The Australian Population Research Institute, April 2024 - Recollections of a reluctant ‘ethnic’

It was an opportune time to embark on this field of reporting in the wake of the controversial 1987 FitzGerald inquiry which took a dim view of multiculturalism and stressed the importance of economic need for migration policy. [...] However, as Birrell noted, the trend by the federal Labor government in the mid 1990s was to emphasise ethnic differences and to require public agencies to set targets to ensure proportionate representation of employees with non-English speaking backgrounds (NESB). [...] The 1995 report by the National Multicultural Advisory Council, The Next Steps: Multicultural Australia, Towards and Beyond 2000, called on the government to incorporate “multicultural principles” in any proposed revision of the Australian Constitution. [...] Multiculturalism is not much talked about these days, and gone is the time when ethnic leaders and their organisations were given prominence on the national stage, especially in the era of the Hawke and Keating Labor governments. [...] In the age of social media and cancellation, it seems considerably more difficult to report on and challenge the new diversity than it was to cover multicultural affairs in my time.