Labor's multicultural turn: Can Australian society really insulate itself from conflicts abroad? - ABC Religion & Ethics

Australia Broadcast Center

07-07-2025

You can hear Chloe Patton discuss 'progressive patriotism' and multiculturalism with Peter Kurti, Yassir Morsi and James Carleton on God Forbid.
After years in the political wilderness, Australian multicultural policy has been placed in the political spotlight in what I am terming Labor's 'multicultural turn'.
This turn began in early 2023 with the launch of the Multicultural Framework Review (MFR) which culminated in a 2024 report recommending ways to strengthen multiculturalism and a $100 million funding commitment. Confined to the outer ministry during the Howard era, Labor also returned the Ministry of Multicultural Affairs to cabinet and, in June this year, announced the formation of a new Office of Multicultural Affairs within the Department of Home Affairs.
The backlash against Labor's renewed interest in multiculturalism has been unsurprising. The Coalition certainly did not heed the MFR's report's call for renewed bipartisan support for multiculturalism. During his election campaign, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton chose to attack diversity, equity and inclusion hiring in the public sector and refused to stand in front of the Aboriginal flag. The proof that Australians had grown tired of such aggressive culture wars rhetoric and feared where it was leading the United States was in the electoral pudding. There was also a predictable response from the conservative media, with Andrew Bolt deriding the report as 'wacky' and many of his colleagues bemoaning its lack of focus on antisemitism.
A less typical critique of Labor's multicultural turn has come from the Centre for Independent Studies' Peter Kurti, who examines democratic theorists' conceptions of multiculturalism to arrive at the position that Australia needs to adopt civic nationalism in place of multiculturalism.
On one level, this is an odd proposal. Australian multiculturalism has always been expressed in civic nationalist terms, and its multiculturalism has never resembled anything close to the theories of group rights debated by democratic theorists. Successive multicultural policy statements issued between 1989 and 2017 consistently stressed the nation's liberal-democratic values and its commitment to the rule of law, and all prominently outlined limits to multicultural tolerance in these terms.
In this sense, Australian multiculturalism has always been of what democratic theorists term the 'weak' or 'soft' variety: it embraces difference at a superficial level but does not afford groups much in the way of special rights or privileges based on ethnic identity. This is what British scholars often derisively term 'saris, samosas and steel bands' multiculturalism. It's a version that Canada shares: while avowedly multicultural, it too expresses its commitment to ethnic diversity in terms of shared citizenship, political participation and adherence to liberal-democratic values.
On another level, it is interesting to consider what a more overtly civic nationalist national political ideology might mean for Australia, given that the alternative to multiculturalism is generally only ever considered to be the retrograde ethnic nationalism of the White Australia policy. In what follows, I want to draw on insights from my social anthropological research into the politicisation of Muslim communities in France and Australia to consider the comparative merits of civic nationalism and multiculturalism.
Civic nationalism and Islamophobia: the case of France
Civic nationalism is premised on the idea that a nation with strong civic values and democratic institutions is best placed to uphold the rights of every citizen and ensure peaceful cohabitation. Freedom to engage in one's culture or religion is enabled by the neutrality of the state in relation to both. National social space is therefore envisioned as diverse citizens coming together to form a harmonious community by holding the values that ensure this freedom in higher esteem than one's cultural identity. The social contract is thus seen to be upheld by individual virtue.
While all Western democracies espouse these ideals to at least some extent, France expresses the most overtly civic nationalist narrative of its nationhood, so it is a good case study to explore its merits.
Research comparing France and European nations that adhere to civic nationalism with other European nations that adopt ascriptive national political ideologies has found that civic nationalism does not necessarily foster more harmonious social relations. The results from a survey question about individuals' willingness to have a Muslim neighbour were used to gauge anti-Muslim sentiment, and this was found to be comparatively high in France.
