Dammit, my response is a bit long, but please bear with it. I believe it touches on each of the central issues for all of us who are debating the term.
The problem seems to me to be something I brought up in this newsgroup a long time ago - that people are operating on very different concepts of what multiculturalism is or means as a term. Your definition above seems very negative and totally different from mine. Let me tell you how I understand the term and then we can see how far you go are prepared to go towards accepting it, and vice versa. Obviously we cannot rationally debate the virtues and vices of something if we don't both have a large measure of agreement about what it is or means.
To me, multiculturalism is nothing more than people living together in a society where their different origins and traditions are practised and respected. To me, multiculturalism does not and cannot mean that people do not respect their host nation. That is not multiculturalism - that is bigotry on their part. People can enjoy their own traditions - and those of others - without disrespecting the host culture. If Chinese who come here prefer their own cuisine to meat and three veg., we have no difficulty with that, surely. Why should that not apply to other healthy traditions they cherish as much as we might cherish ours? There is nothing inherently wrong with that, otherwise we should insist of every new citizen that they speak nothing but English both at home and in public, they should eat whatever the dominant culture eats, and they should practice whatever is the dominant religion.
As such a demand is a breach of fundamental human rights, then we cannot ask that of migrants from a different cultural background. We can and should demand that they observe our laws and that they respect our right to observe our own traditions without impediment. But the law is one thing, and tradition is another, and surely as long as the tradition they practice hurts no-one else, what harm can there be in that?
If they bring with them hatreds and rivalries that consbreastute unacceptable cultural baggage into their adopted land, then we can also demand they leave those rivalries right back where they matter, not here in this country where they can only do harm. I have no problem with demanding that of them. Likewise I have no problem with demanding that they give their first loyalty to their adopted country and not to the homeland they have chosen to leave. They can't have their cake and eat it too. If these loyalties conflict, then they must choose between them, and if they choose loyalty to another country over that to Australia, they forfeit the right to live here as citizens of this country.
I believe that most migrants actually do conform to all this. Generally speaking, they observe healthy and harmless traditions that come from their original homeland, but they leave behind the things they presumably came here to try to escape from. Some do not, and we have just seen the recent appalling examples of that. But that is not multiculturalism - that is dangerous bigotry.
Do you have any objection to this interpretation of multiculturalism? If your choose a definition that makes multiculturalism mean that people have first loyalties to another country or group, or that they are not prepared to obey the laws of this land, then we are simply not talking about the same thing. I could not accept this definition of the term.
This is why I find Ferdie's diatribes so objectionable. He makes the claim that every piece of communal disharmony is the result of multiculturalism. It's not. It's the result of bigotry, fear and ignorance - and can be on both sides and not just one. He appears to deny the right of Australians of a different cultural background to be different in ways that do not hurt us. Not only is that wrong, it's impractical and unhealthy to demand it. Maybe he is willing to make some serious comment on that. I'm tired of arguments that go round in circles simply because we have no agreed definition of what the hell it is that we are arguing about.
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