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Literacy, Competence and Virtue

Race Discrimination

 

Keynote Speech to The University of Sydney Teaching Colloquium

4 November 2015

It is wonderful to be joining your colloquium today, and I acknowledge that we meet on the traditional lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation. May I also acknowledge Deputy Vice Chancellor Professor Pip Pattison and Professor Juanita Sherwood.

Academia has a natural love for classical words to describe scholarly meetings. Symposium is my personal favourite, coming as it does from the Greek word for drinking. I confess I’ve never been to an academic symposium that resembles it, but a symposion was a drinking party following an evening meal that typically featured songs, games and entertainment. I remind people of this in the hope that one day the academy will do justice to the original concept.

Today, of course, is a colloquium – which comes from the Latin colloquy, meaning to speak together or to converse.

It is almost universally accepted that the art of conversation is something worth celebrating. Confucius wrote that, ‘not to discuss with a man worthy of conversation is to waste the man’ (though Confucius would also say that, ‘to discuss with a man not worthy of conversation is to waste words’). Montaigne believed that conversation was ‘the most fruitful and natural exercise of our mind’ and ‘the most delightful activity in our lives’. For the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott, conversation was something more elemental: it ‘distinguishes the human being from the animal and the civilised man from the barbarian’.[1]

These days, however, many lament what they see as the decline of the art of conversation. It is said that popular culture and technology are making us turn inward, even converting us en masse into passive narcissists. It is said as well that our discourse is becoming defined by outrage and polemic, and now leaves little room for raillery or curiosity – those stimulants of genuine conversation.[2]

There is, I believe, some truth to this diagnosis. But I would like to commend the University for making conversation so central to the work that you do as scholars and teachers. Conversation also lies at the heart of my own work on matters of race and culture. It is crucial. If we are seeking to educate attitudes and opinions – if we are seeking to challenge prejudice and foster understanding – then we can only truly do so by speaking with people. Social change isn’t done through legislation or regulation alone.

The idea of conversation also relates to the question of cultural competence, which is the theme of your gathering. It is timely that you are reflecting upon it, because in our public debates we are reminded constantly of the need for better understanding of differences. All too often, it is a case of cultural incompetence, rather than cultural competence.

In my remarks this morning, I want to focus on the connections between literacy, competence and virtue. My perspective is one guided by concerns about the meaning of citizenship. If we are a society that values our diversity, then what skills must a good citizen have? How might cultural competence relate to civic virtue?

Cultural literacy

The term cultural competence is a relatively new one. It didn’t exist forty or fifty years ago. Its usage seems to have grown from the late 1980s in the United States; here in Australia, its usage seems only to have grown during the past decade.[3]

As a specific concept, cultural competence has its roots among health care professionals and educators in the United States. There was a recognition that providing services to people of diverse cultural backgrounds required attention. The needs of people from minority cultural and racial backgrounds weren’t necessarily being met by the application of prevailing standards.

It was in this context that scholars and policymakers began using cultural competence to describe the skills and mindsets required for dealing with such diversity. Such competence was about recognition. A recognition that some people, for reasons not of their own doing, were historically excluded from economic and political power. That some people hadn’t shaped the institutions which shaped their quality of living.

Cultural competence may only have recently entered our vocabulary recently, but so long as we have lived with diversity there has always been a need for such competence. Let me illustrate with two examples.

Consider the words of Jean Martin, a sociologist who is regarded as one of the intellectual architects of Australian multiculturalism. In the early 1970s, Martin studied the experience of European migrants to Australia, and the persistence of their ethnic identities. It is interesting to study her analysis of how ethnic community organisations responded to the conformist expectations of an Australian society that insisted on migrants assimilating to its national culture:

The characteristic response of the Australian bodies included in this study has been to go on with their activities as if the advent of European settlers could (or need) make no difference to them. It has been easier for them to maintain this stand because they have avoided collecting, or if available absorbing, information about the realities of the migrants’ origins and their present situation. Fostered ignorance has saved them from having to confront the fact that European immigrants are different and have given expression to this distinctiveness, not only by establishing their own community life, but also by cultivating characteristic forms of participation in Australian structures. While the Australians have been stubbornly looking in the one direction, a kind of pluralism has been quietly consolidating on the other.[4]

