National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia
Sharing our future
Foreward
Australia has changed dramatically in the last generation. Our strategic relationships, trading network and investment patterns have become far more enmeshed in the Asia Pacific region; and our immigration policy has been progressively liberalised.
The face of Australia is being transformed. Not long ago we saw ourselves as a nation descended exclusively from British and Irish migrants. That is no longer so. There is increasing recognition that Aboriginal people have a special status in our nation. Immigrants and refugees, selected from more than 140 countries, have been attracted by our British heritage and institutions.
My own electorate of Wills is a microcosm of the new Australia. Of every 20 residents, 7 were born overseas, 6 of them in a non-English speaking country. A further 6 are the children of such immigrants. As a result, 8 in every 20 families in Wills speak a language other than English at home.
The task for governments is to respond to the challenge of this diversity. We need to meet its demands in the attitudes we encourage, the policies we design, and the programs we initiate and deliver. We need fully to harness the enormous wealth of human talent available to us.
The term multiculturalism describes both the reality of Australia's diversity and the range of policies necessary to respond to it. Yet when I visit schools across Australia, and when I talk to children from a wide variety of backgrounds about their vision of our future, such definitions seem unnecessary. They live and enjoy multiculturalism at first hand.
The National Agenda for a Multicultural Australia represents my Government's policy response to the changing composition of the Australian people. It is based on the splendid work over two years of the Advisory Council on Multicultural Affairs headed by Sir James Gobbo and Mr George Wojak and on extensive community consultations undertaken by the Office of Multicultural Affairs in my Department.
The Agenda has been developed within the context of economic restraint that is the hallmark of my Government. It expresses the goals, priorities and strategies that the Government considers necessary in order to promote respect for individual identity, to ensure social cohesion and to enhance social justice. It addresses not only issues of equity but also of economic efficiency.
I hope that no Australian will deny that the important new initiatives set out in the Agenda are necessary and that they will help to fashion a better and fairer Australia for us and our children.
Bob HawkePrime Minster
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