REVIEWING MULTICULTURALISM: STATE AND STASIS

 

The recently released Victoria Multicultural Review – Final Report presents itself as a decisive blueprint for an inclusive and harmonious state. It invokes the rhetoric of trust, cohesion, and the elevation of multicultural affairs to the highest echelons of government. Yet, on closer examination, it discloses more about the anxieties and blind spots of an Anglo-centric polity than it does about the aspirations of the communities it claims to represent. While its pages are filled with exhortations and symbolic gestures, ultimately, it falls short of articulating the kind of structural vision that could weave disparate identities into a shared narrative of belonging. What emerges is less a roadmap for integration than a reaffirmation of a hegemonic class still uncertain about how to move beyond spectacle towards genuine partnership.

The Review situates its narrative in Victoria’s long history of diversity. We are reminded of the forty Aboriginal languages once spoken across the state, of the Chinese miners of the goldfields, of John Joseph the African-American rebel at Eureka. These references are marshalled as evidence of an enduring tradition of inclusion, yet they remain disconnected fragments, curated more as exhibits than as histories with contemporary resonance. Rather than interrogating the ongoing exclusions that mark Victoria’s past and present, the narrative reassures the majority that tolerance has always been the state’s hallmark. Postcolonial theory draws our attention to this manoeuvre: the coloniser selects which fragments of the colonised past to display, curating them into a story that comforts the centre while obscuring the silences and dislocations at the margins.

The means by which the ruling class prefers to acknowledge cultural difference is evidently through performance. The Review recommends funding between twenty and thirty large multicultural events and up to sixty smaller ones annually, while also elevating the beleaguered, largely isolated and limited in scope Immigration Museum as a “cultural icon.” These initiatives invite communities to display their identity through costumes, food, music and ritual, in forms that can be consumed by the mainstream. Such gestures are not without merit, but they relegate multiculturalism to the realm of ornament rather than structure. Communities are celebrated for their difference so long as that difference entertains or educates. They are rarely situated as co-authors of policy or as interlocutors in shaping civic culture. The result is what Bhabha terms mimicry: migrants permitted to reproduce their heritage in ways sanctioned by the dominant culture, while genuine parity of voice is withheld.

The proposed reforms to the Victorian Multicultural Commission illustrate this dynamic. Once envisaged as a conduit between government and community, the Commission is now deemed too ceremonial, too focused on celebration, and insufficiently strategic. The Review proposes replacing it with “Multicultural Victoria,” a statutory authority led by three commissioners and advised by an appointed Multicultural Community Advisory Group. Yet these changes do not redistribute authority. Commissioners remain government appointees, advisory groups remain advisory, and oversight remains firmly within the Premier’s office. This is not empowerment, but consolidation. What is presented as reform is in fact the reinforcement of a hierarchy in which multiculturalism continues to be administered from above rather than shaped in dialogue.

The rhetoric of trust in the document is particularly telling. Communities are said to have lost faith in government institutions, to feel unsafe, unheard, and marginalised. Yet the onus is subtly redirected back onto them: they are invited to participate more actively, to consult, to pledge allegiance to social cohesion. The implication is that trust is mutual, eroded equally on both sides, to be rebuilt together. What is not acknowledged is that trust was first broken by a state that has long instrumentalised migrant loyalty while disregarding migrant exclusion. It is the government, not the communities, that must do the greater work of rebuilding. To suggest otherwise is to indulge a false equivalence that masks the asymmetry of power.

Throughout the Review there are gestures towards deeper engagement. Multicultural communities are quoted as insisting that they do not wish merely to apply for programs but also to shape them, that they are not vulnerable but visionary, that policy without them cannot serve them. These voices are acknowledged but not embedded in the recommendations. Instead, the familiar machinery of committees, frameworks, grants, and reports proliferates. The structures multiply, but the central narrative of who leads and who follows remains unchanged.