Consider as well the emergence during this period of voices calling for greater cultural understanding of Aboriginal Australia. In 1968, the anthropologist WEH Stanner would deliver his celebrated Boyer Lectures, ‘Beyond the Dreaming’. One writer has described it as ‘charged with the anger for the physical and psychological misery inflicted on Aboriginal Australians’. But the lectures are also animated by an urgent call for people to understand Aboriginal identity – and to understand it on its own terms:

No English words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an Aboriginal group and its homeland. Our word ‘home’, warm and suggestive though it be, does not match the Aboriginal word that may mean ‘camp’, ‘hearth’, ‘country’, ‘everlasting home’, ‘totem place’, ‘life source’, ‘spirit centre’ and much else all in one. Our word ‘land’ is too spare and meagre ... A different tradition leaves us tongueless and earless towards this other world of meaning and significance. When we took what we call ‘land’ we took what to them meant hearth, home, the source and focus of life, and everlastingness of spirit.[5]

Between Martin and Stanner, we see some prototypical calls for people not to ignore differences or assimilate cultural differences, but to accept them and respect them.

More than 40 years on from them, we can say that there is an appreciable difference in the way that people understand diversity.

Last week, the Scanlon Foundation released the findings of its annual survey on social cohesion. It found that 86 per cent of Australians believe that multiculturalism has been good for the country.[6] It is resounding evidence that the vast majority of Australians are relaxed and comfortable about us being multicultural. Returning to Martin’s words, our society hasn’t just ‘confronted’ the fact that immigrants may give expression to their distinctiveness, they have emphatically embraced it.

Such positive attitudes towards diversity is also true, it would seem, with respect to Indigenous people. According to one ANU poll in early 2015, 83 per cent of people support changing the Constitution to recognise Indigenous cultures, languages and heritage when making laws.[7] Another poll conducted by Fairfax and Ipsos showed 85 per cent support for Constitutional recognition.[8]


One way of describing this is to say that, as a society, Australia has developed a healthy literacy on matters of cultural diversity. The vast majority of us see multiculturalism as a good thing. The vast majority of us recognise that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the first peoples of Australia.

We are culturally literate, then, in the following sense. We understand the language of diversity. We also believe diversity should be part of our official civic language.

More than that, diversity is written into the text of our everyday social life. We live and work alongside people who may not come from the same background. It’s second nature for us to have a cappuccino in the morning, some noodles for lunch, and to grab a late-night kebab. We experience all these things as part of the ordinary reality of living in contemporary Australia.

In this respect, our cultural literacy is appears healthier than our political literacy. In recent years, polls conducted by the Lowy Institute have revealed an alarming ambivalence among Australians towards democracy. This year, only 65 per cent of the voting age population agreed that, ‘democracy is preferable to any other kind of government’ (up from between 59-60 per cent over the preceding three years). Only a minority of people aged 18-29 – namely 49 per cent – express a preference for democracy.[9]

Such attitudes about democracy perhaps shouldn’t surprise us. Though we aren’t alone in this, Australians have rather low levels of political knowledge. Since 1996, the Australian Election Study has quizzed respondents about Australian government. It has put to respondents six factual statements, which respondents were asked to identify as either true or false. In each of the four surveys conducted, a majority of citizens could only provide a correct answer about the operation of the political system in only one out of the six questions. For example, only between one in four and one in three people knew that the House of Representatives does not have 75 members, or that federal parliaments are not elected every four years.[10]

Beyond literacy

There is, of course, a danger in overstating our cultural literacy. Too often we wear it not lightly enough. Although we have good reasons to celebrate Australian multiculturalism, particularly the nation-building success of immigration, we can verge on ostentatious self-congratulation.

In our popular culture, for example, cultural literacy has been reduced to culinary sophistication. If the old world of Europe had its ballet, opera and literature, the new world of Australia had its cultural temples in the form of fine dining. We venerate our chefs; indeed, we aspire to be masterchefs. It is no accident that so many of our most popular television programs involve the expression of so-called Modern Australian fusion. For many Australians, this represents the apogee of diversity.

