Members of the political class, beaming to some captured audience, will sometimes embellish their speeches with the declaration that Australia is ‘the most successful multicultural country in the world’.

One obvious problem in assessing this is that ‘multicultural’ is a ‘Humpty-Dumpty’ word. As he told Lewis Carroll’s Alice in rather a scornful tone, ‘When I use a word it means precisely what I want it to mean, nothing more or less.