Consider the recommendation that all Cabinet submissions include a multicultural impact statement. On the surface progressive, it positions multiculturalism as an afterthought, to be appended once decisions have already been conceived within Anglo-centric frameworks. Similarly, the requirement that government boards reflect community demographics, though laudable, depends upon appointment processes that remain firmly in government hands. Diversity here is managed, not re-imagined.

The “social cohesion pledge” illustrates the same logic. To access government funding, multicultural organisations must first commit themselves to upholding laws and promoting harmony. While framed as neutral, this requirement subjects them to a moral test not imposed on mainstream organisations. It implies that they are potential risks to cohesion, requiring additional scrutiny. In effect, multicultural organisations are placed in a perpetual state of probation, compelled to perform loyalty more conspicuously than others. Postcolonial critique reminds us that the subaltern is admitted to the polity only when compliance with dominant norms has been demonstrated.

Youth initiatives are treated in much the same way. The establishment of a multicultural youth worker program, the expansion of support groups, and the creation of youth-led grants do respond to genuine needs. However, they appear to situate multicultural youth as a distinct cohort to be managed, rather than as citizens integral to the mainstream youth policy framework. Separation is thus maintained even as inclusion is promised.

Language services are similarly framed. The Review rightly calls for declaring interpreting and translation an “essential service” and for ensuring that only credentialed interpreters are used. Nonetheless, language is treated as a technical barrier to be managed, rather than a positive cultural resource capable of transforming public discourse. The multiplicity of languages spoken in Victoria is cast as an obstacle requiring service provision, not as an opportunity to reconceive civic identity on equal terms.

This trajectory is familiar to scholars of multicultural theory. The Australian model, formalised in the 1970s, rested upon three pillars: cultural identity, social justice, and economic efficiency (Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975). Over time, the balance has shifted. Cultural identity has been reduced to spectacle, social justice diluted, economic participation commodified. The Review reproduces this pattern. It cites numbers of languages spoken and festivals funded, but articulates no vision of how these elements are to be integrated into the civic centre. Difference may be acknowledged but this not woven into the political fabric.

The Review’s approach to racism underscores this limitation. It acknowledges the rise of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Asian sentiment, praises the Anti-Racism Strategy, and recommends expanded data collection and education campaigns. This notwithstanding, racism is depicted as an external problem, imported from global conflicts or amplified by social media, to be countered through management. There is no sustained recognition of racism as structurally embedded within institutions, the dominant culture or within the narratives of statehood itself. Communities are asked to combat racism, but not invited to interrogate the Anglo-centric frameworks that perpetuate exclusion and give rise to systemic racism.

Taken together, the recommendations serve to increase governmental control while appearing to empower communities. Advisory groups proliferate, but remain advisory. Grants increase, but reinforce dependency. Data is collected, but interpretation remains with bureaucrats. Communities are urged to participate, but only within structures they did not design. This is multiculturalism as management, not as shared authorship.

What the Review does not offer is a narrative of integration that transcends performance. A society does not cohere merely by staging festivals or erecting heritage museums. It coheres when institutions mirror the diversity of the people, when decision-making power is genuinely shared, and when cultural difference becomes an integral component of civic identity. Achieving this requires more than bureaucratic adjustment. It requires a transformation of imagination: away from Anglo-centrism as the invisible norm, and towards a polity in which multiple heritages constitute the centre.

Until such a vision emerges, the trust the government seeks to invoke will remain elusive. Trust is not rebuilt through proclamations but through deeds. Ethnic communities have long demonstrated their trust in the state through their labour, resilience and creativity. It is the state that must now demonstrate itself worthy of theirs. Without that, the multicultural project will remain what this Review inadvertently discloses: a spectacle of difference, presided over by a dominant class still uncertain how to move from performance to partnership, from tokenism to transformation, from Anglo dominance to genuine plurality.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday, 27 September 2025

CONSTANTINOPLE 1955 POGROM: THE CASE FOR GENOCIDE

 

The memory of the Greeks of Constantinople stirs the heartstrings of our people. It evokes an ever absent presence, a community whose voices, though long silenced, continue to haunt the boulevards of Pera, the shores of the Bosporus, the sokaks of Fanari. Their absence is palpable, for they remain everywhere in memory while scarcely present in fact. The calamity that befell them in September of 1955 is often called by us a διωγμός, a violent expulsion, one in a series of many. At times it is even described as a pogrom, a word that hints at mob violence yet conceals the deeper design behind the catastrophe. Increasingly, however, legal and genocide scholars argue that what took place in Constantinople over the course of those harrowing September days constitutes a form genocide, orchestrated with intent to destroy a people whose roots in the City stretched back to its very founding.