Historian Frank Bongiorno traces these developments to the 1980s. During that decade, we saw Australian mimics adapt nouvelle cuisine for domestic tastes. Food and wine became the currency of a local cosmopolitanism:

The cosmopolitan citizen could tell her Shiraz from her Cabernet Sauvignon and knew how to pronounce both focaccia and roulade. Salad, meanwhile, was no longer shorthand for iceberg lettuce, sliced tomatoes and grated carrot. Alfalfa, chives, snow peas and mustard cress now graced the bowl, which might also include warm duck or lobster.[11]

This new shift would also be reflected in the change in our drinking habits. Australians would expand their embrace of wine, with chardonnay replacing riesling as the most favoured variety. Our consumption of beer also had a new character. As Bongiorno observes, ‘boutique or pub-brewed beers provided a means of combining cosmopolitan sophistication, contempt for Alan Bond and John Elliott, and the love of drink still most commonly associated with the old Australia’.[12]

Yet does such self-conscious sophistication translate into something of genuine cultural depth?

It’s often said, particularly by our television chefs, as they lead us through yet another tour of a culinary landscape, that we can only truly understand a culture through food. They will tell us that sitting down for a meal helps to break down barriers of misunderstanding. Every week, for an hour, our spirits are renewed. We are reminded that our common humanity requires only a simple meal for affirmation. However, it is unclear to me whether this holds in our popular culture of food consumption.

Later this month, SBS will air a television show titled ‘Kebab Kings’. It’s an observational documentary on the institution of the kebab shop, capturing the goings-on of two kebab shops in Sydney and Melbourne. At one level, it underlines one everyday aspect of our multiculturalism. There is, as I’ve noted, a quintessentially Australian part of our social script to grab a late-night kebab. Yet at another level, the program highlights the cultural gap that may exist in those interactions at our kebab shops.

As described in the program’s trailer, ‘Kebab Kings’ explores the challenges kebab shop owners and staff encounter when ‘their beliefs and values come face-to-face with a very different culture on a daily basis’.[13] In the case of one Indian-Australian Muslim couple that own a kebab shop, how do they make sense of their alcohol-fuelled customers, who spill into their shop after a night at the pub or club? More to my point, how does eating at a kebab shop help such patrons understand the lives or identities of the fellow citizens who are serving them?

These go to some of the limits of our multiculturalism, as conventionally understood. Getting a fix of doner kebab may do nothing to fix misconceptions about culture. Just because one consumes cultural difference doesn’t mean that one understands cultural difference.

There are limits to our generally relaxed acceptance of diversity. For some, those who bring cultural difference to Australia are expected to conform to Australian ways. Integration isn’t always understood to involve a two-way process, with immigrants adapting to Australian society but with Australian society also giving room for new arrivals to express their cultural identities. It isn’t always understood that cultural change may also mean different public sensibilities – a willingness to understand that living with differences means showing respect to others, rather than simply expecting that respect is given without anything in return.

Let me briefly recount a number of examples. They illustrate that a small but sizeable minority of people remain deeply ambivalent about public expressions of cultural difference, if not resolutely hostile against them. This applies to public expressions of Indigenous identity as it does to expressions of other ethnic and cultural differences. And it applies as well to the civility that is required in a culturally diverse society.

Consider the case of Adam Goodes, who for the last two years of his illustrious AFL career has been the subject of booing at matches. The booing appeared to escalate earlier this year, after Goodes performed a symbolic Indigenous war-cry dance during a match in May. Many were disturbed by what they regarded as a divisive and troublesome display of antagonism. Many believed this expression of Aboriginal cultural identity was inappropriate, even in the context of the AFL’s ‘Indigenous round’ (a round dedicated to Indigenous culture and players).

