Page 121 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

1980s, although the Anglo-Celtic Australian sense of ‘superiority’ may be tinged
more with anxiety and defensiveness than with confidence and arrogance. In fact,
Markus suggests as much when he notes that the failure of government after
government to gain popular support for the reformed immigration and multi-
cultural policies has to do with a failure ‘to allay unreasonable fears of the dangers
of multiculturalism, and to create a climate of confidence that the legitimate
interests of Anglo-Australians were being protected’ (ibid.: 22).
But what, so we can ask, are those ‘legitimate interests’? Surely a purported desire
to return to a ‘white Australia’ among some Anglo-Celtic Australians can no longer
be recognized as ‘legitimate’ by any government, not even John Howard’s? We are
returned here to Howard’s ambivalence about multiculturalism. Having explicitly
argued against ‘too many Asians’ in the 1980s, a position he had to disavow in order
to save his political career, by the mid-1990s he said that under his government,
‘the views of all particular interests will be assessed against the national interest and
the sentiments of mainstream Australia’ (Howard 1995a). It is reasonable to argue
that the sentiments Howard refers to here are those of ordinary ‘Anglo-Celtic’
Australians. By describing this group as ‘mainstream Australia’ he implicitly
marginalizes people of non-Anglo-Celtic backgrounds, and opposes the latter’s
particular interests to the ‘national interest’, which presumably represents the
legitimate interests of the Anglo-Australian ‘mainstream’. In another speech
(Howard 1995b), he attacks what he calls ‘minority fundamentalism’, which, he
says, ‘is based on the assumption that if you extol mainstream practices or values
then you must automatically be intolerant of the values or circumstances of
minorities – despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary’. Thus Howard (1995a)
sings the praises of mainstream tolerance: tolerance is a virtue of the mainstream.
‘Tolerance’, he says, ‘has been one of our distinguishing features for a very long
time.’
However, as Ghassan Hage (1994: 23) has observed: ‘the popular language of
acceptance, often encountered in the form of “they’re just as Australian as we are”
or “they’re Australian too”, reinforces the placing of the Anglo-Celtic Australians
in the position of power within the discourse of tolerance.’ Thus it is the Anglo-
Celtic Australians – or, in Howard’s ex-nominating terminology, ‘the mainstream’
– which has the power to put limits to its tolerance, presumably at that point where
minority interests are so ‘out of the mainstream’ that they are no longer ‘in the
national interest’. In this discursive move Howard, without making any explicit
racial references, manages to reorient the policy of multiculturalism closer to the
assimilationist concerns of the old White Australia policy. Thus the government
now emphasizes the need for ‘ensuring that cultural diversity is a unifying force’
(National Multicultural Advisory Council 1997), a statement which clearly signals
a tendency to see ‘diversity’ and ‘unity’ in terms of a binary opposition and not, as
in the multiculturalist slogan of ‘unity-in-diversity’, as mutually reinforcing.
What should now be apparent is that this assimilationist move is also, in practice,
if implicitly, a racializing one. In Australia ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or ‘mainstream’ culture
is historically British in origin and, most importantly for our argument, ‘white’. By

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