The return of multiculturalism as a live political question in Australia has been swift – and faintly familiar.
The Coalition’s new migration plan, announced by Angus Taylor at the Menzies Research Centre, proposes tighter visa screening, stricter enforcement of the ‘Australian Values Statement’, and even the possibility of removing those deemed not to comply with it. Framed alongside the resurgence of One Nation, it revives a distinctly Howard-era vocabulary of cohesion, integration, and national character. In his 1988 ‘One Australia’ policy, John Howard argued that Asian immigration should be ‘slowed down a little’ in the name of social cohesion, a stance more candid about questions of identity than contemporary talk of ‘values’. The contemporary recourse to ‘values’ avoids culture altogether, offering the appearance of precision while sidestepping the real question of culture.
What is really at issue, beneath these formulations, is multiculturalism itself – and the deeper misgivings it continues to provoke.
I. Values vs Culture
The language of ‘values’ treats them as though they were discrete, identifiable features of a society – like its laws, language, or customs. But this is misconceived. In reality, every society contains a plurality of values, often in tension with one another. Ask what ‘Australian values’ are and the answers proliferate: egalitarianism, individualism, tolerance, prosperity, fairness, and irreverence. Values quickly become a case of let a thousand flowers bloom. Angus Taylor, among other things, cites ‘values’ in terms of liberal democracy and the rule of law – principles which are neither uniquely Australian nor especially illuminating as a description of national culture.
What this vocabulary avoids is the more difficult subject of culture.
Culture is not an inventory of values. It is something thicker, more deeply sedimented, and less tractable: a shared language, a set of customs, a sense of historical continuity, a body of inherited meanings. The 18th Century thinker Johann Gottfried Herder is the originator of the idea of the Volksgeist – not in any racial sense, but as the lived spirit of a people formed over time, later developed in a different register in Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History (1837). Isaiah Berlin later drew out the point: such attachments respond to a deep human need for belonging, in which a form of life becomes intelligible from within rather than assembled from abstract principles. National feeling, on this view, has two faces – one aggressive and exclusionary, the other rooted in continuity, memory, and shared life. In a parochial Australian context, culture is not a set of avowed values, but an inheritance of practices and social meanings through which a common life is made possible, sustained as much by national mythologies as by formal institutions.
II. The Illusion of Multiculturalism
Multiculturalism, at least in its more optimistic forms, assumes that cultures can be combined, overlaid, and rearranged with relatively little friction. The metaphor of the ‘melting pot’, or its softer successor, the ‘mosaic’, suggests a process that is ultimately harmonious. But this is the utopian reading of history. Large-scale, rapid cultural integration is not something for which there are many stable precedents. Prior to the mid-20th Century, such cases have typically been the products of conquest or annexation.
None of this is an argument against immigration as such. Australia is, and has long been, a country shaped by it. But it is an argument about pace, scale, and absorption – and about the conditions under which a shared culture can persist. Cultures do change. They are not static. But they tend to evolve gradually through processes of adaptation that occur within a relatively stable internal core. Rapid demographic change places strain on these processes, not because newcomers bring something inherently incompatible, but because the mechanisms of cultural transmission – language, institutions, informal norms – struggle to keep pace.
At this point, the language of ‘values’ begins to look particularly thin. Values can be asserted in the abstract while the underlying forms of life that give them substance become harder to sustain.
There is also a paradox at the heart of multiculturalism that is rarely acknowledged. It is often assumed that cultural preservation is best achieved through a degree of separation that communities should retain their distinctiveness within a broader social whole. But this can quite obviously work against integration itself.
III. The Immigrant and Mass Immigration
Adaptation to a new society is not a simple or instantaneous process. It involves learning how to move within a new set of expectations, norms, and assumptions. A useful analogy is learning an instrument. Progress does not come from remaining exclusively among other beginners, but from exposure to those who are more accomplished. The same holds, in a broad sense, for cultural adaptation. Immersion in the host culture, at least to a meaningful degree, is what allows newcomers to flourish rather than remain on the margins.
Where this does not occur, a kind of mutual distance can emerge. Communities become socially insulated, and the opportunities for deeper acculturation diminish. At the same time, the contact that does take place between groups may be limited, transactional, or occasionally adversarial, particularly in disadvantaged areas – where many first-generation immigrants find themselves. The result is not a confident pluralism, but a strained and more fragile coexistence.
In this sense, mass migration can be unfair not only to the host society, but to migrants themselves. It assumes a capacity for rapid adaptation while often placing people in conditions that make such adaptation more difficult. To speak loosely of ‘integration’ under these conditions is to understate the challenge. To acknowledge this is not to deny the benefits of immigration, nor to suggest that any culture is fixed or pure. It is simply to recognise that continuity matters – that belonging is not infinitely elastic, and that it has been strained by the speed and scale of change.
The real question, then, is not whether Australia should affirm ‘values,’ but whether it can sustain a shared culture under present conditions. That is a harder question, and a less comfortable one. It is also the question that the current debate, for all its noise, has largely avoided, preferring instead to leave unspoken the quieter, accumulating frustrations that drive public sentiment beneath it.
To those who might dismiss this as philosophic onanism, with careless disregard for the ‘real world’ of ABS statistics, demographers, and reams of policy papers, it is worth saying that the argument is not a refusal of evidence, but a question about what such evidence is taken to mean. Unless we can speak intelligibly about culture itself, not as an inventory of values but in the sense of a historically formed way of life, we can hardly discuss multiculturalism. In T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948), culture is likewise understood as an inherited, historically layered whole, sustained in large part by its parochial and particular attachments rather than abstract universals. Without this clarity, we will continue to trade in soundbites and slogans while avoiding the question that gives it coherence.