Then there is the case of anti-Muslim protests, which have attracted considerable media attention this year. Fuelled by extremist fringe groups, including far-right nationalist elements, these protests have identified the religion of Islam as being fundamentally incompatible with an ‘Australian way of life’. At times, these protests have resembled a campaign of bullying and intimidation. But they have been based on a certain determination to judge and slander an entire religious community based on the extremism of a small few – to indulge in prejudice and stereotyping of the crudest nature. Frequently, those involved in the protests have hidden behind the mantra, ‘Islam is not a race’, as though that somehow excuses and justifies religious intolerance and bigotry.

Consider as well the recent controversy involving the term ‘negro’. Last month, there was debate about whether the term ‘negro’ should be regarded as not only outdated but also offensive, after Senator Eric Abetz used it to describe US Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas. It was clear that Senator Abetz didn’t intend on using the term as a pejorative. Yet sometimes the harm caused by using inappropriate and racially loaded language isn’t tied to the intention.

These examples suggest that any celebration of our multicultural literacy should be tempered – tempered, that is, by a recognition that the achievement of multiculturalism is by no means complete.

Cultural competence and racism

Cultural literacy for a society at large doesn’t automatically translate into its citizens having cultural competence. This explains one paradox that is sometimes highlighted in discussions about Australian multiculturalism. Some critics ask: If Australian multiculturalism is so successful, why then does racism persist as a social concern? Shouldn’t multicultural success have obliterated the problem of race? Isn’t a genuinely multicultural society one that is post-racial?

To be sure, racism does persist. According to the Scanlon Foundation’s survey this year, about 15 per cent of people say they have experienced racial or religious discrimination during the past two months. This is a figure slightly lower than the case in previous years – it was 19 per cent in 2013 and 18 per cent in 2014. People from certain backgrounds experience discrimination more than others. Twenty-one per cent of those of non-English speaking background reported discrimination, compared to 12 per cent of those born in Australia. Whereas 26 per cent of Hindus and 26 per cent of Muslims report experience of discrimination, only 8 per cent of Anglicans and 12 per cent of Roman Catholics do so.[14]

Other evidence confirms the persistence of racial discrimination in its various forms. Studies have shown that if you’re applying for a job, you’ll have a better chance if your name is Williamson as opposed to Wong, or if you’re called Morrison as opposed to Mohammed.[15] It is striking that while Australia is a society that enjoys comparatively high levels of social mobility, the echelons of leadership in our society are not remotely close to containing a proportionate representation – one reason why I’ve convened an expert working group to develop a blueprint on cultural diversity and leadership for Australian organisations, which will be launched next year.[16]

Not all discrimination stems from racial hatred or religious bigotry. Sometimes this presumption gets in the way of progress. We still typically understand racism in terms of racial superiority.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as ‘prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior’. A second definition says that racism is ‘the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races’.[17]

What is striking about these definitions is the emphasis they place on a belief in racial superiority. Let me explain why this is a limited way of understanding racism.

For one thing, the dictionary definition of racism can’t account for things such as unconscious bias. Prejudice doesn’t have to take overt expression, but exist in more insidious forms.

For another thing, it also can’t account for casual racism – those instances where people make an off-colour racial joke or say things that exclude people racially. Such instances, which most of us would regard as implicating a form of racism, doesn’t require the person saying it to be waving around a membership card of the Ku Klux Klan.

Take the following illustration. Last month, in the United States at a presidential campaign event, republican candidate Donald Trump responded to a question from Joseph Choe, an Asian-American college student, by cutting him off and asking him, ‘Are you from South Korea?’ Choe responded that he was born in Texas and raised in Colorado. According to one reporter from the Washington Post, this was a clear example of a racial microaggression, one of the ‘everyday insults, indignities and demeaning messages sent to people of colour by well-intentioned white people who are unaware of the hidden messages being sent’ – in this case, a reminder that being an Asian in America translates to being perceived by fellow Americans as a foreigner.[18]

This goes to another problem with the dictionary definition. Namely, racism doesn’t always require notions of superiority for it to have consequences. You can wound someone through your words or action, without necessarily intending on doing so. The weapon of racism is something swung not with ideological malice, but with reckless ignorance.

And sometimes racism can be stimulated not by hatred or ignorance, but by fear. There can be fear that some races or people of some races may outdo us.

