies to white people for upbringing and education was similar. The Racial Discrimination Act of the 1970s officially ended this phase of Australia’s history, but it did not mean that Australia immediately entered a multicultural society.
Australians born before the 1990s grew up with very little contact with people of other ethnicities in their communities and lives, so racial discrimination was rampant at that time. Nowadays, most of the Australian leaders in their 40s and 50s were born in the 1980s or before. Although they accept the diversity of the Australian society today, they have never had much personal experiences with multicultural communities or migrants, and therefore seldom consider things from the perspective of a multicultural society in their policy implementation or management. For example, many managers of mainstream organizations or enterprises deeply understand that they need to enter the multicultural community in order to continue their current market or organizational goals, but they do not know how to intertct with hese communities. In Australian society, the Australian Football League (AFL) have demonstrated a determination and experience to become multicultural, as many of the AFL’s past leaders have come from multicultural backgrounds.
Similar scenarios are reflected in politics and social management, that is, when the government implements a policy, it often fails to get a response from the whole society. For example, the NDIS, which was legislated in 2013, still has less than 9% of participants from multicultural backgrounds, which is less than 40% of the original expectation. Obviously, a policy that aims to benefit people with disabilities across the country has failed to reach out to ethnic minority communities, and has resulted in many cases of abuse and misuse. It is totally unacceptable but little complaints has been made by neither mainstream Australians nor ethnic communities. Other example is services to help families troubled by gambling, which have not been used by many migrants for a long time. For many years, the organizations concerned thought that the problem was that migrants were reluctant to use their counseling services, but the truth is that these services are provided according to the Western individualistic medical model, rather than seeing gambling as a social problem that brings difficulties to the family members, let alone dealing with the problem by promoting it to the multicultural community. During the Covid pandemic, the Victorian government’s publicity of anti-epidemic measures neglected the role of multicultural media, which initially led to a situation where the infection and death rates of overseas-born people were twice as high as those of local-born people in the.early days.
Diversity in Australian Society
The Australian Bureau of Statistics recently announced that the proportion of overseas-born Australians in the population has increased to 31.5%, in response to the large number of migrants to Australia over the last 20 years. Until the early 1990s, the proportion of foreign-born people was not as high as this, and most of these people came from the United Kingdom, which was close to their cultural background, so the Australian society was not pluralistic, and it could be said that Australia was a monocultural British society at that time. At the time of the founding of the Liberal Party, Robert Menzies was confronted with such a monocultural society. Nowadays, Australia is the most multicultural society in the world. Obviously, the design and implementation of policies must take this factor into consideration.
The Labor Party’s support for multiculturalism basically allows immigrants to continue to retain their native customs, festivals and celebrations, and to tolerate each other in order to maintain respect and peace among communities. Such a society does not mean that there is communication or integration between communities. In fact, a society with no communication or integration will easily be segregated nto competing and opposing groups. It is not easy to maintain harmony and cohesion in such a society.
Last year, the Labor Party released the Multicultural Framework Review report, which was the Australian government’s first attempt to explore what kind of multicultural society Australia could become. The Commonwealth Government has so far indicated that it is also willing to provide funding support to take forward the report’s recommendations to further the realization of the framework. The report’s emphasis on the creation of a multicultural society in Australia, beginning with the recognition that Australian society started from Aboriginals, rather than solely a colonial society created by the British, is a progressive perspective in which migrants of different cultures are welcomed and accepted as part of the Australian society and culture. This means that Australia should not be a society divided by different cultural communities, but rather a modern Australia that integrates and embraces cultures from different places.
Integration into Intercultural
In order to build an integrated and inclusive society, the government has a responsibility to help migrants from all sides of the world, especially those from authoritarian societies, to experience Australian values that are different from their own, including freedom, equality, the rule of law, and human rights. Of course, migrants from non-English speaking backgrounds need to learn English and try to engage with the wider community, rather than being isolated in a culturally homogeneous migrant community.
For young migrants, this is not too difficult. Through the work environment, through life contacts, through community involvement, we see that the new generation is integrating without great difficulty. But for first generation immigrants, it is the government’s responsibility to create opportunities for them to gain exposure and experience in integration. This does not mean that the government is giving resources to migrants as a form of welfare, but rather as an investment by the community in migrants to integrate them into Australian society in the short term, so that they can contribute to Australian society as soon as possible. Such a policy would bring positive returns to the community, and would enable the migration program to maximize the social contribution of the elite settling in Australia.
Another group that has been neglected for a long time is those who were born and raised in the mainstream society. The government should also provide opportunities for them to develop through exposure to multiculturalism. For example, many traditional churches in Australia have been unable to absorb multicultural Christians and have eventually shrunk or even closed down. This is the result of not being able to keep up with the societal changes.
The unwritten expectation of Australian society has always been that newcomers will become mainstream Australians. I believe this is impossible. The challenge for Australia today is for all Australians, immigrants and native Australians (including Aboriginal Australians), to transform and integrate into modern Australians.
Mr. Raymond Chow