Professor Jock Collins, UTS The Great Hall, April 2010

START OF TRANSCRIPT

Roy Green: I'm the Dean of the UTS Business Faculty, and it's my great pleasure to welcome you this evening to the second presentation this year in the 2010 UTSPEAKS series with our own Professor Jock Collins. First, however,First, however, may I acknowledge and pay respects to the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation on whose land UTS stands. Can I also say that you should be aware that this lecture is being digitally recorded and also videotaped to be aired on the ABC2 Big Ideas television programme. So, please turn off your phones completely to ensure no electronic interference occurs and, also, if you need to go in and out of the doors, please do so as quietly as you can, and go preferably via the back doors - the doors tend to be very noisy for some reason.

So, to tonight's topic, which is very timely, given the growing debate in the community, within politics, and within the media about immigration, multiculturalism, and our ethnic communities. You may know or you may not that there are about 200 million international migrants in the world today. In the past two decades, international migration flows rose with globalisation as most Western nations, including many like Italy and Ireland, which had historically been nations of emigration, sought to import workers to fill labour shortages created by the globalisation boom.

The Australian business community has benefited enormously from migration, permanent and temporary, particularly of skilled workers. Universities like UTS have also benefited from the influx of international students, though, as we know, recent events in Melbourne remind us of the ever present dangers to harmonious integration into our multicultural society.

At our faculty, the UTS Faculty of Business, located in the creative hub of Sydney and, indeed, in Sydney's Chinatown, we are committed to providing world-class education for students of all backgrounds. We're also committed to researching and understanding the important roles that linguistic, cultural, and religious diversity play in local and global markets with support from our business, government, and community stakeholders.

We are a leading business school in one of the world's greatest cosmopolitan global cities, and this requires us to have an understanding of and a commitment to a diverse and socially cohesive Australia. So, we look forward to a very informed discussion and debate on this topic tonight, and we will also welcome your questions at the end of the lecture.

Firstly, to introduce our topic and our keynote speaker this evening, I'm pleased to welcome Mr Pino Migliorino, who was last year elected Chairman of the Federation of Ethnic Community Councils of Australia. Pino migrated to Australia in 1964, he is a graduate of the University of Sydney, and has been involved in multicultural affairs and ethnic community activities for nearly three decades. He has a very long CV, great experience - I won't try to cover it all - but he is a former Executive Officer of the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW, former Principal Policy Officer of the former Ethnic Affairs Commission of NSW, and he also manages Cultural Perspectives and CIRCA organisations that provide research and marketing services in the multicultural and indigenous spheres.

In 2009, Pino's work with the Italian community and in multicultural affairs was recognised by the Italian Government, which awarded him the honorary title of Commendatore. Would you please warmly welcome Mr Pino Migliorino.

Pino Migliorino: Thank you very much. I'm very honoured to be here, and when Jock asked me, I think I bowled him over in how quickly I said yes. It's not often that someone who's been a practitioner in this field gets to speak to an audience of academia and people involved in academia, and yet it's so really important that the two worlds of advocacy and academia work together.

I'm honoured here to present this quick introduction and, may I say, given this huge turnout - it is a huge turnout - I love the fact that Jock was the drawcard and I'm getting the reflected glory, so it's fantastic for me. For me, Jock has been part of my life, I suppose, for nearly 30 years. I've been in that ambit of ethnic affairs, either looking up or looking sideways, or working with Jock, and it's been quite an extraordinary period.

He represents the - I call it the Young Turk movement of academia, and it followed on from names like Charles Price, [Jersey Zubrisky], [Sol Insul], [Lucky Jayasuriya], and it's an amazing group because, with his cohorts - and they were named Yakubovich, Kalantzis and Cope - they developed a new critique, new dimensions, and new perspectives on areas which were just evolving - diversity, social policy, racism, multiculturalism. It's really interesting where we are now, and the public debate we see in our daily papers around population, and social diversity, and threats to social cohesion. The lack of detailed knowledge, the lack of evidence, the lack of anything which reflects any form of academic rigour in the debate at the moment is appalling - is absolutely appalling.

When you read those reports in newspapers, you challenge them, you look for where the evidence is because, unless we start getting to a realistic discussion of what numbers are really numbers of migration, of what population increase means, and on how different populations need to work together, we will not get very far.

I love Jock's body of work because it's so broad and diverse. He has not only commented on the difficulties of multicultural societies, and social inclusion, and development over time, he's also talked about a range and an investigated range of the positives. Regional migration - one that almost disappears on the landscape - when you talk about migration to people, they say it's only in the big cities, but the reality is Australia's regional hubs have been developed by early migration. The development of refugee settlement into country New South Wales, and country Queensland, and country Victoria, will be a hallmark of future development.

That area is being given voice by work that Jock's done. Work on ethnic entrepreneurs and on multicultural precincts, and I remember first hearing about it from Jock, and I thought, why is he doing work around Marrickville? Isn't it a bit light on? And then I thought, no, not really, because what the precinct studies do is they show a really interesting social phenomenon, which is about how groups settle in Australia, and the infrastructure they require to settle. What we should be learning from that is absolutely essential if we're looking to understand what will keep people in rural areas to create rural communities. That sense of what their fundamental needs are and how they are fundamentally met. Not only that - not only is that a social phenomenon on in terms of settlement, it's also, and I think more importantly, the pathway to social mobility.

If you look at those little shops, if you look at those businesses, those micro businesses, the fact that they involve the husband, the wife, the grandparents, the cousins, the kids. The kids hate it because they'd rather be playing rugby league or tennis down the road, but they're there every night. Seeing how long those shops are open, and what they do is take away a sense of what it actually means to work for something, the value of effort and, from that, social mobility, which comes with that. As the parents always say, if you don't want to work as hard as I am, go and get an education. When you look in the halls of this university and many of the others, that message is actually getting through.

He's also looked at a range of difficult issues - immigrant crime, immigrant youth and their struggles, in terms of growing up in Australia. Some recent work that Jock's done, that hasn't actually seen the light of day, has got some really interesting things to say. I did a piece for the Federal Government a couple of years back in the same areas and, for me, the really interesting phenomena was that the migrating groups, especially from the Middle East and from Muslim backgrounds, were really happy with Australia and saw it as a fantastic place - their kids didn't. Their kids didn't. We have some major issues we need to address, and the quicker we get to an evidence base, in terms of what migration is actually meaning for young people now, the better. I think what I'd like to quickly focus on the end is tonight's lecture.

