Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Australian Politics and Policy
up to ten customers and eight employees. After a 16-hour stand-off hostages Tori
Johnson and Katrina Dawson were killed, along with the gunman, when police
raided the cafe. Since the Lindt cafe siege, there have been several other attacks
by individuals with Muslim backgrounds, including in Sydney in 2015, when an
Iraqi youth attacked with a knife and shot an accountant who worked for the
New South Wales Police in Parramatta, and in Melbourne in 2018, when a Somali
migrant stabbed three pedestrians and a police officer, who later died in hospital.
These attacks further damaged government support for multiculturalism. They also
harmed Muslim communities that in most cases had fled from wars, terrorism and
religious violence in their countries of origin, only to be confronted with the reality
of politically motivated violence once again.
Public support for multiculturalism
So far, this chapter has looked at the development of multicultural Australia from
the perspective of government in response to changing immigration patterns,
public fears about national identity, globalisation and national security. However,
throughout the changes in government policy, the broader Australian public has
maintained consistent views towards multiculturalism. One way to measure public
attitudes towards multiculturalism is to ask people whether they feel equal
opportunities for migrants have gone too far. As can be seen in the previous section,
the original goals of multicultural Australia were to provide equal opportunities
for migrants through a range of programs, such as providing English as a second
language support for migrants from NESB, as well as a range of migrant welfare,
cultural and translation services.
Figure 1 shows the results from the 1990–2016 Australian Election Studies.
The Australian Election Study surveys a representative sample of Australians each
election year, asking questions on a range of social and political issues. The
advantage of the Australian Election Studies is the way in which the surveys track
political attitudes and behaviours over time, asking the same questions in each
election year. The results in Figure 1 reveal that up to 44 per cent of respondents
were not overly supportive of multiculturalism in the early 1990s. Interestingly,
the percentage that were concerned about multiculturalism decreased in the years
leading up to the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the follow-up concerns about migration,
particularly arrivals of asylum-seekers with Muslim backgrounds. Asylum-seeker
arrivals became a source of political controversy during the 2001 election
campaign. In 2001, the Howard government, in what became known as the ‘Tampa
Affair’, claimed that asylum seekers had thrown their children overboard to secure
long-term protection in Australia. An Australian Senate Select Committee later
found that the children of asylum seekers were not placed at risk and that the
government had tried to mislead voters.
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