The earliest academic critics of multiculturalism in Australia were the philosophers Lachlan Chipman and
Frank Knopfelmacher, sociologist Tanya Birrell and the political scientist Raymond Sestito. Chipman and Knopfelmacher were concerned with threats to
social cohesion, while Birrell's concern was that multiculturalism obscures the social costs associated with large scale immigration that fall most heavily on the most recently arrived and unskilled immigrants. Sestito's arguments were based on the role of political parties. He argued that political parties were instrumental in pursuing multicultural policies, and that these policies would put strain on the political system and would not promote better understanding in the Australian community. Prime Minister
John Curtin supported
White Australia policy, saying, "This country shall remain forever the home of the descendants of those people who came here in peace in order to establish in the South Seas an outpost of the British race". Prime Minister
Stanley Bruce was a supporter of the White Australia Policy, and made it an issue in his campaign for the 1925 Australian Federal election.It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. Labor leader
H. V. Evatt said in 1945 at the
United Nations Conference on International Organization: You have always insisted on the right to determine the composition of your own people. Australia wants that right now. What you are attempting to do now, Japan attempted after the last war [the First World War] and was prevented by Australia. Had we opened New Guinea and Australia to Japanese immigration then the Pacific War by now might have ended disastrously and we might have had another shambles like that experienced in Malaya.Historian
Geoffrey Blainey achieved mainstream recognition as a critic of multiculturalism when he wrote that multiculturalism threatened to transform Australia into a "cluster of tribes". In his 1984 book
All for Australia, Blainey criticised Australian multiculturalism for tending to emphasise the rights of ethnic minorities at the expense of the majority population and for being "anti-British", despite Britons being the largest ethnic group to have migrated to Australia. According to Blainey, such policies created divisions and threatened national cohesion. He argued that "the evidence is clear that many multicultural societies have failed and that the human cost of the failure has been high" and warned that "we should think very carefully about the perils of converting Australia into a giant multicultural laboratory for the assumed benefit of the peoples of the world". In one of his numerous criticisms of multiculturalism, Blainey wrote: For the millions of Australians who have no other nation to fall back upon, multiculturalism is almost an insult. It is divisive. It threatens social cohesion. It could, in the long-term, also endanger Australia's military security because it sets up enclaves which in a crisis could appeal to their own homelands for help. Blainey remained a persistent critic of multiculturalism into the 1990s, denouncing multiculturalism as "morally, intellectually and economically ... a sham." Historian
John Hirst argued that while multiculturalism might serve the needs of ethnic politics and the demands of certain ethnic groups for government funding for the promotion of their separate ethnic identity, it is a perilous concept on which to found national policy. Hirst identified contradictory statements by political leaders that suggested the term was a nonsense concept. These included the policies of Prime Minister
Bob Hawke, a proponent of multiculturalism while at the same time promoting a citizenship campaign and stressing the common elements of our culture, and anti-multiculturalism statements by Prime Minister Howard, who aroused the ire of multiculturalists who thought that he was suggesting closing down Italian restaurants and prohibiting the speaking of the Italian language when he proposed no such thing. Critics associated with the Centre for Population and Urban Research at
Monash University argued in 1993 that both right and left factions in the
Australian Labor Party have adopted a multicultural stance for the purposes of increasing their support within the party. A manifestation of this embrace of multiculturalism has been the creation of ethnic branches within the Labor Party and ethnic
branch stacking. In 1996,
John Howard's Liberal-National Coalition was elected to government. Howard had long been a critic of multiculturalism, releasing his
One Australia policy in the late 1980s which called for a reduction in Asian immigration. He later retracted the policy, citing his then position as wrong. Shortly after the Howard government took office, a new independent member of Parliament,
Pauline Hanson, made her maiden speech in which she was highly critical of multiculturalism, saying that a multicultural society could never be strong. Hanson went on to form her own political party,
One Nation. One Nation campaigned strongly against official multiculturalism, arguing that it represented "a threat to the very basis of the Australian culture, identity and shared values" and that there was "no reason why migrant cultures should be maintained at the expense of our shared, national culture.". Despite many calls for Howard to censure Hanson, his response was to state that her speech indicated a new freedom of expression in Australia on such issues, and that he believed strongly in freedom of speech. Rather than official multiculturalism, Howard advocated instead the idea of a "shared national identity", albeit one strongly grounded in certain recognisably
Anglo-Celtic Australian themes, such as "
mateship" and a "fair go". The name of the Department of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Indigenous Affairs was changed to the "
Department of Immigration and Citizenship". However, Australia maintained a policy of multiculturalism, and government introduced expanded dual-citizenship rights. Following the upsurge of support for the One Nation Party in 1996,
Lebanese-born Australian anthropologist
Ghassan Hage published a critique in 1997 of Australian multiculturalism in the book
White Nation. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from
Whiteness studies,
Jacques Lacan and
Pierre Bourdieu, Hage examined a range of everyday
discourses that implicated both anti-multiculturalists and pro-multiculturalists alike. In exploring the discourse of multiculturalism others have argued that the threat to social cohesion and national identity have been overstated. For instance, Ramakrishan (2013) argues that the "largely European" cultural traditions of the population have been maintained despite greater ethnic diversity. Some scholars have argued that the persistence of racism in Australian society has been understated; for example, in the journal
Sexualities, Jessica Kean writes that "in a nation invested in promoting official policies of ‘multiculturalism’, championing the egalitarian rhetoric of the ‘fair go’, and forgetting colonial violence (or imagining its effects to be a thing of the past), real or projected differences in cultural practices of sex and kinship become an outlet for racism and classism that won’t speak itself plainly." ==Celebrations of multiculturalism==