International jurisprudence and critical theory alike remind us that memory is never static. It is contested, framed, and given form through power. The 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, far from being an inert legal document, functions as a living instrument of moral judgment. Article 2 does not measure crimes against humanity through the number of corpses or through the erection of exterminatory camps. Instead, it identifies the essence of genocide as intent, the demonstrable will to destroy in whole or in part a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group.

It is precisely here that the 1955 Constantinople pogrom becomes relevant. Alfred-Maurice de Zayas, jurist and scholar of international law, has argued persuasively in his The Genocide against the Armenians 1915–1923 and the Relevance of the 1948 Genocide Convention that the destruction of minorities in Turkey, including the events of 1955, satisfies the criteria set forth by the Convention. The orchestrated nature of the pogrom, conceived within the apparatus of the Menderes government, is a matter of record. The systematic targeting of Greek property was no spontaneous eruption of popular anger. It was state-sponsored devastation designed to terrorise a community into flight, and to erase its historical presence in the Queen of Cities.

The framework of genocide that emerges from the scholarship of Raphael Lemkin, William Schabas, Leo Kuper, Helen Fein, and Jacques Semelin illuminates the meaning of the September catastrophe. Lemkin, in Axis Rule in Occupied Europe (1944), who gave the world the very term genocide, insisted that cultural annihilation was as central to the crime as physical extermination. In Constantinople, churches were desecrated, cemeteries such as that at Valoukli defiled, and schools attacked, acts intended to sever the continuity of a community. The pogrom therefore exemplifies precisely the kind of cultural and spiritual destruction that Lemkin feared and sought to define.

Later jurists such as William Schabas, in Genocide in International Law (2000, 2009), have demonstrated that numbers cannot serve as the decisive criterion in defining genocide. What matters is intent, the demonstrable aim to extinguish a community’s existence. The Greek deaths in 1955 may have been limited in number, yet the terror unleashed, the displacement that followed, and the creation of conditions that made continued residence impossible align exactly with the principles Schabas identifies. By this measure, the pogrom speaks unmistakably of genocidal purpose.

The orchestrated nature of the pogrom also reflects Leo Kuper’s observation in Genocide: Its Political Use in the Twentieth Century (1981) that genocide often conceals itself under the mask of public disorder while being directed from above. The provision of vehicles to carry looters, the preparation of lists of Greek owned shops, and the studied paralysis of the police reveal an operation coordinated by the state itself. Far from being the product of mob frenzy, the pogrom demonstrates Kuper’s insight that the state frequently operates through the guise of popular tumult in order to achieve its destructive ends. Critical theorists of violence, from Hannah Arendt to Giorgio Agamben, agree, having demonstrated that the power of the state often manifests itself through the creation of zones of exception, in which law is suspended in order to annihilate the other.

Helen Fein’s characterisation of genocide as the destruction of a collectivity, articulated in Accounting for Genocide (1979) and later in Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (1993), captures the longer trajectory of Hellenism in Constantinople. Already weakened by the confiscatory wealth tax of 1942 and continuing restrictions on property and professional life, the Greek community faced in 1955 a blow that destroyed the foundations of its social viability. The demolition of homes, businesses, and sacred institutions ensured that communal life could no longer be sustained, forcing thousands into exile and leaving only fragments of a once flourishing presence in the city.

