Some have argued that the term is entirely a product of
multiculturalism that ignores the history of
sectarianism in Australia. For example, historian
John Hirst wrote in 1994: "Mainstream Australian society was reduced to an ethnic group and given an ethnic name: Anglo-Celt." According to Hirst: In the eyes of multiculturalists, Australian society of the 1940s, 150 years after first settlement, is adequately described as Anglo-Celtic. At least this acknowledges that the people of Australia were Irish and Scots as well as English, but it has nothing more substantial than a hyphen joining them. In fact a distinct new culture had been formed. English, Scots and Irish had formed a common identity – first of all British and then gradually Australian as well. In the 1930s the historian
W. K. Hancock could aptly describe them as Independent Australian Britons. According to Hirst, the label was historically inaccurate and objectionable. He later wrote: In calling Australians of the 1940s and their descendants ‘Anglo-Celts’ multiculturalists depart from their own rule. This term has not been used by these people to describe themselves. They were proud that they had constrained particular ethnic identities and subsumed them into the broader terms of British and Australian. The imposition of ‘Anglo-Celt’ is the tyrannical arm of multiculturalism. I find the term offensive. Hirst also argued that nineteenth-century Australian nation-building involved encouraging the English, Scots and Irish to adopt a common British or Australian identity rather than retain older ethnic divisions: In the nineteenth century there were (to name the largest groups) Aborigines, English, Scots, Irish, Chinese and Pacific Islanders as well as the native-born. However, those who controlled the society considered that the process of nation-building required ethnic identities to be limited and superseded. The English, Scots and Irish were traditional enemies bound together in one state, the United Kingdom. In Australia there was a conscious, determined effort to avoid old-world enmities and to bring these three peoples to think of themselves as one – British, or Australian–British, or Australian. The Irish-Australian journalist
Siobhán McHugh has argued that the term "Anglo-Celtic" is "an insidious distortion of our past and a galling denial of the struggle by an earlier minority group",
Irish Australians, "against oppression and demonisation... In what we now cosily term "Anglo-Celtic" Australia, a virtual social
apartheid existed at times between [Irish] Catholics and [British] Protestants", which did not end until the 1960s. The term was also criticised by the historian
Patrick O'Farrell as "a grossly misleading, false, and patronising convenience, one crassly present-oriented. Its use removes from consciousness and recognition a major conflict fundamental to any comprehension not only of Australian history but of our present core culture." ==Culture==