WHEN MULTICULTURALISM BECOMES A MATTER OF PUBLIC ORDER

 

The recent cabinet reshuffle in Victoria contained one appointment with particular symbolic resonance: Paul Edbrooke was given responsibility for Police, Emergency Services, Crime Prevention and Multicultural Affairs. There may be perfectly practical reasons for bringing these portfolios together. However, the way a government arranges its ministries also says something about how it understands the relationship between different areas of public life. The new arrangement therefore invites a reasonable question: does placing Multicultural Affairs alongside policing and crime prevention simply reflect administrative convenience, or does it also reveal a broader change in the way cultural diversity is being understood?

The question becomes more significant when considered against the findings of the Victorian Multicultural Review. Completed in 2025 after extensive consultation with multicultural communities, the Review argued for a stronger institutional presence for multicultural policy at the centre of government. Among its recommendations were a dedicated Minister for Multicultural Affairs, retention of the portfolio within the Department of Premier and Cabinet, and mechanisms requiring major government policies to be considered for their effects on multicultural communities. It also recalled an earlier period when Victorian premiers themselves held responsibility for multicultural affairs, giving the portfolio considerable authority across government.

Ministerial portfolios inevitably bring different policy areas into conversation with one another. Roads sit naturally beside road safety, agriculture beside regional development, and the creative industries beside culture. It is therefore worth asking what relationship the government sees between Multicultural Affairs, Police and Crime Prevention. Equally, one might ask why multicultural affairs are not associated more closely with education, culture, community development, or the Premier’s office, particularly given the direction proposed by the Review.

Consultation presents a further question. The Victorian Multicultural Review drew upon extensive engagement with multicultural communities and produced numerous recommendations about the future of multicultural policy. The association of Multicultural Affairs with Police and Crime Prevention does not appear among them. It would therefore be useful to know whether the new arrangement arose from subsequent consultation with communities, or from the government’s own assessment of how the portfolio can best operate. That distinction matters because Australian multiculturalism has developed most successfully when governments and communities have treated one another as partners in shaping policy.

One of multiculturalism’s greatest achievements was precisely its capacity to move cultural difference beyond the realm of social anxiety. During the closing decades of the twentieth century, multicultural policy became part of a larger project of nation building. Australian identity expanded so that people of different languages, religions and backgrounds could participate fully in public life while retaining their cultural inheritance. Interpreting services, community languages, migrant resource centres, ethnic media and recognition of community organisations were therefore more than accommodations for migrants. They became instruments through which democratic participation itself was broadened.

The vocabulary surrounding multiculturalism has since changed. Social cohesion, community safety, hate speech, extremism, foreign interference and resilience now occupy a much more prominent place in official policy. These concerns respond to genuine developments, and governments plainly have a responsibility to protect synagogues, mosques, churches, schools and community centres. The difficulty arises when the vocabulary of risk begins to crowd out the older language of participation, cultural continuity and belonging. Seen in that light, the new ministerial arrangement brings two understandings of diversity into unusually close proximity: diversity as a source of social and cultural strength, and diversity as something increasingly approached through the structures of security, prevention and public order.

For the Greek Australian community, the issue carries particular historical resonance. Greeks were more than beneficiaries of multiculturalism. Through decades of organised advocacy, they actively helped to build it, campaigning for community languages, interpreting services, ethnic broadcasting, equitable access to government services and funding for cultural endeavours. Greek communities, brotherhoods, parishes, schools and newspapers often performed functions resembling an informal welfare system, supporting people whom public institutions had yet to reach effectively.

That history also explains why the language surrounding multiculturalism matters. The first major generation of postwar Greek migrants arrived in an Australia where assimilation remained the prevailing expectation. Greek was frequently regarded as an obstacle for children, migrant institutions were expected eventually to disappear, and successful integration was often understood as progressive approximation to an Anglo-Australian cultural norm. Multiculturalism represented a profound change in that conception of citizenship. It established the possibility that someone could remain culturally Greek while participating fully and unambiguously in Australian civic life.