Finally, Jacques Semelin, in his Purify and Destroy: The Political Uses of Massacre and Genocide (2007), has emphasised the symbolic dimension of genocidal violence, where the annihilation of cultural and religious symbols becomes a means of erasing the identity of a group. The profanation of Orthodox altars, the desecration of holy icons, and the violation of tombs during the pogrom cannot be dismissed as vandalism. They were ritualised gestures of destruction, calculated to declare that the Greek community was to be erased both physically and spiritually.

Contemporary genocide scholars such as Dominik Schaller and Jürgen Zimmerer have located the crime within broader structural processes of state formation and ethnic homogenisation. In Late Ottoman Genocides (2009), Schaller examines the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek cases as interrelated strategies of the late Ottoman and early Republican elite, aimed at dissolving pluralism and producing a homogeneous nation. Zimmerer, in Colonial Genocide and the Holocaust (2008), likewise interprets genocide as a recurring instrument of statecraft, used to eliminate perceived obstacles to national or imperial projects. Within this framework, the 1955 pogrom in Constantinople cannot be read as an isolated episode. It represents the continuation of policies of ethnic cleansing that had begun with the destruction of Armenians in 1915 and extended through the expulsions of Greeks from Asia Minor. The September catastrophe emerges as part of a continuum of state-directed attempts to forge a culturally uniform polity through the elimination of minorities, rather than as an aberration of mob violence. It is, a genocide.

Accepting the events of 1955 as genocide carries significant implications for international law. Such a recognition would confirm that astronomical body counts or the infrastructure of extermination camps are not required for the crime of genocide to be established. In the case of Akayesu, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda affirmed that rape and forced displacement, when carried out with the intent to destroy a community, fall within the definition of genocide. In its judgments on Srebrenica, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia underscored that the destruction of even a part of a group within a geographically confined space could constitute genocide. Precedents of this kind demonstrate that the pogrom of Constantinople belongs squarely within established jurisprudence, where intent carries decisive weight and the method of destruction is legally secondary.

The recognition of the pogrom also sharpens the kinds of questions that must be asked about conflicts in our own time. When communities are uprooted en masse, when their cultural symbols are deliberately obliterated, and when language is deployed to dehumanise them or to call for their disappearance, does this not raise the same legal and moral concerns? Ongoing debates over whether the violence in Ukraine or in Gaza should be framed in terms of genocide, together with similar questions arising from conflicts elsewhere in the world, illustrate how contested and fraught such determinations remain. The case of Constantinople demonstrates that genocide can take the form of devastation directed at homes, churches, and livelihoods as readily as it can manifest through mass killing. Recognition strengthens the principle that international law must guard against every form of annihilation, regardless of scale or method.

The legacy of 1955 also invites reflection on the broader Hellenic experience. The invasion of Cyprus in 1974 brought mass displacement, the destruction of cultural heritage, and the long-term severance of communities from ancestral homes. Can such events be understood through a similar lens? Scholarship has rarely addressed this question within the framework of genocide studies, yet the echoes are undeniable. Raising the question does not collapse distinct histories into one. Instead it underscores the importance of applying legal categories consistently and confronting difficult truths about intent, destruction, and accountability. This is particularly pertinent considering that in 2020, the Turkish Parliamentary Speaker’s Office rejected a draft bill seeking to have the pogrom recognised as a national day of mourning. Parliamentary Speaker Mustafa Şentop noted that he found the wording used in the draft bill as “rough and hurtful.”

Calling the Constantinople pogrom a genocide is an act that demands coherence and integrity in international law. Such a step would affirm that smaller-scale yet decisive campaigns of eradication fall within the scope of the Genocide Convention. It would confirm that the destruction of a group, whether achieved through displacement, humiliation, or cultural annihilation, is no less grievous than the destruction of life itself. In an age when international bodies hesitate to apply the word genocide for fear of political repercussions, Constantinople offers a touchstone: an insistence that international law must speak clearly against any intent to destroy a people.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 20 September 2025

NOT QUITE RECOGNITION

 

Sections of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities across the globe have greeted Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent acknowledgment of the genocides of their peoples with jubilation. His words, spoken during an interview with Patrick Bet-David, were invested by sections of the Greek media especially, with the aura of long-sought vindication. After decades of silence, here was an Israeli prime minister affirming aloud what entire diasporas have struggled to bring into the realm of international recognition. Yet the rejoicing, while understandable, is perhaps premature. For all their symbolic force, Netanyahu’s impromptu comments remain a personal gesture. They do not constitute a change in Israel’s official policy, which remains cautious and unresolved.

