We have over recent years endured debates that call for multiculturalism to be abandoned because it is seen as divisive and detrimental to Australia. Nothing is further from the truth.
Without multicultural policy, Australia’s modern multicultural society would not have achieved the social cohesion we have that has enabled us to prosper as a nation. Its promotion of inclusion, and fairness, its promotion of understanding and acceptance, its recognition that racism is harmful to individuals and to society, its recognition that this behaviour should not be tolerated has meant that far from being divisive and destructive, it has been, what Arthur Calwell, former Labor leader and Australia's first immigration minister, and his contemporaries envisaged… a success story for Australian nationhood.
