Australia changes name of multiculturalism department

Here, from the Australian newspaper the Daily Telegraph, is an obviously misleading headline and opening paragraph of a type of story I have seen repeatedly in the British press:

PRIME Minister John Howard officially scrapped multiculturalism today as he sacked Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone and renamed her old department.

The trouble-plagued Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs (DIMA) will now be known as the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, with former Workplace Relations Minister Kevin Andrews the new minister.

Of course, Australia has not officially or unofficially scrapped its multiculturalism policies. It has merely changed the name of a department. Yet Melanie Phillips has fallen for the line about multiculturalism being “officially scrapped,” uncritically quoting it as though it represented the truth. Does she really believe that a vast, decades-old ideology such as multiculturalism, institutionalized and embedded in all kinds of ways in the Australian government, could be “scrapped” just like that? Maybe she thinks that multiculturalism is nothing more than a name. She evinced a similar attitude last year, believing that a single phrase in her book calling for unspecified “tough controls” on immigration meant that she had called for Muslim immigration into Britain to be stopped, when in reality she had done nothing of the kind.

I asked Australian conservative blogger Mark Richardson how long Australia had had a department of multiculturalism and he writes back:

The department was established in 1945 but called back then the Department of Immigration. The term multiculturalism was adopted by the Labor Party in 1973 and the Liberal Party in 1974. I’m not sure, though, when it was added officially to the name of the department.

The change of name does reflect a minor difference between the main parties, with the Liberals being a little more assimilationist in their politics than Labor. This is not, though, some great breakthrough. The Liberals are still happy to raise immigration to record levels, to raise the non-European component of the immigration programme to record levels, to admit that they are using the immigration programme to suppress wages and to fill university courses with paying overseas students (40% of whom lack sufficient English to fill professional jobs) rather than fund places for local students.

At times, in fact, the Labor Party sounds better on some of these issues, as they are at least willing to argue that the “skills shortage” should be addressed by training locals in preference to the foreign worker visa scheme relied on by the Liberals. There were Liberals who attacked the previous leader of the Labor Party, Kim Beazley, as being xenophobic and racist for arguing that Australians should be given preference in filling jobs. There were Liberals who attacked the previous leader of the Labor Party, Kim Beazley, as being xenophobic and racist for arguing that Australians should be given preference in filling jobs. Amanda Vanstone, who made these comments, has admittedly now been replaced in the latest reshuffle.

Howard has been good on border control, and he doesn’t present himself as being hostile to the Anglo mainstream as some on the left do, but it would be a gross mistake to look to him for a solution to issues of immigration and nationalism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 31, 2007 10:33 AM | Send