Take the White Australia policy that was instituted at the beginning of the new Australian federation. While many of its architects were motivated by a desire for racial purity, there were also economistic reasons: a fear that Asian labour would undercut local wages. Alfred Deakin, an eloquent proponent of White Australia, would even explicitly say that the policy was not about racial superiority. Rather, Deakin believed that ‘Asiatics’ such as the Japanese should be excluded from Australia precisely because they possessed ‘high abilities’ and would be ‘our most formidable competitors’.[19]

This is a slight departure from the point I want to make about cultural literacy, cultural competence and racism. What I want to say is this.

Having a certain cultural literacy is no guarantee that someone will in fact understand cultural differences. It is no guarantee that someone will know how to handle them when they emerge in ordinary life. Knowing the difference between pad thai and chow mein – or between champagne and prosecco – isn’t going to get you over the line.

Moreover, having an active hostility towards diversity isn’t a necessary condition of racial prejudice and discrimination. Sometimes prejudice and discrimination can emerge even with benign intentions. They can emerge precisely because people don’t have the skills required for avoiding cultural mistakes or misconceptions.

This is why efforts to develop cultural competence are so important in our society. They ensure that we don’t confine things to basic literacy or a basic awareness of diversity. They ensure that in our institutions we have systems and policies that are appropriate. That we can shift people’s cultural attitudes and behaviour.

Dealing with difference isn’t something that always comes naturally. To some extent, we are all the products of our backgrounds and our socialisation. And not everyone has been routinely exposed to cultural diversity. We can’t always assume that everyone will know how to deal with difference, or will have learnt how to deal with it. It makes sense for us to teach people about cultural competence.

This kind of work can make a difference. In the realm of healthcare, for example, we know that the cultural competence of service providers can influence whether some cultural groups use health services. It can come down to basic things such as whether doctors and nurses can understand their patients, whether they rush clinical appointments, whether they can explain their diagnoses to patients and their families.

These are the sort of things that people can typically take for granted. Yet cultural differences can demand a need for different kinds of communication. The basic proposition, though, is simple. The better the communication, the better the results. But better communication begins with more open attitudes, with a willingness to see things from a different perspective. It begins with what many of us would refer to as cultural competence.

From competence to citizenship

I want to elaborate a little, now, on cultural competence. It is an idea whose meaning remains debated. The most influential definition, however, remains that of Cross and her colleagues:

Cultural competence... is... a set of congruent behaviours, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or amongst professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations. ... A culturally competent system of care acknowledges and incorporates—at all levels—the importance of culture, the assessment of cross-cultural relations, vigilance towards the dynamics that result from cultural differences, the expansion of cultural knowledge, and the adaptation of services to meet culturally-unique needs.[20]

I am not, I confess, an academic expert on cultural competence. As some of you know, my own background as an academic was in political theory; and my research interest was in questions of patriotism, multiculturalism and national identity.

There is, however, one difficulty that arises with cultural competence as an idea. For those who may have limited familiarity with it, the concept can be difficult to understand. The lay person may well ask: What do you mean by ‘a set of congruent behaviours, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system, agency, or amongst professionals and enables that system, agency, or those professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations’?

I raise this question as a friendly critic, and one who isn’t by any means immune from the criticism of jargon. As a political theorist trained in what is known as the Anglo-American analytic tradition, I am no stranger to the abstruse and esoteric. In my former world of political theory, we had debates about overlapping consensus, deliberative democracy, communicative rationality – terms that no lay person would understand (and terms that some political theorists themselves sometimes struggle with).

Yet it is worth us reflecting on the importance of language when we are speaking about cultural concepts. It’s one thing to have scholarly debates: there, one can speak in a scholarly language. But if those debates do enter into the realm of policy, and into public debate, we should be prepared to state the case with maximum clarity.

There are a number of elements to cultural competence that deserve emphasis. One involves being able to understand that some things can have more than one fixed meaning. This is true of our most basic ideas.

Take the idea of family. The modern Western idea of family is one that has close associations with the nuclear family – of a two-parent family and children. In many cultures, however, this is only a partial understanding of what family means.