From what Jock has actually undertaken, and this range of learning, the insights that he has and, this might sound rude to him, but the sectoral longevity. He's been around for a long, long time. He's seen these things take place. It's not just from book learning; it's actually being involved with them. What that's done is allowed him to discuss key issues, and the key issue tonight is the basis of what is in the papers? The immigration and population debate. What is the nexus between diversity and cohesion, and can we hope to create an Australia of the future, which actually allows our kids to feel that they are part of an Australian mainstream? I think that is the challenge.

While a large and complex migration will invariably throw up various conflicts and challenges to cohesion, Jock will demonstrate the relative civil harmony, which has allowed significant settlement and upward mobility. Anyone who questions the value of multiculturalism need only look at the second-generational mobility in all the groups out of the post-war period to know that it's been extremely successful.

I'm also keen, and this is, I suppose, a challenge in the presentation, to hear his views about the nature of leadership in this area and in the ongoing population debate because, not only will we need good evidence, but we'll also need good leadership.

So, in conclusion, I think it's imperative that academics are involved in the multicultural discourse, and I think there is a need for evidence which cuts through the popular stuff that we see on our newspapers and TV screens on a nightly basis, and there is a need for a rational and informed debate, and I know tonight's lecture will be very, very pertinent to that debate. I'd like to introduce Jock Collins.

Jock Collins: Thanks very much for the kind words. Oops - the very first mistake I was told not to do. Thank you all very much for coming tonight to this lecture. I'd like to start by also paying my respects to the indigenous people of this nation. I think it's something that's very important, and it's not a tokenistic thing as some federal politicians seem to think it is.

My talk tonight is on diversity and cohesion, and I use the subtitle of cosmopolitan contradictions because the way in which I look at the whole immigration story is neither terrifically good nor terrifically bad; it's a bit of a mixed picture. Those contradictions or those mixtures are quite important because that's where all the real stuff happens, and we need to pry into that, even though sometimes governments aren't happy about talking about issues like racism, or conflict, or identity. These are very important issues for us.

Of course, diversity is a very broad term. It covers religious diversity, and diversity of sexual preferences, and of abilities, and a whole range of things, but what I want to concentrate on, of course, is the diversity that comes from immigration - cultural, linguistic, religious diversity. Also, I want to look at cohesion because part of my key arguments is that we are a remarkably cohesive society, but at the same time - and I'll give you some figures to support this - we have more immigrants of a greater diversity than almost any other country. And yet, when you see the media headlines, when you see ethnic diversity, you expect and mostly get an image of conflict to follow that. And we haven't followed that path. I think more by accident than by design, although I think the important design element in ensuring cohesion is multiculturalism, and I want to talk a little bit about that.

I want to throw in something about cosmopolitanism, to think about that as a concept and what that might mean, and give you some figures about Australia as a migration nation because this is important data. We need hard evidence in this debate. I think the whole issue of racism is very important. Politicians are very uncomfortable with racism. They don't want to have research into it. They want to sweep it under the carpet. As the events of the Indian students in Melbourne, but also in Sydney, Harris Park, and other places, and other foreign students, have shown that this is not a thing that we can sweep under the carpet unless we address it head-on.

I suppose one of my key themes is that racism is the social cancer that will undermine Australian cosmopolitan society. We must be ever vigilant and increasingly vigilant about racism, and I think neither federal, state government of any political persuasion has been adequate in that front so far today.

I want to talk a little bit about multiculturalism and how you manage diversity, before returning to some of these key cosmopolitan contradictions, and say something at the end about the way forward.

Now, essentially, if we look at immigrant diversity, we are one of the world's greatest migration nations - I'll give you some figures in the next slide to show that compared to others - but I think one metaphor that captures this diversity is the fact that when we had the opening of the Sydney Olympic Games, and some of you may remember it, I remember very fondly being in the stands when Cathy Freeman won the 400m. Everyone was screaming and crying and it was this amazing moment.

But the thing is that at the opening and closing ceremonies of that Olympic Games, there was a community living in Sydney for every nation that walked around with a flag, and that's quite an amazing thing. It hadn't happened before. Maybe we can say the same for the London Olympic Games, but it's a very rare event, and it points to the great diversity we have. A diversity, of course, initially with the indigenous peoples - terrific diversity there - but also with the migration flows that have followed in the 200-odd years since that time.

Also, there's a colleague called Steve Vertovec, who's introduced this term called super-diversity. If you just look at the italicised part of that, in a sense, the complexity of diversity is so fundamental and so all-embracing, affecting all the elements of public and private life, that he promotes this notion of super-diversity and thinks that the policymakers haven't caught up with this notion. He's talking, of course, about the UK, which has nowhere near the immigration history and size that we have, and I think if ever there's a nation where the term super-diversity is relevant, then Australia certainly would be one of those countries.

I just point to that particular slide - figures aren't always terrific, but if you see up the top there - my little pointer is gone - but Australia is up the top there - 23.8 per cent of our population are first-generation immigrants. When you add the second-generation, that's much larger. If you go down the list, the very bottom one is the United States. We have many more than that - Canada, New Zealand, they're also very high. So, as a Western nation of immigration, we have more than most other countries and also of a greater diversity - those two things. Despite that - despite the so-called problems that the immigration critics would argue, we tend to actually be travelling pretty well, and my main message is that cohesion tends to dominate over conflict, but not always, and that's the important contradiction.

Of course, we now have a very, very diverse population. Just to give you a few little images of that. This one relates to ancestry. Census data used to mainly collect birthplace data. The problem with birthplace data is it doesn't equate with ethnic diversity. You might be ethnic Chinese but born in Malaysia, or Fiji, or China, or the UK. That is not captured by birthplace data, so for a couple of censuses, the ABS has collected ancestry data. So, this gives us another window into issues of ethnic diversity. It just gives you, obviously, the English, Scottish, Irish, initially; the Italians and Germans, the big waves in the '50s and '60s; and then the Chinese, the Indians, Lebanese, Vietnamese, et cetera, as we go.

If you look at the top 10 countries of immigration each year, it's normally New Zealand, UK - one or two - they challenge. The top 10 are normally all from Asian countries - maybe South Africa pops in there. It shows you that the web - the immigration net - has gone all around the world progressively to different countries, bringing increasing diversity to our country. Linguistic diversity is another dimension of that. Language spoken at home is the question we normally ask to get some indication of that. We see, in particular, at the bottom there, the growth of Cantonese, Mandarin, and Arabic, reflecting the waves of immigration, in particular, of the last few decades.