The context of the remarks matter. They were delivered in response to an unexpected question, without the solemnity of a formal declaration, and without the authority of a parliamentary resolution. There was no cabinet deliberation, no act of legislation, and no motion before the Knesset. The distinction between individual speech and institutional recognition is profound, for genocide recognition is not a private matter. It is a public act of state that affirms history, acknowledges victims, and defines collective memory. Until the institutions of government have spoken, the recognition of which Netanyahu spoke retains the force of nothing more than personal opinion.

This distinction between person and office, or person and state is a pertinent one, with the Australian experience offers useful parallels. Bob Carr, as premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr as premier of New South Wales, led his government to a unanimous recognition of the Armenian Genocide in 1997. As foreign minister of the Commonwealth, however, he refrained from doing so, stating: “As a Government we don’t take a stand on this historic dispute.” Scott Morrison, as Opposition Leader, was equally forthright in acknowledgment. In 2011, he called for Federal recognition of the Genocide and acknowledged the outpouring of Australian support for victims of the Armenian Genocide as the country’s first international humanitarian relief effort, going as far as referring to it as “one of the greatest crimes in modern history.”  Yet as prime minister, he fell silent, preferring to maintain ambiguity. Similarly, in May 2022, just prior to becoming Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese called upon the Ottoman Empire’s successor state to “come to terms with its history.” Three years later no recognition has been forthcoming. In each case, the convictions of the individual were no doubt sincere. Ultimately though, they were tempered by the perceived responsibilities of the office. Netanyahu’s statement belongs in the same category. It reflects the voice of a man, not the policy of a state.

To date, Israel’s reticence to recognise the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides has been consistent. The reasoning has been strategic rather than moral. Successive governments have concluded that recognition would compromise delicate relationships with Turkey and Azerbaijan, both of which are vital to Israel’s regional calculations. During the Cold War, Turkey was Israel’s sole Muslim-majority partner, providing both diplomatic recognition and military cooperation. Acknowledging the Armenian genocide would have placed this partnership in jeopardy, given that Ankara has long made denial of the genocide integral to its national identity. The pattern continued even after relations soured, for the prospect of alienating Azerbaijan became an additional constraint.

The Turkish dimension has long been the most sensitive. Turkey’s recognition of Israel in 1949 made it the first Muslim-majority state to do so. Over decades, the partnership deepened, culminating in extensive military and intelligence cooperation in the 1990s. The rise of the Justice and Development Party under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan transformed the relationship. Erdoğan cast himself as a defender of Palestinian causes and a sharp critic of Israeli policy. Relations grew increasingly bitter, reaching their nadir after the Mavi Marmara incident in 2010, when Turkish activists were killed in clashes with Israeli forces. Since then, the relationship has oscillated between hostility and tentative rapprochement, but the warmth of earlier decades has not returned. Netanyahu’s sudden reference to the genocides of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks must be seen against this background. It carries the flavour less of moral awakening than of deliberate rebuke. Such instrumentalisation is troubling, for when recognition is deployed as a diplomatic weapon it risks being stripped of its moral gravity.

The Azerbaijani relationship adds another layer of complexity. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel has cultivated a close partnership with Baku. Azerbaijan provides nearly forty percent of Israel’s oil, delivered through the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. In exchange, Israel has become one of Azerbaijan’s most significant arms suppliers, delivering drones, missile systems, and other advanced weaponry. The proximity of Azerbaijan to Iran and its willingness to cooperate with Israel in intelligence matters have made this partnership invaluable. Yet recognition of the Armenian genocide would place Israel in direct conflict with Baku’s national narrative. For Azerbaijan, locked in a bitter conflict with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh, any acknowledgment of Armenian historical claims undermines its own sense of legitimacy. Netanyahu is acutely aware of this. To transform his words into binding policy would imperil a strategic relationship that Israel regards as vital for energy security and as a counterweight to Iran.