Yet the abandonment of assimilation as official policy did not necessarily extinguish the older expectation that migrants continually demonstrate the compatibility of their identities with the national norm. Thinkers George Vassilacopoulos and Toula Nicolacopoulou have explored this more complicated history, arguing that migrants in Australia have often occupied the position of the “subordinate foreigner” and the “eternal subversive”, required repeatedly to demonstrate their loyalty and their compatibility with the national narrative. Their analysis provides a useful caution in the present context. When multicultural communities are increasingly discussed through the language of cohesion, surveillance, prevention and foreign interference, legitimate political advocacy can more easily become entangled with questions about loyalty, connections with ancestral homelands can acquire an atmosphere of suspicion, and vigorous disagreement with government policy can be interpreted through the language of integration rather than ordinary democratic contestation.

There is an internal consequence as well. Community organisations that depend substantially upon government funding may gradually learn which forms of advocacy attract support and which create discomfort. Over time, the temptation arises to shape public interventions around the language favoured by government, particularly the language of “social cohesion” or “unity”, while difficult or politically inconvenient questions receive less attention. Representation then risks becoming increasingly concerned with maintaining access to government rather than articulating the independent concerns of the people represented.

None of this requires us to romanticise an earlier age of multicultural policy. Victoria faces challenges that previous generations encountered in different forms, or scarcely encountered at all, and governments have a legitimate responsibility to respond to extremism, hate crime and racism. The question is how those responsibilities can be met without allowing security to become the organising principle of multiculturalism itself. This is particularly important at a time when, across Australia and other Western democracies, political forces are again promoting versions of national identity that favour greater cultural uniformity, expressed through calls for assimilation, anxiety about migration, suspicion of transnational identities and the belief that social cohesion requires a stronger common culture. This makes clarity about the purpose of multicultural policy especially important. Political movements hostile to multiculturalism have long sought to portray cultural difference as a source of fragmentation, divided loyalties and social danger, with greater cultural uniformity offered as the remedy. If the language and structures of government themselves begin, however inadvertently, to associate multiculturalism predominantly with security, extremism and crime prevention, that argument becomes easier to make. A confident multicultural policy should provide the answer: cultural plurality and social cohesion are entirely compatible, and common citizenship derives its strength from democratic participation rather than cultural sameness. In this political climate, where Multicultural Affairs sits within government assumes a significance extending well beyond the allocation of ministerial responsibilities: it speaks, however indirectly, to whether diversity continues to be understood primarily as a dimension of democratic citizenship or is increasingly viewed through the prism of security, prevention and public order.

This also places a responsibility on those who represent multicultural communities. The presence of ministers and parliamentarians from diverse backgrounds is itself one of the achievements of multicultural Victoria. Representation acquires its fullest value when those representatives participate openly in debates about the future direction of multicultural policy. It would therefore be useful to hear from elected representatives of diverse backgrounds and from the representative bodies of our community organisations about whether they believe the new arrangement strengthens multicultural affairs, how they understand its rationale, and how they envisage the portfolio retaining a broad role across government.

Labor played a decisive role in establishing multicultural Victoria, alongside politicians and governments from other traditions. That history gives the present government a particular reason to explain how the new arrangement accords with the recent Review’s recommendation that multicultural policy should enjoy stronger influence at the centre of government. Such an explanation would also clarify what practical authority the portfolio will retain across departments whose decisions directly affect multicultural Victorians.

Governments are entitled to organise their ministries in the way they consider most effective, and administrative arrangements will inevitably change with circumstances. Multicultural communities are equally entitled to ask what those arrangements signify for a policy that has contributed profoundly to the character of modern Victoria. At its most ambitious, multiculturalism rested on the proposition that cultural difference could enrich a common democratic life without weakening common citizenship. At a time when that proposition is again being challenged by those who present cultural uniformity as the answer to social division, governments and multicultural communities alike have an interest in stating clearly what multiculturalism is for and why it remains worth defending. The question raised by the present arrangement therefore reaches beyond the distribution of portfolios: it concerns whether cultural difference continues to occupy a legitimate and confident place within the political imagination of Victoria itself.

DEAN KALIMNIOU

kalymnios@hotmail.com

First published in NKEE on Saturday 29 August 2026