Anthropological research into French Republicanism and Islamophobia, including my own, has consistently shown how the French state uses civic nationalism as a technology of governance to position Muslim bodies outside the national community. One of the main ways this has played out is through the recurrent national debates over Islamic veiling which have periodically occurred since 1989, resulting in legislation banning the hijab in public schools in 2004 and the niqab in all public spaces in 2010.
Rousing speeches in the parliamentary debate preceding the 2004 hijab ban claimed it breached the value of liberté because girls are supposedly forced to wear it by their male relatives, and égalité because it was said to be a sign of women's subordination to men. The 2010 niqab debate extended the focus to fraternité , with a 658-page parliamentary report drawing on the work of Jewish-French philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas to present a phenomenological ethics of cohabitation which demands bare-faced citizens.
Philosopher Emmanuel Lévinas in France on 23 January 1992. (Photo by Louis MONIER / Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images)
As my research found, the niqab report significantly misrepresented Lévinas's work, even misattributing a lengthy quote from a self-described 'secular theologian' blogger to him. For Lévinas, the concept of the face was not equivalent to the physical face; it referred to a more ephemeral and transcendent notion of someone's personhood which compels us towards ethical conduct in relation to her. While not quite the soul, it is closer in meaning to it than the physical face. From a Levinasian ethical perspective, the inter-subjective encounter between citizens in the public sphere does not require the face to be uncovered because the face, in his understanding, is not something that can be masked by a piece of cloth.
Only around 100 women were estimated to wear the niqab in France at the time of the ban, so the question of niqabs was almost entirely rhetorical. My analysis of that rhetoric revealed a nation aggressively positioning itself as victim in relation to its Muslim population. The report claimed that in 'refusing the reciprocity of contact', the niqab wearer is enacting 'symbolic violence' against all those she encounters.
Hind Ahmas leaves the court after being convicted as the first woman wearing a niqab after France's nationwide ban on wearing the niqab, on 22 September 2011 in Meaux, France. (Photo by Franck Prevel / Getty Images)
That argument played out on live television in a bizarre exchange between Jean-Francois Copé, president of the Union pour un mouvement populaire (the UMP party), and a young French niqab wearer on the stage of a popular talk show. The woman's responses to some well-worn arguments against the niqab frustrated Copé's attempts to convince her that it contravenes freedom and equality: she was born in France to a French non-Muslim mother, is not married and she came to wear the niqab on the basis of her own studies. Copé, one of the most powerful men in France, then resorted to repeatedly shouting over her that in not showing him her face the young woman was victimising him. It is fair to say that civic nationalism was being wielded as a tool to gaslight the young woman.
National politic ideologies and the creation of meaning
The French laws banning hijabs and niqabs and their accompanying national psychodramas over civic national values were not inevitable. In 1989, when the first debate over the headscarf in schools raged in France, the then Education Minister Lionel Jospin did not capitulate to demands to ban it. His reasoning was that the value of secularism ( laïcité ) — which in the French view required the removal of all symbols of religion from schools — needed to be balanced against religious freedom. At that time, religious freedom won out.
The 2004 and 2010 veiling laws were the result of a 'muscular' liberalism, as David Cameron put it, which emerged in Europe after 11 September 2001 to appease public fears over Islam. Those fears became prominent, not just in relation to 'home grown' terrorism after the 2005 London bombings, but as far-right beliefs about a 'great replacement' of white Europeans by Muslims made their way into the political mainstream. Such fears intersected with a deeper-seated resentment towards France's Muslim population that has lingered since France's humiliation in the Algerian War of Independence and its subsequent loss of its African colonies.
Civic nationalism is therefore a set of abstract values that are not semantically stable across time or place. Its values operate as floating signifiers — which is to say, there is a wide variety of political meaning that can be attached to them with different social outcomes.
Multiculturalism is the same, in this sense. This is why in 2017, Australia's multicultural policy — as articulated in Multicultural Australia: United, Strong, Successful — reflected a bipartisan political preoccupation with securitising Australia's Muslim population rather than the recognition of group rights based on ethnicity. It outlined the civic national values said to unite Australians — respect, equality and freedom — in terms that differed little from French civic nationalism, and highlighted counter-terrorism measures as the key means of realising those values.
