Australian Multiculturalism—“Natural Transition” or Social Coercion?

Abstract

Few countries embodied the UN’s cosmopolitan ethos of the 1990s more than did Australia. However, Australian society was squarely on this trajectory prior to the 1990s. From the early 1970s onward, the Australian political elite were persuaded that Australian society should be identified as multicultural. This fundamental shift was partly due to the influence of a small and determined group of multicultural intellectuals and lobbyists. Their influence, however, was greatly enhanced by the rapidly changing international strategic and economic environment of the 1970s, and by anxiety among Australia’s political and business elites about Australia’s viability in the emerging new world order. The Australian government’s increasingly Asia-focused foreign policy aspirations provided a fertile environment for multicultural lobbyists to consolidate their influence. So, when liberal cosmopolitanism gained international momentum during the 1990s, Australian governments were primed to showcase Australia to the world as an exemplar of the new paradigm of economic and cultural openness.