‘She’ll be right, mate’: multiculturalism and the culture of benign neglect

Abstract

‘Multiculturalism', writes Pnina Werbner, is ‘an important rhetoric and an impossible practice'. Tracing the rhetoric surrounding the term multiculturalism in recent political debate in Australia, this article examines the relationship between rhetoric and practice, and between different meanings of multiculturalism as they have evolved over the last decades, particularly in the climate of ‘backlash' during the Howard government.