Or take the idea of happiness. In most Western cultures, happiness is the axiom of individual freedom and a good life. There are few more beautiful words in the English language than life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Yet in non-Western cultures, happiness may not reside at the apex of values. Some cultures, particularly those more collectivist ones, prioritise harmony and stability. And insofar as happiness is cherished, it may not be so much about pursuing one’s dreams as it is about securing the happiness of one’s family or community.

There is also a more sophisticated demand for understanding. Cultural competence must also involve being aware of the relationship between power and culture. While in our liberal democratic society, every citizen is legally entitled to equal treatment, not every citizen will enjoy the same social standing. Some will speak from a position of privilege, while others will not have that fortunate luxury.

Not everyone grasps this. This has been revealed, for example, by the debates we have had during the past two years about racial vilification and free speech. As many of you know, the Federal Government sought to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate someone because of their race.

Among many calling for the repeal of this section were many so-called libertarians or classical liberals. These are people who believe there should be no limits on free speech, so long as it doesn’t involve an incitement to physical violence. From this perspective, if there is bad speech in our society, we best fight it through good speech. Allowing racist or bigoted views to be given airing is, libertarians argue, the best thing we can do – as it ensures there is public scrutiny of them and prevents such views from being driven underground.

It was revealing that the proponents of this view paid almost no attention to the perspective of those who may experience racist hate speech. For those who are insulated from such experiences, it is easy to say that people could just simply speak back against racism. It is easy to say that our society benefits from having hatred aired out in the open, as though it were a matter of abstract speculation.

Yet, once social power is brought into the picture, we can quickly appreciate that such prescriptions can only take us so far. Precisely because of differences in social power, some people may not have the ability to speak back and do so effectively. As for the benefits of having hatred out in the open, I’ve yet to hear anyone who has experienced racial vilification say to me that they were grateful that bigotry has given voice to their face, rather than be driven underground.[21]

What I’ve focused on here are two elements of cultural competence: an ability to understand differences in values and an ability to discern social power.

Within many discussions of cultural competence, these elements can be regarded as technical aspects of professionalism. They are the set of skills that may be required of doctors, nurses, teachers and educators. However, they are demands that are not confined to people in their professional lives. They also concern the skills that we require as citizens in a diverse society. What we often call cultural competence may be described more generally as the skills of multicultural citizenship.

Civic virtue and multiculturalism

In my view, there is much to be gained from thinking about these issues from the perspective of citizenship and looking further than professional competence. Too often, practical questions of cultural diversity can be left to human resources divisions of organisations to manage. We need to think beyond cultural diversity as being just about gathering for a staff potluck lunch every Harmony Day in March. And think beyond having to complete another training module administered by Human Resources as part of your annual professional development.

Admittedly, this requires some readjustment. Most people may only think about citizenship when they require a passport or when they are in the customs and immigration queue at a foreign airport. Historically speaking, the category of citizenship remains relatively young in Australia. Prior to the enactment of the Nationality and Citizenship Act in 1948, citizenship didn’t formally exist in this country; every member of this society was a subject of the British Crown, not a citizen of an Australian polity.

It is citizenship, however, that is the foundation of our cultural diversity today. Our multiculturalism is built on the rights and responsibilities of citizenship. We say that there is not one way of being an Australian; you can come from whatever background but be a member of this society. But this derives from the right that a person has, as a citizen, to express their cultural heritage and identity.

This right is not absolute: multiculturalism doesn’t mean a right to do anything in the name of one’s culture. It doesn’t sanction cultural relativism. Rather, any rights are balanced by responsibilities. In Australia, multiculturalism has always been limited by liberal democratic values: a commitment to democracy, adherence to the law, respect for the freedom and equality of others.[22]

Viewing cultural diversity in terms of citizenship means this. We don’t value diversity just as an end in itself; we value diversity also as a means to an end. Multicultural citizenship makes a more measured demand on people: it is not about simply endorsing another person’s cultural identity, but about giving another citizen the respect they are entitled as an equal. It is about giving someone respect, but the respect they warrant as a fellow Australian.

Citizenship of this kind requires the support of institutions. It requires, for example, the support of legislation.

