Australian multiculturalists know they have a problem but ignore history in looking for the solution

They are part of the problem rather than part of the solution. Community relations were better before they came along

Miranda Devine has an interesting article pointing out that even Australian left liberals are now airing doubts about multiculturalism's ugly side. She points out how recently Philip Adams interviewed Professor Jerzy Zubrzycki, the man often credited with being the intellectual architect of Australia's multiculturalism policy.

"Zubrzycki told Adams the Cronulla riots were a "wake-up call" for multiculturalism. They illustrated the folly of dumping poor, unskilled migrants from Lebanon in the outer suburbs of Sydney in the 1980s, "on the understanding they would be looked after by their families . We left them to their own devices, with no specific settlement policy, traumatised [by civil war], unable to speak the language, unable to come to grips with Australian culture and also largely of the Islamic faith" ."

So the answer to multiculturalism's failures is even more multicultural bureaucracy. Isn't this like a losing General demanding he be sent more troops? My guess is that both Adams and Zubrzycki would (as I do) regard Australia's post WW2 immigration as successful. Yet the hundreds of thousands who came to our shores in the two decades after WW2, many of whom experienced devastation and wartime traumas, at least as bad as anything seen in Lebanon, had far fewer government provided services than immigrants and refugees who have arrived in recent decades. Many post-WW2 refugee immigrants to Australia ended up in Displaced Persons camps and had to spend two years living in amenity poor tent cities, with dozens of nationalities thrown together, more or less at random, working with pick and shovel before being released into the general community. Once released they had no translator services, no high profile community advocates on TV every night, and anti-discrimination laws were decades away. Hard work was really their only option. Still they survived and thrived. The immigrant groups who have come since the 1990s have, comparatively speaking, had it easy.

The pundits also ignore the comparative add-on costs between the two generations of immigrants and it's impact in promoting anti-immigration sentiment in the wider community. In the 1940s-1960s immigrants had a much lower government spending price tag per capita, even in relative terms, than in the 1990s-2000s. As such it shouldn't be surprising to learn that polls show popular opposition to the immigration program was much lower in the earlier period. Despite Australian society in the 1990s being considered much more diverse and 'tolerant' than the "White Australia" of the 1950s.

Trickle down arguments about modern immigrants 'paying their own way' may be correct in a textbook economics sense but are irrelevant in this particular case. If modern immigrants manage to 'pay their own way', the earlier generation must have been a bargain. The pundits also fail to explain why there were no "anti-immigrant" riots among the former generation of anglophile-educated Australians. No liberal pundits have even noticed that the participants in the Cronulla riot were actually from the first generation of Australians with pro-multicultural schooling from their first day of kindergaten. We know that three generations of Communist propaganda failed to turn the Russians into true believer marxists. Even though in the Soviet era all learned to mouth the phrases as required. Perhaps a similar situation impacts the doctrine of multiculturalism. Zubrzycki's solution would undoubtedly exacerbate tensions not relieve them.

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