Of course, with that we get terrific diversity in religious beliefs and, of course, we are mainly a Christian nation, but increasing numbers of people from all different religious faiths and backgrounds. Of course, the ability to allow people to practice their faith whatever it is without hindrance, or race hatred, or religious hatred, or whatever, is a very important thing to maintain in this society. I think, unfortunately, a few of the ugly chapters, like in Camden recently, with this massive opposition to a Muslim school, and all the people waving the Australian flag and being passionate, you really wonder whether or not had it been a Catholic school or a Church of England school, whether the same sort of response would have occurred.

Of course, the other thing is, in a sense, people don't live in Australia. They do, but they live in a neighbourhood; they live in a place. If you look at our major cities, and as Pino said, most of the Australian immigration has been urbanised. In fact, immigrants are more urban dwellers than we are on the whole, and Australia is one of the greatest urbanised nations in the world. I think the latest data puts the Netherlands as the most urbanised nation. I think we're about third or fourth somewhere in that league. So, immigration has fed that, although interestingly enough, immigrants have recently been redirected to other areas. Interestingly enough, mainly as a result of the environmental debate, which is one of the anti-immigration debates that I want to talk to you about at the end. So, you can see about 57 per cent of people in Sydney are first or second-generation immigrants. It's an amazing phenomenon.

In the late 1990s, I did a book about that, where we wrote about 60 different ethnic groups in Sydney and where they are, and when they came, and the churches, and the radio stations, and the newspapers. This is a rich tapestry of life we have, and it's important that people document that sort of thing. Also, where people live because, it wouldn't be a surprise to you, living in Sydney, that most immigrant minorities live in western and south-western Sydney. Not as many on the North Shore, although that's changed, of course, because a lot of skilled, professional Chinese and other immigrants live on the northern shore - Chatswood - and there's an increasing encroachment there because not only do we have ethnic and religious diversity, we have class diversity, and class is an important element in the picture that I'm trying to draw tonight for you.

Just to dig deeper down to the local level, we have a number of different statistical local areas and the proportion of the population who are born overseas and, of course, the inner Sydney one is the highest, but Auburn - and I'll mention Auburn in a minute - has nearly 60 per cent of the population who are immigrants. We list just the first three groups, but the point that I want to make here is that in these suburbs, there aren't ghettos where you find all Greeks, or all Chinese, or all Lebanese. In all our neighbourhoods, they're terrifically culturally diverse. There's an amazing range of people who live there. Unlike, for example, the UK, where you may have whole neighbourhoods of Indian, or Pakistani, or Afro-Caribbean immigrants living there in large numbers, we are very, very diverse, and I think that's one of the elements of our success to some extent. That we don't have ghettos that become just one group and no one else can go there.

Despite the fact that if you read the papers about ethnic crime, you could never go through Lakemba, or you could never go through Punchbowl or Bankstown because you'd never get out alive. It's Lebanese who only live there but, of course, we know that's not true - that stereotype. We need to unpack that because the fabric of racism is generalising. Middle Eastern - what's Middle Eastern? It's a huge area. Middle Eastern is so many different nations, cultures, traditions, and we lump these things together in very loose ways. We talk about Lebanese crime, Middle Eastern crime - we don't worry about specificity; they're all the same. We brand cultures as criminal, and these are some of the dangers, I think, of reporting and responding to cultural diversity.

Just to add a personal perspective to this, because immigration is a personal matter, people immigrate, people move, it's very significant for families, even the poor people who pay $30,000, $40,000, $50,000 to the snakeheads, to the boat smugglers, to try and get here. It's a human story of emotion, of drama, of doing the best for your family.

I grew up in Auburn in the '50s and '60s. My father was a railway worker; my mother was a tea lady. Auburn, at that time, was a fibro, white-bread, working-class, Anglo-Celtic area. If you look at Auburn today - and you remember the slide before - nearly 60 per cent of the population born in other countries. In some ways, it's a metaphor for the whole change of immigration in Australian society. To throw another personal dimension, my parents were uncomfortable with that change, and they moved to the Central Coast in retirement, and always say how happy they are to get out of Auburn. So, these are - immigration does change the neighbourhood, and some people, particularly elderly groups, do feel disconnected.

The people in, say, Burwood or Ashfield, they go down there - the older working-class used to walk down - they'd know the butcher, this person would say hello. Now, maybe they're all Chinese restaurants and Chinese - they don't have that connect, so there's a disconnection, and we mustn't always just label that as a racism, as a redneck - we've got to, in a sense, understand diversity and responses to diversity in a sympathetic way.

I just wanted to throw this up here. This is 2006 data of the Shire - Cronulla Beach - and juxtaposing that to Canterbury and Bankstown. If there is a ghetto in Sydney or Australia, it's actually the Shire, and it's a white ghetto. If you look at the portion of the population born overseas, 80 per cent, what proportion of Islamic faith there, 0.7 per cent, and terrifically dominant. If you look at the other - if you go to Bankstown, you'll see that only 15.2 per cent of the population are Islamic. Well, if you listen to some of the shock jocks, you think they're all Islamic. They're all out there to get you, they're living there, they're waiting for you, just ready to pounce on you, and you see this great diversity. This is an important background to understand the Cronulla Riots, which is the most recent example in Sydney of conflict.

So, let's think - so, diversity - I've tried to sketch the elements of diversity by using census data and other things. The other key theme of the lecture, of course, is cohesion. It's naive to expect a society without some conflict. In fact, Karl Marx, of course, saw class struggle, or class conflict, as the driving engine of history. So, that wasn't accidental; that was central to the nation. If you even look to the Chicago School of Robert Park, who looked at immigrants there, he argued that immigrants would have to go through a conflicting stage before they assimilated. It was sort of like a necessary step to assimilation. That was sort of a good thing, that conflict, because once they got that out of the system, they were okay; they were happy to settle down.

My argument is that if you look at over the seven decades of immigration, we've been remarkably free of conflict. I looked, as we all did, in some shock and horror at our TV screens when we saw the Cronulla Riots being broadcast - some 3000 or 4000, mainly young males, mainly drunk, many of them proudly wearing the Australian flag, chasing and bashing anyone that looked dark-skinned. It didn't really matter, really. Muslim, Middle Eastern, it didn't matter - they weren't white. That horrific moment really challenged our notion as a cohesive society, and there were a number of people who played a key role in that, urging people to go to defend our beaches and, of course, the issues are quite complex.

When I looked at that, and I said, all right, let's look back in history. What are the worst elements of conflict? There have been many worse than that, say, in the Kalgoorlie fields, there were a number of people killed in race riots in the '20s. If you look back through the history of things - various riots in Melbourne - it was an ugly, horrible moment. It showed us that racism is ever vigilant, waiting to rear its ugly head. But also, when you step back and you look at the history of it, you say, if that's the worst we've had in six decades, maybe we're not travelling too badly. So, those two messages come out. Racism - it's there, be vigilant. But at the same time, this is the exception and not the rule.