Theories of international relations help to illuminate the complexity of Israel’s position. Realist analysis suggests that states act above all to preserve their security, and from this perspective recognition of the Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek genocides could imperil valuable partnerships. Constructivist approaches, however, remind us that national identity and historical memory influence policy no less than strategic interests. Turkey’s sense of self remains tied to denial, Armenia’s to remembrance, Azerbaijan’s to a counter-narrative of survival, while Israel’s identity is profoundly bound to the Shoah. For a state whose very being is shaped by the memory of atrocity, hesitation to extend recognition to other genocides creates a tension that is felt acutely. Netanyahu’s words may be read as a spontaneous expression of this tension. As the leader of a people marked by the Holocaust, he is drawn towards acknowledgment of what history and scholarship affirm. As the head of government, he must weigh this moral instinct against the imperatives of alliances and regional stability. His statement thus reflects less a contradiction than the inevitable strain of governing a state whose ethical commitments and strategic necessities are often in delicate balance.

For Jewish communities abroad, the matter resonates deeply. Denial of genocide strikes at the heart of their own historical experience. In Australia, Jewish leaders have consistently supported Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek campaigns for recognition, and scholars such as the late Colin Tatz, whose pioneering work on genocide studies placed Australia at the forefront of comparative research, have ensured that these histories are neither ignored nor diminished. Internationally, figures like Yehuda Bauer, one of the most authoritative historians of the Shoah, and Marc David Baer, whose work has revealed the intricate legacies of Ottoman and Turkish history, have contributed substantially to advancing awareness and understanding. The Holocaust Museum in Melbourne includes a display on the Armenian genocide, affirming that the memory of the Shoah compels solidarity with other victims of extermination. For Jewish communities, recognition is not an option but a moral and ethical imperative, and the support they have extended to the descendants of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in their campaigns for justice remains a source of profound gratitude.

The communities celebrating Netanyahu’s words must therefore take care not to mistake gesture for policy. Genocide recognition, if it is to be worthy of the name, must be enacted formally through the institutions of state. It requires deliberation by parliament, a vote, and an act that cannot be dismissed as rhetorical flourish. Until such a step is taken, words, however powerful, remain transient. They can be retracted by successors, ignored by ministries, and dismissed by foreign policy officials. Recognition delivered in parliament, by contrast, endures.

Thus while the rejoicing of Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks at Netanyahu’s remarks is understandable, such acknowledgments remain fragile when spoken without institutional backing. Recognition of genocide cannot rest on improvisation. It requires the authority of Israel’s institutions and the solemnity of deliberate decision.

To legislate such recognition would affirm that truth is stronger than denial and that the defence of memory transcends the suffering of any one people. It would be a moment when political calculation yields to moral clarity, and Israel, in full possession of its history, affirms the indivisibility of justice. Until then, words remain provisional. When that act arrives, recognition will endure as a testament that remembrance unites peoples across time and redeems history through truth.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 13 September 2025

IMMIGRATION INSECURITY AND THE PERPETUAL FOREIGNER

The recent anti-immigration protests held in Australian cities serve as a troubling reflection of a society grappling with profound insecurity. A confident Australia that once prided itself on dynamism and outward vision appears increasingly to be turning inward, losing its sense of momentum, retreating behind walls of suspicion and recrimination. The disquiet they reveal is neither incidental, nor ephemeral. It speaks to a deeper malaise, a sense that the nation, rather than confronting the complexities of the present with courage and imagination, prefers to seek refuge in exclusionary certainties.

Historical precedent is clear. Progress is never realised through isolation. It is achieved only through the embrace of challenge, through the pursuit of innovation, and the cultivation of an outward-facing vision. Civilisations that retreated from the world have invariably stagnated, while those that sought engagement with the broader global landscape have forged the paths of advancement. The decline of Ming China after its withdrawal from maritime exploration, the self-imposed isolation of Tokugawa Japan, the fate of Eastern empires that turned their gaze inward rather than outward, are all cases in point.

