Eleven months ago, I wrote an article for Pearls and Irritations called A good captain can stop this Senator’s social cohesion ‘Titanic’.
After the August anti-immigration rallies, I argued Australia could still change course. After a year in which far-right and neo-Nazi groups had become increasingly confident in public, ordinary Australians had turned up in numbers. Something previously easier to quarantine as fringe politics had acquired the possibility of becoming a mass vote.
Last year I believed good political leadership could still stop our ship hitting the ice. This week we saw that mass vote win Secret Harbour in Western Australia for One Nation.
The iceberg has hit.
In 1912 the Titanic struck its iceberg at 11.40pm. By 2am, the ship was in its final stages of sinking. The time for a better captain, a different course or another discussion about navigation had passed. I think it is past 2am for both multiculturalism and social cohesion.
So lectures announcing the failure of social cohesion or multiculturalism seem rather late. Equally puzzling is the growing push among established academics and senior commentators towards another idea: interculturalism.
The idea makes sense. There isn’t one Muslim community, Chinese community, Indian community or white community. Class, generation, religion, gender, sexuality and politics run through all of them. People within communities disagree all the time.
Sure, research it to design better programmes and publish it. But it isn’t the Carpathia.
When the Titanic sank, the Carpathia answered its distress call. It arrived after the ship had already gone down and rescued those who had survived long enough to reach the lifeboats.
Interculturalism may help us understand the passengers better. It may help design programmes for diverse shipyards to build the next ship. But at 2am it is not a lifeboat.
Seminars on replacing the word “multiculturalism” with “interculturalism” sound infuriating to anyone swallowing salt water right now.
That water is gushing through the hull from directions multicultural policy wasn’t designed to float with. Foreign policy eventually comes home. Gaza. Bondi. AUKUS. Cost of living and a housing crisis never imagined when they coined the term the Lucky Country. A potential Asia-Pacific war.
We keep asking multicultural policy to repair domestic consequences created in portfolios over which it has almost no control. Park-the-war-at-the-door fantasies didn’t work for Gaza and they won’t work for Jason Arday’s death in Britain.
We cannot behave as though events overseas remain overseas. Compartments flood.
Interculturalism is a Harmony Day dinner at the captain’s table.
Diasporic communities don’t experience the world through denial. Most of them are travelling in steerage. Knowing where that ice is splintering is about survival.
Yet we keep inventing First Class words to describe the reality of multicultural Australia. No wonder multicultural Australians are also angry. To people who feel they are about to die, lectures on positivity can land flat.
We can value our government-aligned peak bodies while seeing them continually fail to narrate rapid change. The view from steerage is people with time, money and fluency in the accent of government that looks increasingly distant from their lived experiences.
Then there is Pauline Hanson’s One Nation.
She understands a distress signal that parts of First Class still seem unable to hear. She tells people in steerage that First Class isn’t listening.
She’s right about that.
But Hanson is a false Carpathia. She’s not going to save anyone.
Hanson’s captain’s call is to tell some passengers that other passengers are the problem. She offers belonging by drawing tighter boundaries around who belongs. She turns steerage against steerage and turns the lifeboat into another argument about who deserves a seat.
Abusing her voters won’t help.
We should be asking why her message reaches people our institutions no longer can.
We should stop assuming that thought leadership lives only in First Class. It is in steerage too. Mums and dads, young people, migrants and refugees, queer Australians, people of different faiths and none, and white Australians who have never travelled First Class either.
The people living through these pressures are not simply communities to be researched, consulted or reassured.
They will never use words like interculturalism. In ordinary language, it sounds like a wank.
Steerage uses words like “fair go” and “help” and Ed Husic’s colourful line “I don’t give a shit”.
Arguing over words is also an insult to the pain of the moment for many.
Civilians know things.
If only they were asked.
Government still has a job. A very large one.
But instead of another ‘what’ concept, we need more and faster ‘hows’.
How will different Australians actually meet and work together?
How will budgets pay for that?
How will foreign policy account for its consequences at home?
How will government hear families who don’t attend conferences, join peak bodies or speak in the accent of government?
So give people something real to do together.
Young Australians don’t need another youth leadership programme to teach them to care about their country. They already care about housing, fires, floods, the environment, AI, their communities and their future.
Build big national programmes around the things people already care about and let them work on them together.
The sinking of the Titanic changed things. Ships had to be made safer. Companies had to build enough lifeboats for everyone. The scale of the disaster changed the scale of the response.
Wasting time at the captain’s table choosing polite words for imminent catastrophe is exactly what One Nation wants.
Of course people are leaving the major political parties in droves.
We don’t need another job description for captains that keep jumping ship.
Re-anointing the word multiculturalism as interculturalism won’t build more lifeboats.
Nor should we wait for another saviour ship to appear on the horizon because for too many Australians it’s cold, it’s past 2am, and they need more than First Class telling steerage to stay calm and carry on.
Carl Gopalkrishnan is an Australian writer, essayist and artist based in Perth, Western Australia. His writing explores multiculturalism, social cohesion, politics and contemporary Australian society.
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