There was Andrew Marcus has done a study on social cohesion in Australia, funded by the Scanlon Foundation. They did a report in '07 and another report in '09. The interesting thing there, is that - and I'll come to this in a moment - that I expected, with the global financial crisis, there would be a real outbreak of racism and conflict, and we'd see this mass conflict. It didn't happen. Interestingly enough, in the '09 survey that Marcus did, they found that people are more supportive of immigration than the '07 survey, which occurred before the global financial crisis hit. So, maybe that's another measure of the cohesive nature of Australian society.

But there's a cosmopolitan contradiction that this cohesion coexists with conflict. It's like a tightrope walk. Mainly, we're teetering to one side and then the other. Mostly, we fall on the side of cohesion, but there are occasional moments - Cronulla, the Indian students down in Melbourne, other examples we could tell you about, where that's not the case. Not to mention, of course, the racism that people of Muslim faith have suffered after 9/11, and the bombings, and the racism that Indigenous people suffer all the time. So, these two things coexist.

Another term that I want to throw into the picture is the term cosmopolitanism. I do that partly because, if you've seen at the bottom there, we've established at UTS a Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Research Centre. Those things, cosmopolitan and civil, diverse but civil - an emphasis of social justice across a whole range of fears we think is a very important field to study. The distinctive feature of this particular research centre, it's a cross faculty research centre - we've got the Faculty of Business, the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, we've had some Faculty of Law people, and so we're really interested in this new space - this interdisciplinary space where we can learn a lot from new disciplines, and we're really encouraged about the work we have done.

If you look at the term cosmopolitanism - I've got a bit of a definition there - belonging to all parts of the world; not limited to one part of the social, political, commercial or intellectual world; free from local, provincial, and national ideas, and prejudices. So, in many ways, that appeals to me - that sort of notion - that we're not hung up on that. Pino alluded to the fact that I have a research report before the Immigration Department that they're a bit worried about and, of course, I can't talk about the research. Partly, the key thing is this question of national identity and young people. Of course, cosmopolitan means you don't have a national identity; you're an international. So, in a sense, I raise the question could cosmopolitanism replace multiculturalism? My answer at this stage is it can't because the government couldn't handle the fact that everyone didn't want to waive the Australian flag. There's something immature about the body politic.

Our research tells us that young people love living here. They identify with Australia. They've got strong aspirational values. It's such a good news report. But on the other hand, when you ask them, what's your national identity? They don't say I'm Australian. For that reason, the government's freaked out. So, for that reason as well, it seems to me that cosmopolitanism is maybe too idealistic for this country at this particular point in time.

But the other thing about cosmopolitanism is that, first of all, it's been a very Western notion, and we need to have a notion of cosmopolitanism that challenges that, that includes the East and so forth from that, or the north and south, depending which metaphor you want to use. Also, a non-elitist few. Sometimes they talk about cosmopolitanism as being business class migration. You sit up the front of the plane; you're the very wealthy people who jet around. Whereas I think you can have a cosmopolitan that's much more egalitarian and much more, shall we say, cattle class as well as business class in this regard.

There's this whole conflict between world transnational identity and national identity, and particularly young people. Young people - they're living in a different world today with the Internet and stuff. They're not so interested in national identity. They're fluid in identities, and they're changing, and they're shifting. This is a thing we ought to accept, and we see in every bit of research in every country, and yet, somehow it becomes a problem for governments. Somehow it's a signal that the reactionary people will jump onto that and say I told you the whole thing wasn't working. In many ways, that's only a small part, but it's a contradictory picture that I'm trying to draw.

Roy mentioned in his introduction that globalisation has meant massive flows of capital, of trade, and also increasing numbers of people. The interesting thing is that the flow of people has been much less free than capital and goods. Capital - very free; goods - contradiction there because the West is happy to - everyone to drop tariffs on manufactured goods, but they have big subsidies to stop developing nations export their primary products to them. But in the area of people, there's been much less movement.

The free market economists' view is open doors. People ought to be as free as capital and goods. I have a real problem with that. The problem I have with that is that migration takes planning. Where are the schools? Where are the houses? Where are the jobs? If those things aren't provided, large unpredictable, unplanned numbers of people will just cause a massive reaction, and there'd be nothing more to guarantee that there'd be a new Pauline Hanson that if you open the doors to immigration. Immigration's got to be managed at a whole series of levels - from services to programmes for schools, and it ought to be changed gradually.

You can see what's happened. We've had record numbers of immigration. The big story has been temporary migration. We don't use the word guest worker in Australia, but that's respectively what is a guest worker programme. We've never had a debate about this, but the numbers have increased quite dramatically - 300,000, 400,000 a year coming on temporary migration visas.

Basically, the other big change is an increase and a preference to skilled migration. So, family reunion is down dramatically, and I think there's a real problem there. Shortsightedness - when there's a family there, people can resolve the difficulties of new settlement in a family environment with support. You take away the family, where does that problem go? To the law courts, to the welfare system, it explodes elsewhere. It's an indirect cost, and so we're not worried about it because it's not a front up. I think there's a real argument to reinstate family reunion, particularly elderly parents and so forth that people have. The government is so focused on the economic benefits that it can't see social benefits, and I think it's too economistic in its focus about the direction of immigration policy.

We've had business migrations being fine-tuned, we've got new immigrants to the bush now - new programmes to the bush. The main driver for that was Bob Carr when he was Premier of New South Wales. He said that immigrants are destroying the environment of Sydney; let's reduce and stop immigration. He was the loudest and most outspoken anti-immigrant voice after Pauline Hanson, and that voice is very resonant today about the environmental debate, which I want to come to.

We also, remember, have increasing outflows. About 1 million Australians live overseas and, of course, with globalisation professional technical young people can move about. Your degree is your global passport for mobility, and a lot of young people, in particular, do that. So, it's a two-way street. It's not all in; it's also out. Of course, security of migration post-9/11, issues of the worst form of immigrant crime - terrorism - became a big concern, and understandably in many ways, and governments have reacted to that in different ways.

The other issue, of course, is refugee populations. Some 25 million people live in blue plastic camps around the world today. A rich country like Australia ought to take its share. I don't believe it is taking its share. As the numbers of immigrants have increased, the proportion of humanitarian immigrants have not kept pace with that. In real terms, they've gone down significantly. I also acknowledge that when you have refugee intakes - humanitarian intakes - these people are likely to have been traumatised, often tortured, sometimes sexual abuse. Those people have needs that need to be met by services and programmes. So, you've got to increase the intake, but you've also got to spend the money that goes with that. You've got to do both. You can't have the one without the other.

