Australian Politics and Policy - Senior, 2019a

Multicultural Australia
Figure 1 Attitudes towards multiculturalism and immigration (%). Source: 1990–2016
Australian Election Studies, https://australianelectionstudy.org/.
The percentage of survey participants that were concerned about multiculturalism
increased throughout the first decade of the 21st century from 27 per
cent in 2004 to 35 per cent in 2016. This may, in part, be related to increasing media
attention on terrorist attacks in other countries. However, the results in Figure 1
also show that attitudes towards levels of migration run parallel to attitudes towards
multiculturalism, with an increasing percentage of Australians concerned about the
number of migrants allowed into Australia. In 2016, more than 40 per cent of the
Australian population felt that the number of migrants allowed into Australia had
gone too far, increasing from a low of 27 per cent in 2004.
Australian attitudes towards multiculturalism and immigration are also consistently
related to several important background factors, such as age, education
and political identification. Table 1 shows that, in more recent election years,
younger Australians were less likely to be concerned about equal opportunities
for migrants, compared to older Australians. For example, in 2016, only 14 per
cent of respondents in the ‘18–24’ age bracket expressed, concern compared with
over 40 per cent of respondents in the ‘35–44’ and ‘55 and over’ age brackets. In
some elections, younger respondents were more likely to express concern about
multiculturalism, compared to older respondents, such as in 1990, 1996, 1998,
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