Critiquing Labor's multicultural turn
Given their semantic malleability, the way to assess the relative merits of different national political ideologies is not through comparison in abstract terms, but by critically analysing specific expressions of them through policies and public discourse. How and why do they construct certain social phenomena as issues of national significance? More specifically, who is constructed as a national social problem? What notions of civic virtue are at play in them, and whose interests do they serve?
Turning a critical eye to Labor's recent multicultural turn reveals a familiar notion of individual civic virtue realised through people's ability to distance themselves from their religious or ethnic identity. As Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently put it:
At a time where there's conflict in the world, where people are often divided on the basis of race or religion, here in Australia, we can be a microcosm for the world. That says that we're enriched by our diversity, that we have respect for people of different faith, that we try to bring people together, that we don't bring turmoil overseas and play out that conflict here, either, and that's really important. This is a project, if you like, that's not just about strengthening Australia, but also being a symbol for the globe in how humanity can move forward.
The implication was that recent local tensions surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been imported from elsewhere. But this is incorrect. Australia is a player in that conflict due to its allyship with Israel and the United States, and how those relationships subsequently influence global governance responses to the conflict. Whether it's through occupying university campuses or lobbying the ABC to take journalists off the air, those voicing their grievances about the conflict are not simply miming the politics of elsewhere on an unrelated local stage — they are actively participating in global politics in the limited ways they can. Those grievances are certainly anchored in ethnic or religious identities for some, but there are many others with no cultural ties to the Middle East whose strong feelings about the conflict are grounded in personal commitment to human rights and international law.
Minister for Small Business, International Development and Multicultural Affairs Dr Anne Aly shakes hands with Governor-General Sam Mostyn during a swearing-in ceremony at Government House on 13 May 2025 in Canberra, Australia. (Photo by Hilary Wardhaugh / Getty Images)
This combination of the resistance to seeing Australia and therefore its citizens as implicated in global affairs and the over-determination of cultural identity in problematising social issues is not new. It also played out in the public policy response to forced marriage. In the lead-up to the introduction of legislation banning forced marriage in 2013, forced marriage was represented as a dangerous cultural practice imported from Muslim societies. Its existence in Australia was understood in the media either as a sign either that multiculturalism had failed, or that a limit to its principle of tolerance needed to be imposed.
My research on forced marriage has found, however, that while pressure on migrant girls and young women to marry does have a cultural component, it is not reducible to it. It is also influenced by the social upheaval of protracted wars in migrants' homelands, the trauma of forced migration, the stringency of national migration policies, racist representations of affected communities and migrants' settlement experiences. These factors are intertwined, and the Australian state plays varying roles in each of them.
The dominant representation of forced marriage as an exotic 'cultural practice' as opposed to a socially situated form of domestic violence was therefore reductive. It led to attention and resources being channelled in directions that were ultimately ineffective — in over a decade, the law banning forced marriage has seen only one conviction.
The truth about cosmopolitanism
What does this mean for multiculturalism? The implication here is that Australia is not a version of the world writ small — it is a component of a hyperconnected global community. Social issues related to migration are not simply reflections of other cultures, they are bound up in global processes and their local consequences.
A normative vision of social relations in which migrants trade cultural allegiances to homelands for the good feelings of a rarefied national community that is sectioned off from the world has little basis in lived reality. Australians live in the world, and so it is perhaps time that the way the nation narrates itself came to reflect that. This would mean overcoming a long local culture of resistance to cosmopolitanism in which an orientation to the wider world is seen as elitist.
Sociologist Bryan Turner has addressed this: if a national political ideology centred on cosmopolitanism is understood to be elitist, then so be it — a cosmopolitan vision of civic comportment should not be aimed primarily at everyday citizens, but rather the elites who control national social space.
Chloe Patton is a Lecturer in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies at RMIT University. Her research focuses on the gendered dimensions of Islamophobia in Australia and Europe.