African refugees that have come in - the programmes and services aren't there. It's almost as if we had the golden heyday of multiculturalism where we provided that stuff, they've solved all the problems, now we can just take all that away, despite the fact that immigration is increasing to record levels. One of my points at the end is we need to reinvigorate multiculturalism; we need a new multiculturalism. We need to readdress the whole issues of planning and services. We need, if you like, a new Galbally Report to reassess the stage of immigration and how we're responding to it.

I want to talk a little bit about racism, and my first statement might confuse you. Australia has always been racist but is not always racist. We've always been racist but are not always racist. Why do I say we've always been racist? I look at the experience of Indigenous people from day one to day now; I look at the experience of migrants across the period. It's not to say that people are racist always every day, but there will keep coming up racial incidents, and people will suffer racial abuse through their lives. So, that's, if you like, a scar.

It's particularly related to immigration policy because, you all know, with the White Australia policy, it was officially racist. We had no bones about that. In fact, we wanted to call it the White Australia policy, but our British overlords wouldn't let us do that because India was part of the Commonwealth of Nations, so we can't talk about White Australia; we had to call it the 1901 Immigration Restriction Act. It meant, and was clearly understood as, White Australia, and that lasted until Whitlam was elected in '72. Very recent sort of history there, so that's important - the primary racism I've mentioned there.

If you look at the Cronulla Riots, you look at the Indian students, you need no better example than the experience of Indian students in Melbourne to look at the dysfunctionality of racism. We cannot, as a nation, afford racism. There you've got education, our second largest export earner - $15 billion or $17 billion or whatever - and, of course, what's happened to the number of Indian students in Melbourne? They've cut dramatically this year. Of course, the Premier's been over there, and the Deputy Prime Minister - they've all been going over there. It's one clear demonstration at the bottom line that we can't afford racism. We need not, or ought not to have to demonstrate everything on the bottom line because - a humanitarian's perspective would tell you that we should not truck with racism.

When you see an industry like that challenged, the governments wake up very, very quickly. There was a big debate. Was it racist? Wasn't it racist? A lot of politicians want to say, there's no racism there; it was all opportunist. Some people can be very naive, and I think we need some further research into that particular incident. So, here we have what I call a cruel irony. We also have some market failure, that I'll show you in a minute, in the labour market.

So, up the top there I just cite, first of all, some work by Andrew Leigh of the ANU. He looked at labour market discrimination, and the way in which they did it, the methodology they employed, was to send out résumés for jobs and to have two identical resumes. One was accompanied by a photo of a white person, the other one with a photo of a coloured black, non-white person. You wouldn't be surprised that the fact that those who got - they were identical in all their résumés, but who got the call-back to come in? It was the white people far more than those people from other backgrounds.

There's been other research like that conducted, and that shows you that there's a racism act in there. That's why I call it a market failure because we're, in a sense, importing immigrants, and we're not utilising their human capital. Why? Because of racial discrimination - formal or informal - it's not happening. The cruel irony is we then blame migrants for the economy not being so strong. So, we don't let them work in the jobs they're qualified for and blame them for the economy not growing strongly enough. The whole cliché of doctors and engineers driving taxis in Sydney is very, very real, and there are people there that have the skills. Professions like the doctors' profession - a very closed shop in that regard - and this is a market failure we need to address in the future.

Kevin Dunn and his colleagues at UWS - UWS has done a lot of work on the geographies of racism - where are we racist? This is reallyour attitude to this and that, and that's also, if you like, demonstrating the dimensions of racism. You can see there that he talks about one in 10 - between one in 10 and one in three have experienced some form of everyday racism. So, clearly, racism is an issue. It varies between part, and I often thought, in particular, the Bush was redneck. I suppose it's a common city view.

As Pino alluded, we've done some recent work. We surveyed 1000 new immigrants that have settled in regional rural areas because that's the new programme of the Immigration Department. Nearly all of those said how warmly they were welcomed; how they felt welcome in those towns. We asked them, what do you like and what do you dislike? This strong like about the friendship - they'd visited their neighbours. They felt quite friendly and warm there. At that was a terrific bit of research and evidence. Hang on, let's, once again, not be stereotypical about the bush either; let's be more complex in our analysis in the sorts of things we just hold for granted. Let's challenge those things a bit.

I now want to turn a little bit to look at the global financial crisis and, as you all know, the worst downturn since the 1930s internationally. The thing about that is that, in many of these countries, say, the US, where unemployment rates are about 10 per cent - Britain's about the same - the people who have been hardest hit have been new migrants. They're the people who lost most of the jobs that were shed.

I give you some data there from the US that shows you how the immigrant unemployment rate was 5.6 per cent compared to the native unemployment rate of 3.8 per cent. The US use this term native to mean white Americans. In Massachusetts, most of those workers who lost their jobs were migrant workers. Also, we've got a lot of other evidence because I've been tracking this impact of the global financial crisis on immigrants in a whole range of countries including Australia. This economic hardship, this disproportionate burden of unemployment, was coupled by a massive escalation of anti-racism.

Let me just give you some indication of that - just taking one dimension of that - the last European parliamentary elections. In those countries from the UK through to Finland, the Netherlands, and right down, the far-right vote increased substantially. What is the main platform of the far-right? Stop immigration, in general, but in particular, Muslims. No Muslim immigration, but we just generally don't like immigrants at all. They haven't got much of a political platform other than that. That's about it. You can see that, as unemployment increases, people worry about their job, and the key argument in racism, that migrants take our jobs, found very fertile ground in those particular countries.

So, what about Australia? Well, If you look at our history, we've had recessions '74 - '75, '82 - '83, '90 - '91 and, of course, the most recent one, 2007 to 2009, although, as I mentioned, that was not really a recession in Australia. The point I'm trying to make here is that Geoffrey Blainey and the first big immigration debate emerged just after the '82 - '83 recession. He wrote his book in '84, and his key argument - they're taking our jobs. He said there's going to be blood in the streets; there's going to be conflict because we're taking all these Asians in, and we should be taking British migrants.

Then we had Pauline Hanson arrive in the mid-90s. That was a little bit later than the 1991 recession, but the thing about the 90s was that it was what we call a jobless recovery. We got hit unemployment 10 per cent, 10.5 per cent, 11 per cent, but then it took a long time, nearly a decade, for employment to recover. So, there was a lot of hardship and unemployment. That was once there in the fertile ground for someone to say let's stop this immigration. What else did she say? Why doesn't the government send the navy boats out there and send those boats away? Of course, that did happen in 2001 with the children overboard election.

