The Lowy Institute's annual poll, released this week, carried two important signals for politicians and other policy makers about Australian multiculturalism. One was reassuring, the other an amber light.
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Nearly three in four (73 per cent) say Australia's "cultural diversity" has been positive. This indicates multiculturalism's roots remain firmly in the ground, despite the winds blowing in troubled times.
But there had been a big drop from the 90 per cent level registered in 2024, when the question was last asked. Lowy said this was "the largest movement on any societal question" in the poll's more than two decade history.
The 2026 result was likely influenced by the question being asked just months after Bondi, which has had a profound impact on community thinking. Nevertheless, the decline is a warning to be heeded, lest this turns into a serious downward trend.
Unsurprisingly, Pauline Hanson is stoking negativity about multiculturalism, with her declaration last week that Australia was multiracial but must be "monocultural".
That triggered political gyrations in which Opposition Leader Angus Taylor once again showed his ineptness when, under intense questioning, he refused to commit to multiculturalism. He later tried to clean up the mess, but ended up in contortions.
Hanson herself was all over the place in trying to clarify "monoculture", citing Japan initially, then pivoting to the Socceroos.
Anthony Albanese invoked history in a word salad illustrating that we were always diverse, reaching back to the First Fleet, where "there were some in chains and some who were in charge of the people in chains".
Political own goals and point scoring aside, multicultural policy will be front and centre in coming months, requiring the government to respond.
The royal commission on antisemitism has as part of its brief to examine "social cohesion". Its report, due in December, will highlight the challenges facing multiculturalism in the age of terrorism and community fractures.
Like much else, multiculturalism is buffeted in a contemporary environment that's much less conducive to social harmony than once was the case.
Many economic and social factors are at play in this, not least the poison social media can inject. As ASIO chief Mike Burgess said on Wednesday in his 2026 Annual Threat Assessment, "Social media is amplifying and accelerating grievance narratives, eroding trust in institutions, promoting discord and inflammatory rhetoric, exacerbating polarisation and creating a permissive environment for violence".
There is a strong case for a reset of multicultural policy, both to make it more resilient and to sustain community appreciation of its contribution. An earlier opportunity was missed, after the government's Multiculturalism Framework Review in its first term but now the task is urgent.
Assistant Minister for Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Julian Hill this week put forward some directions for reform.
Hill, who gave a major speech on the issue earlier this year, told a local government audience on Tuesday:
The question isn't whether we will be diverse. To those who want to argue that question, look around! Clearly, we will. The question is whether we'll remain successful - whether our human diversity will remain a source of national strength.
While Hill said he was "fundamentally optimistic", "I do believe that we're going to need to put more deliberate effort, as leaders and policy makers, in the coming months and years than perhaps we've been used to".
Hill makes the important distinction between "bonding capital", which glues people into groups (or tribes) and "bridging capital", that links groups. He urges more emphasis on the latter.
Hill also points out that much of the responsibility for this effort must fall on states and local government, not just the federal government, which often has a funding rather than an implementation role. In this context, the Sydney's Randwick City Council, covering an area with many Muslim and Jewish residents, has a plan going to its meeting next week on social cohesion and intercultural engagement.
Hill told his audience:
We need to actively think about funding activities that bring groups together, about sharing spaces, because so many of our funding programs now actually fund separate events and then we build everyone a centre and then we put walls up and then we put security up. So, we want people to share, and that could look like investing in community intercultural resilience, Jewish-Muslim, migrant-mainstream, interfaith youth, cross-cultural sports teams or competitions. Local government has perhaps the most important role. We can set a policy direction - that's part of our job federally. We can incentivise things - and we will see that increasingly in multicultural grants focusing on that intercultural, interfaith piece - but most of this work happens at the local level. We don't have all the knowledge and wisdom and ideas.
Hill argues migrants have an obligation to integrate into the wider Australian community but says it's a two-way street and that the role of "settlement services" in enabling and helping people to do so can be revamped.
His approach chimes with that of Andrew Jakubowicz, emeritus professor of sociology at UTS and an expert on multiculturalism, in a just published article, After Bondi: Social Cohesion, Multiculturalism and Nation-Building in Australia, for the German left-wing think tank, Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung.
Jakubowicz writes: "We now require not so much a refinement of existing policies but a reconceptualisation of the institutional infrastructure for social cohesion through the lens of resilience".
He urges a dedicated national body "to coordinate the settlement, multicultural and intercultural dimensions of social resilience".
Its task would be "to create the conditions for expanding intercultural engagement, civic participation across and between ethnic and religious communities and the necessary and sustained educational efforts that will underpin them".
The message from both Hill and Jakubowicz is clear. To have multiculturalism flourish, we need "interculturalism" to be elevated to the centre of policy.
As a footnote, Jakubowicz also has a warning about "social cohesion", which he says is a concept that can be a constraint rather than an aspiration.
"Genuine social cohesion is not enforced uniformity," he writes on his blog. "It is the outcome of a society where people from different backgrounds genuinely feel they belong - where the scriptwriters' table has enough chairs."
A point the royal commission will presumably not miss.
- Michelle Grattan is a press gallery journalist and former editor of The Canberra Times. This article first appeared on The Conversation.
Michelle Grattan
of The Canberra Times. She is a professorial fellow at the University of
Canberra and writes for The Conversation, where her columns also appear.