Nonetheless, the fact that many descendants of immigrants, particularly from the Greek community, were to be found among the ranks of those protesting against immigration, should give us pause for thought. This is especially when we recall that the progressive Greek community in Australia played a significant role in the dismantling of the White Australia Policy, aligning itself with broader struggles for racial equality and multicultural recognition. To now champion anti-immigration sentiment appears not only a contradiction of our own historical experience but a retrograde step that undermines the gains of past generations. Equally concerning is the attempt by some of the protest’s supporters to co-opt the Greek and Italian communities into their narrative by juxtaposing our historical migration with that of newer arrivals from Indian or Muslim backgrounds. Such comparisons are not only simplistic, they are pernicious, for they suggest that communities can be graded upon a scale of legitimacy, with some considered worthy participants in the national project and others permanently suspect.

In their seminal Greek-language study From Foreigner to Citizen: Greek Migrants and Social Change in White Australia 1897-2000,  George Vassilacopoulos and Tina Nicolacopoulou reveal the structural framework within which such narratives operate. They postulate that, despite the veneer of formal equality characterising race relations in this country, there lurks beneath the surface a fundamental concept: that of the perpetual foreigner.

Australian law, founded upon the sanctity of proprietary rights and the elevation of the individual, treats foreigners not as discrete individuals but as aggregated groups. Citizenship and residency may be conferred, but the recipients are not thereby subsumed into the liberal democratic paradigm of individual rights and responsibilities. Instead, they are compelled to remain a collective entity, perpetually expected to display visible signs of loyalty to the ruling culture, lest they be branded suspect.

This theoretical insight is grounded in historical example. Vassilacopoulos and Nicolacopoulou note that early Greek newspapers were closely monitored by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation. They document how Greek-Australian citizens were treated as foreign nationals in various race riots, receiving compensation not as members of the national community but as outsiders. They remind us that Greeks were interned as politically suspect in camps prior to Greece’s entry into the First World War on the side of the Allies, regardless of their citizenship status.

Perhaps the most telling example they provide is the speech of the Lord Mayor of Melbourne at the opening of the first Greek Orthodox Church. Rather than commending the Greek community for its resilience, its cultural vitality, or its contribution to the diversity of the city, the Mayor praised Greeks for being hard-working, law-abiding, and obedient. In other words, they were celebrated not as independent participants in the life of the nation but as a loyal and trustworthy group, permitted to exist on condition of good behaviour.

Multiculturalism, with its promise of inclusivity and celebration of difference, appeared to mark a shift in this paradigm. The metaphor of Australia as a mosaic, or at times as a melting pot, suggested that the old Anglo-Celtic hegemony had yielded to a broader vision. Yet as Vassilacopoulos and Nicolacopoulou observe, the archetype remains stubbornly unchanged.

Ethnic communities have never been fully accepted in the popular consciousness as “Australian.” The term continues in common parlance to refer to those of Anglo-Celtic descent. Even the original custodians of this land are increasingly referred to as “First Peoples” rather than “Australians,” a terminological sleight of hand that preserves the exclusivity of the category. Ethnic groups, meanwhile, are continually called upon to prove their loyalist credentials, expected to distance themselves from any perceived deviance within their ranks, and reminded that their acceptance is conditional.

This, the authors argue, is the plight of the “eternal subversives.” No matter how many generations they have lived upon this soil, no matter how profound their contribution to its culture, they remain at the margins, orientalised, treated as other, or effaced altogether. The ruling class reserves to itself the right to determine which aspects of their identity are safe, which are acceptable, and which must be suppressed.

It is within this framework that the spectacle of descendants of immigrants protesting against immigration must be understood. Such participation reflects not a simple case of amnesia but the internalisation of the very mechanisms of exclusion that once marginalised their own forebears. The narrative of the perpetual foreigner conditions communities to prove their loyalty by distinguishing themselves from newer arrivals. In aligning themselves with exclusionary movements, they attempt to disavow their own otherness, to proclaim that they have crossed the threshold into acceptance, even if only by relegating others to the category they once occupied.