So, the expectation here is that the global financial crisis was really going to lead to massive hardship and an escalation of the ride. Well, what did happen? Well, first of all, we didn't have a recession. We were one of the few, maybe the only - I'm not sure - countries in the Western world that didn't experience two successive quarters of negative growth. Partly, was the Rudd government's stimulus - very quick, very effective - but the other part, of course, was China. It dropped down to about - what - 7 per cent growth and didn't fall any further, and so the iron ore and the coal and that stuff still kept churning out. We're very fortunate we didn't fall into - unemployment never exceeded 5.9 per cent. It was expected to be 8.7 per cent. Thankfully, never got anywhere near that.

So, what I'm going to show to you is that immigrant minorities did still bear the burden of unemployment, and this is quite important. Also, we did have racist attacks, but they were more or less the foreign students. I don't think you could actually blame that on the recession at all. There were very significant increases in Indian students in Victoria in the few preceding years, and those escalation of numbers, and the fact that there's no accommodation at universities for foreign students, and they had to live in far western suburbs where it was cheap, and they also had to work. We have this image of Indian students being all middle-class, therefore very wealthy, but most of their family's wealth goes into paying for the courses, and the fees, and the airfares - and they work jobs late at night.

I just want to look at some labour force data here, and I want to start by the '06 Census because this is at the height of the long boom. So, we had two long booms in the post-war period. One from '47 to '74 - the first long boom - and the second long boom was from about 1991 to about 2007 - the global financial crisis. So, after all these decades of globalisation and boom, if you look at the unemployment data by religion, you can see that Islamic unemployment - 18 per cent second-generation males, 12 per cent second-generation females. If you look at Buddhists, you can see that there is a correlation here between religious minority and higher unemployment rates. This is before the crisis.

Let's look at this one. This is taken by the ancestry data. If you look down at the very bottom - Sub-Saharan African, 11.4 per cent. You go up there, other Oceania - we're looking there at the Pacific Islands - we've got 38 per cent; Vietnamese Australians 22 per cent; Lebanese Australians 10.2 per cent. So, we can see here that, despite decades of boom, large pockets of immigrant minorities still haven't been picked up in work. I've been noticing for census after census that the rates of Lebanese, and Vietnamese, and Turkish unemployment have been two to three to four times higher than average, and that has not gone down. That has not gone down. I think that's a failure of the government that they haven't addressed that.

Why didn't it go down? If you're going to readdress the unemployment for a particular group, you need to tailor labour market programmes specifically to their needs. Not only is that not done, labour market programmes are gone. They don't exist anymore. It's now either earn or learn. You either get a job or stay on at school these days. So, I think that's a real example of the contradictions. Immigrants have generated this terrific wealth and filled labour shortages but, at the same time, they've disproportionately had the burden of unemployment before the global financial crisis.

So, what happened with the crisis? I've got the period from October '08 to October '09 and - something's happened with that graph. You can see there's a very light line above it, but you can't see the Australian line which is very low - I'm not sure whether you can see that, but it's supposed to be telling us that, in fact, it's the immigrants from non-English-speaking countries whose unemployment rate was highest. This will tell us that better because the colours are more bold, and that's not just by born overseas or not, but by different birthplace region.

You can see that up the top, North Africa and the Middle East, the highest rate of unemployment, and then as you go down to the different ethnic groups. So, clearly, there's no doubt that in the global financial crisis, immigrant minorities disproportionally lost jobs. However, because the unemployment wasn't massive because we never had a recession in official terms, luckily, there wasn't a massive backlash to immigrant minorities.

The issue about the social impact of immigration is very important. We try to - everyone concentrates on the economic stuff as if that's all that matters, but the social impact is very, very important. I mentioned to you the arguments of the free market economists that the doors ought to be open. Philippe Legrain wrote a book, Immigrants: Your Country Needs You [sic] where he was making the case for open-door immigration policy. I disagree with that for the reasons I mentioned before - it's unpredictable, you need to plan, there'd be massive hostilities towards that, et cetera. The point I'm trying to make here is that one of the constraints about globalisation is racism because why do people react to new immigrant arrivals? Because largely because of a racism or a xenophobic response. It's not always that, but that's part of the whole picture. So, to some extent, the nirvana for free marketeers would be this great world where there are no barriers, a level playing field, great mobility anywhere, anytime. Tut, of course, that's completely divorced from any social reality. The problem with economics - and I'm a professor of economics - is that a lot of traditional economics doesn't look at the social or the political. With a subject like immigration, you can't artificially divorce that and say, that's the economics; the other stuff doesn't matter, because it's a total picture. You need a holistic analysis, an interdisciplinary analysis of a phenomenon like immigration.

I now want to come to multiculturalism. As you know, before multiculturalism, we had a policy called assimilation. Arthur Calwell said populate or perish, but he said, don't worry, because nine out of 10 immigrants would come from Britain. In other words, we'll continue the White Australia policy. That didn't happen; not by design.

Blainey said there was a secret room where there is social engineering going on, and they're designing this multicultural Australia. They didn't want a multicultural Australia; they wanted a white Australia. What happened right from the start, because of the problems of shipping availability, they could only take half the number of immigrants they wanted. So, the question is, do you cut your intake by half and take 90 per cent British, or do you throw the net further afield? They decided on the number rather than the racial purity objective. That's happened decade after decade after decade. There was no design 10, 20, 30 years ago to have an Asian Australia or to have African. This has all happened by design - sorry, not by design - by accident over time.

Then, of course, the problem with assimilation was we have to treat immigrants exactly the same as Australians. But what did that mean? Kids arrived in schools - they didn't speak any English. You couldn't give them any particular textbook or any other instruction because that was treating them differently. So, all these kids arrived into schools, there was no English as a second language, there were no textbooks, there were no programmes and, of course, what happened is these kids suffered at school. The ethnic communities and the migrant communities said, we're not putting up with this. In conjunction with the Teachers Federation and others, they started a [fort] and they opposed assimilation, and they introduced multiculturalism very much through the agency of migrants themselves.

I'm going to come to this in a moment, but some of the lefts say multiculturalism is terrible. It's a clever policy of containment. It's white Australia, and we're containing all these people. What that argument neglects is the agency - the way in which immigrants fought against assimilation and fought for multiculturalism. It wasn't imposed on them, it was something that they demanded and they finally got. A lot of people, I think, forget that lesson, particularly as it's very popular these days for people to dismiss multiculturalism as old hat, and essentialist, and there's all sorts of arguments against it theoretically.

So, it was Whitlam and Al Grassby, as Minister, who talked about a multicultural nation, but it was really Fraser who introduced multiculturalism. It was interesting because, as you know, Malcolm Fraser's just written a book of his life, and Kerry O'Brien was interviewing him a week or so ago, and he said, what's your proudest achievement? The first thing he said, multiculturalism and the Galbally Report - the very first thing.

Now, the Galbally Report was the report that said this is what immigrants need; this is not what they're getting. Here's a whole range of services - education, welfare, legal, media, right across. We need to fund these people, we need new organisations; it changed the whole landscape - terrifically important milestone report - and it's for that reason I'm calling for a new Galbally Report now today. Some - what have we got - four decades later or whatever - three and a half decades later. So, that was important but, also, the warmth of the welcome for Vietnamese boat people. A lot of the people didn't like them, but the government was leading steadfast, we're going to do this; we're going to do it properly - terrific achievement.

I used to hate Malcolm Fraser - the whole dismissal staff - I was so angry about that and whatever, but he's become a man that I really endear and respect, not only his work in that but against apartheid, and he's been a principal politician and, I think, a very great Australian politician.

We had Hawke and Keating come in - they supported immigration. They set up a thing called the Bureau of Population and Immigration Research because they thought, if you've got a great migration nation, you need to do research. You need to look at what's happening. You don't put your head under the sand, saying, it's all great, mate, it's terrific out here; where the bloody hell are you? What you do is you've got to do this research, and they commissioned research into that.

One thing that I'm ever, shall we say, resentful for of Paul Keating - I thought a number of things he did terrific, particularly the Redfern speech with Indigenous people and other things are so significant, but he introduced the six-months waiting period for new migrants. Hitherto, if you arrived in Australia, a new migrant had all the rights of every other person other than the right to vote, which of course, would gain on citizenship.

For some reason, for the first six months - the time of greatest need for any immigrant settler - these services were taken away. Why would you do that unless you thought they were all scamming, they were all ripping off, it was all corruption. If you look at the evidence, there wasn't - of course, there were some corruption; I'm not saying there wasn't - but there's no evidence there was widespread corruption. So, they introduced that. They also introduced, by the way, let me say, under Gerry Hand, the first camps in the desert for refugee arrivals. I think, another disgraceful move, and a chapter of Australia's refugee history that I completely reject.

We then, of course, moved on to the John Howard government period. What did John Howard do? The six-month becomes 24 months. There is no support for the first two years. When do you need support? The first two years. Why do you take it away? It just makes no sense. Of course, our workers in the ethnic community, who work on the frontline, saw this all the time. They were being defunded, they saw this happening, they saw the harm, the hardship, the sorrow, the difficulty, but they were powerless to do anything about it. More than that, if some of these agencies spoke up against the government, they were defunded. There was a horrific regime in the ethnic community sector there of almost fear of no funding, of seeing the problem, but not being able to do anything about it. A very bad chapter in our history. We also, of course, had the children overboard stuff.

So, multiculturalism is pretty controversial though, and you'd understand that. I don't think that this is surprising because, as my parents were uncomfortable by the change of society, I think a lot of older people, in particular, were quite uncomfortable because neighbourhoods did change. Multiculturalism was a change in Australian society. As I say, the critique from the left is it's all clever state containment. It's just all - the government's always two steps ahead, planning all this stuff, and they're conning everyone. We often refer to multiculturalism as presenting the four Ds - dance, diet, dialect, and dress. That is, if you like, the external trappings of diversity. Multiculturalism has allowed that to happen - allowed the space for immigrants in public spaces, in buses. Before that, they were told speak English; don't speak your language here. That was a very important space.

So, I think that also the left says multiculturalism is based on this essentialist notion of ethnicities - that they're all the same and homogenised. Well, it can be, but it doesn't need to be. I've never espoused a multiculturalism that's got any essentialist notions like that. I think that's an overstating of the issues. In a sense, people argue why still have the monopoly of power? Well, if you look at New South Wales Parliament or Victorian Parliament, I don't think you see that immigrants haven't had their share of political power and influence. Of course, it's maybe the earlier generation of the Greeks and the Italians; it's not yet as much the Chinese, or the Lebanese, or whatever. Although, in New South Wales parliaments, Lebanese have some influence, so I think there's a real issue to be made here.

From the right, we divide the nation up into tribes - a nation of tribes - conflict is inevitable. The frontline suburbs echoing, of course, the famous Enoch Powell speech - Enoch Powell, who recently passed away, said similar things in the UK.

But there are problems of multiculturalism. Where do Indigenous people fit in the multiculturalism umbrella. That's always been a very uneasy thing. My guess is that until the whole reconciliation thing is properly resolved, that's never going to be resolved. There's a lot of unfinished business to happen there. The Rudd government did the first step - the apology - a terrific thing, but there's much more work to be done.

The whole place of the Anglo-Celtic majority - the slogan was multiculturalism for all Australians, but a lot of Anglo-Celtic Australians couldn't identify with it. When they had stuff at the schools, where was the white Australian type legacy? It wasn't there. In a sense, I think this is a real challenge because, I debate a bit with Ghassan Hage about this, and he said, the problem with multiculturalism is we're including all these Pauline Hanson people; we're including too many whites to support it. My take is the opposite. We're not getting enough white support for it. We've got to do much more white support. His argument is not pure enough. My argument is not impure enough. We need to be much more broad. We need to have people identify with multicultural society from all backgrounds. It's a very important challenge.

If you look internationally, Samuel Huntington's work, you would know, Clash of Civilisations, et cetera, the big divide now is going to be the religious divide - that's going to be the big political divide. We've had people in Australia - Blainey, Pauline Hanson, the One Nation Party, Paul Sheehan, and others, who've continued this particular line, how it's destroying Australian society. Robert Putnam, the American sociologist, in his Bowling Alone was more or less saying how, recently, that ethnic diversity is breaking down trust in Australian society - it's destroying this terrific social glue of trust. We had that echoed in Australia, that multiculturalism becomes poison for social capital. Now, to me, that's just wrong.

Let me just cite some work of some Ph.D. students of mine just to throw a little light on the others, and I'll try and finish very shortly. Dr Walter Lalich did a survey of all the ethnic communities in Sydney that bought a building for the purpose of religion, education, child care, or recreation. They built these buildings with their own money, they raise money, they build it week after week, they sweat, and he documented just how much labour, how many dollars - this terrific unspoken, hidden achievement of migrants building better neighbourhoods and communities - very, very significant work. The volunteers, all the people and, of course, these people - these places now were an oasis because immigrant minorities weren't allowed and weren't welcome in the RSL clubs and the leagues clubs of the Anglo-Celtics, so they formed their own - their soccer clubs, their bocce fields, et cetera, because they weren't welcome. It was a socio-oasis - what we call bonding social capital.