The attempt by protest supporters to draw comparisons between established Mediterranean communities and newer Indian or Muslim ones is part of the same logic. It re-inscribes the idea that legitimacy is conditional, that one earns acceptance through conformity, obedience, and loyalty to the ruling paradigm rather than simply being. It is a discourse of hierarchy and stratification, in which groups compete for validation by distancing themselves from the ever-present spectre of the suspect foreigner.

The Frankfurt School has long argued that societies in crisis project their anxieties onto scapegoated groups. When faced with economic, political, or cultural insecurity, communities seek the illusion of cohesion by identifying and excluding an “other.” This exclusion not only relieves internal tension but reaffirms the authority of the ruling class.

Postcolonial theory similarly illuminates the way ethnic communities are positioned within the national narrative. As Homi Bhabha and Edward Said have observed, the “other” is never granted full subjectivity. It is either fetishised as exotic or demonised as threatening, but never permitted to exist as simply itself. The perpetual foreigner exists in a liminal state, tolerated yet never fully accepted, celebrated only when convenient, condemned when expedient.

Significantly, what emerges with stark clarity in the present climate is that this theatre of exclusion rests upon a still deeper amnesia: the near-total forgetting of the First Peoples. Across the entire spectrum of politics, from left to right, progressives to nationalists, debate proceeds as if the violent seizure of this land, the dispossession of its custodians, and the appropriation of their sovereignty are matters of ancient irrelevance. The very foundation upon which arguments for or against immigration rest is the fiction that the sovereignty exercised here is uncontested and legitimate. In reality it is sovereignty unceded, sovereignty taken by force and never surrendered, what Patrick Wolfe has defined as the central logic of settler colonialism: a structure, not an event.

To ignore this fact is to perpetuate the most profound form of historical erasure. It is to act as if the debates over immigration, belonging, and loyalty can be conducted without reference to the original act of exclusion that defined this nation’s birth. The amnesia is not accidental. It is systemic. It allows the ruling classes to continue asserting their right to determine which migrants may be accepted, which must be marginalised, and which may never belong, while occluding the truth that their own presence rests on dispossession.

This silence is deafening. It echoes through the rituals of parliamentary acknowledgments, which speak of traditional custodianship in the past tense, as if recognition itself were sufficient to compensate for exclusion. It reverberates through the euphemism “First Peoples,” which subtly distinguishes them from “real Australians,” preserving the category of Australianness for the Anglo-Celtic settler. It persists in every discussion of immigration that fails to ask the most basic question: who truly holds the authority to decide who enters this land?

To carry on debates about immigration as if the original custodians have no voice is to perpetuate colonialism in its most insidious form. It is to re-enact the imperial mindset that denied their sovereignty in the first place, transforming them into symbolic presences while excluding them from substantive authority. It is to treat them as if they exist outside the polity, their rights suspended, their voice silenced, their sovereignty effaced.

If history teaches us anything, it is that societies which retreat into isolation and exclusion languish. They close themselves off to the currents of creativity and innovation that come with openness. They trap themselves in cycles of fear and recrimination. They ossify. Conversely, societies that embrace challenge, that look outward, that engage with the world in all its complexity, forge enduring legacies. The Greek city-states of antiquity that opened themselves to commerce, exchange, and cultural interaction flourished, while those that clung to insularity faded. The Australia that will thrive in the century to come will not be the one that hides behind barricades but the one that confronts the world with courage and confidence.

To achieve this, we must first confront our own history. We must acknowledge the structures of exclusion that persist beneath the rhetoric of equality. We must resist the temptation to validate ourselves by denigrating others. We must reject attempts to divide communities along fabricated hierarchies of worth. And above all, we must centre the voices of the First Peoples, recognising that any meaningful discussion of sovereignty must begin with them.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 6 September 2025