Now, over time, these places have got membership from all the local area, so they became an important side of bridging social capital for community relations to develop. Once again, where do we read about that in the papers? Where is that in the debate? It's just not there.

Angeline Low, another one of my successful Ph.D. students, who is now a UTS Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow, did a Ph.D. on Asian immigrant businesswomen in Sydney - Asian women who became entrepreneurs. More recently, she is doing her postdoctoral work on Muslim female entrepreneurs in Australia, Canada, and Uzbekistan.

Now, this whole thing about women being in business themselves is new enough, let alone migrant women being in business, let alone Muslim migrant women being in business. This is very, very important work. The demonstrating, not only the economic contribution of these women, but the social role they play in their local communities, in their Australian neighbourhoods. Once again, an untold story that you never see on the front pages of the Telegraph or some of those more sensationalist mediums.

Kirrily Jordan, who's just about to be conferred her Ph.D. in the next month or so, did a Ph.D. on the impact of immigrant minorities in the built environment of cities and regional and rural centres. We took three states - New South Wales, WA, and Queensland. One metropolitan, one regional, and one rural site, and looked at the impact - what buildings did they build? The churches, the mosques, the cafes, the delicatessens, and what role played - once again, her demonstration was not only did they change the built environment, but they improved the social environment of those places and spaces - very important research as an antidote to the notion that somehow we're going to destroy trust by having immigration. I think these three PhDs demonstrated very solidly the trust that was built through the actions of the immigrant communities.

I'm nearing the end of my talk now, and I want to come to the latest immigration issue - the Green critique of immigration. The argument is fairly simple. Global warming is a terrible problem - and I'm certainly not a sceptic on that. I think that if 95 per cent of scientists agree on that, then I'm prepared to accept their work on that. I think it's a very real issue, but the problem is that there's a simplistic equation.

Population screws the environment, immigration increases population, immigration screws the environment - very simplistic. What my intervention into that is to say, hang on, the impact of an immigration number to Sydney on Sydney's environment is very complex. It depends, first of all, how many people leave Sydney, and a lot of people leave Sydney, either to go up north or to go overseas. Secondly, where are those people going to live? On the fringes or in the already developed areas where there is infrastructure? Thirdly, what about the public sector infrastructure that's needed, particularly public transport in a big city?

Really, it galls me that Bob Carr, who was a big critique of immigration because of that, did nothing for public transport in the years that he was in power. He was correctly named because it was really the toll roads that he built. And then to say somehow that we can't have immigration - what's screwing the environment is governments not providing the necessary infrastructure. If you don't have that infrastructure, then yes, there will be environmental problems, but it's more complex.

The final thing, of course, is the market puts zero prices on resources - air, water. So, these things are despoiled until we get the market to take into account some sort of carbon pricing emissions trading scheme or whatever, then it doesn't matter what you're going to do with immigration, that's irrelevant to the whole equation because the whole capitalist system, the whole globalised system, is screwing the environment for profit.

All these things intervene between a certain number of people and a certain environmental impact. My argument is that it's possible to have immigration and an improved environment. The far-right, one of their key slogans is full house - we've got a full house; there's no more room for any people. I recently did an interview with Dick Smith for a documentary he's doing, and I put that to him, that this is a problem for Greens like you - who are really anti-immigration - that the right-wing are going to love this. Not to say that he's right-wing or racist, but the Green movement have got to carefully distinguish itself from the right-wing, who just don't want immigration for racist reasons, and this is a big challenge.

I think the Rudd government was very smart to appoint Tony Burke as population spokesman. I think that's a very clever political move to introduce that portfolio. I'm just having a go at some of the simple environmental stuff. The thing about Paul Ehrlich's book is that he said that it's actually worse to take immigrants from Asian countries because, by coming here, they're increasing their standard of living, and therefore, their carbon footprint is much worse. So, it's better not to take immigrants from developing nations but from developed nations. So, that's why I call it a green white Australia; we only want whites, but not because we're racist, but because if we take people from developing nations, they're going to improve their standard of living, and that's going to be very, very bad for the world environment. So, I think environmentalists have got to stay away from the Doomsday stuff. I think there's too much Doomsday stuff, and too much preaching, and we need a more balanced argument about this relationship.

Political opportunism - I refer to John Howard, and I'll also try to be even-handed by being critical of the Labor Government, both at federal and state level. The children overboard photo that people went to vote for in 2001 - a photo that never existed - is one of the most despicable aspects of Australian political history. The problem is, I think, that the current leader of the Federal Opposition looks like going down the same road - playing that race card. We had, in previous decades, a bipartisanship on immigration and multiculturalism. I think we need to return to that and as quickly as possible.

So, what I've been trying to argue in this lecture - and thank you very much for your patience in listening - is that, in a sense, it's our greatest comparative advantage, the cultural diversity of our people. It's our most precious asset, and we've got to guard that not through political opportunism, but through political leadership of the sort that was demonstrated by Malcolm Fraser and other people previously. So, it's a global market. We've got global cities; we've got a global workforce. We need to utilise those. Unfortunately, the contradiction is that often we just don't employ those people because of racism or because of some - you can't communicate, so when you hear an accent, you can say, you can't communicate, so I won't employ you, or you can say, that person probably speaks two or three or four languages, has got cultural knowledge all around the world; I can use someone like that in my organisation as it tries to globalise. I think the social environment is very, very critical. Let me just readdress some of the cosmopolitan contradictions that I've mentioned, and then I'll briefly conclude.

So, cohesion and conflict; economic merits versus discrimination and racism and tolerance; multicultural nation; white nation; national identity versus global identity; multiculturalism; and the environment - some of the issues.

So, where to from here? My argument is we ought to reinvigorate and renew multiculturalism. I think that's very, very important. The key point is social justice. Everyone irrespective of their background needs help to get up. That's one of our recipes, or one of our secrets. We've had immigrants in that wealthy 200, in professional jobs, in labouring jobs, unemployed, right across the social spectrum. Not altogether down the bottom. That's a critical thing, and that's what multiculturalism does.

Social justice and human rights are the critical things, but we need to look at that because immigration has changed so dramatically, and the fabric of multiculturalism has been destroyed largely, anti-racism must be much more prominent, politicians can't be scared of it, they've just got to address it head-on. The migrant community sector and the NGOs, things like that, et cetera, the Migrant Resource Centres. They need money, they need certainty. They do a terrific job, and we need to resource those sectors. Also, the political voice of the migrant sector - very prominent in the 80s - we look forward to the day when FECCA has a year of government, and the ethnic communities - an important issue for all Australians. Thank you.

END OF TRANSCRIPT