Here, multicultural citizenship has been given legislative expression through the Racial Discrimination Act. This legislation last Saturday celebrated its 40th birthday. The first national human rights legislation, it has since 1975 protected all Australians against racial discrimination. The Act makes it unlawful to engage in racial discrimination and vilification. It allows for people to hold others to account when they experience these forms of racism.

Legislation alone cannot, of course, sustain citizenship. Good citizenship requires good citizens. It finds its expression most powerfully through the behaviour and conduct of citizens themselves.

Civic virtue can’t be separated from practice. It is both revealed and nurtured through practice. Thus understood, civic virtue is a form of practical wisdom. There is ‘no recipe, formula or set of techniques’ that lead to it. Instead, it is something learned through experience, and through the application of both will and skill.[23]

The kind of virtue that exemplifies multicultural citizenship doesn’t always materialise, even with the best of intentions.

I was reminded of this by the recent national anthem controversy involving Cranbourne Carlisle Primary School in Melbourne. The school recently gave permission to Shia Muslim students to excuse themselves from singing Advance Australia Fair. From 13 October to 12 November, Shia Muslims observe Muharram, a month of mourning to honour their founder Imam Hussein. It is a month of solemnity, in which Shias avoid all joyful acts, including singing.

There has been a great deal of debate about this episode. Many have said that it was unacceptable for Shia Muslim students to have sat out their school assembly; that it was tantamount to them rejecting the Australian national identity. Others have said that the school was right to respect the religious freedom of its students – this wasn’t a case of the students withdrawing permanently from the singing of the national anthem but only temporarily.

This was, I suspect, a controversy that never should have been a controversy. Is our national identity so fragile, and our patriotism so delicate, that we can’t countenance the prospect of a temporary religious exemption to singing the national anthem? Would we have had such a passionate response to the decision had the children been of a different religion?

It is interesting, though, that some Shia Muslim Australians have said that they didn’t believe that the school’s decision about the national anthem was necessary. I don’t know the full details of the school’s deliberations, but this does raise questions about whether in this case getting students to sit out the national anthem was the only option available. Might it have been possible to reach a different solution? Could there have been a compromise, for instance, which involved the Shia schoolchildren attending the assembly but not necessarily singing the national anthem? Could that have been a way of demonstrating that religious observance could sit alongside patriotic expression?

I raise these questions not to criticise the decision of the school, a decision which I believe they were entitled to take. I raise them, rather, to illustrate how questions about cultural difference may require an answer in the form of practical wisdom. I suspect that the next time this scenario arises again, perhaps next year, the school will be armed with greater confidence about what to do.

Civic virtue, as I’ve said, is something that is revealed and nurtured through practice. And if we understand what we call cultural competence as part of the demands of multicultural citizenship, then a similar point can be made. Living with cultural difference is something we perfect not through theory but through practice as well. But it is important that we also give thought to what it means, and support scholarship and research about how we can improve. For this reason, cultural competence is indeed everyone’s business.


[1] S Miller, Conversation: A History of a Declining Art (2006), p ix, 1.

[2] See Miller, above.

[3] Cross, T., Bazron, B., Dennis, K., & Isaacs, M., 1989. Towards a culturally competent system of care: a monograph on effective services for minority children who are severely emotionally disturbed. Washington, DC: Child and Adolescent Service System Program Technical Assistance Centre, Georgetown University Child Development Center.

[4] Cited in P Beilharz, T Hogan, S Shaver, The Marin Presence: Jean Martin and the Making of the Social Sciences in Australia (2015), pp. 127-28.

[5] WEH Stanner, ‘After the Dreaming’, in R Manne & C Feik (eds.), The Words that made Australia: How a nation came to know itself (2012), p 131.

[6] Markus, A., ‘Mapping Social Cohesion: The Scanlon Foundation Surveys 2015’, Scanlon Foundation 2015.

[7] Gray, M., and Sanders, W., ‘Australian Public Opinion on Indigenous Issues: Injustice, disadvantage and support for recognition’ ANUPOLL, Report No. 17, March 2015.

[8] Fairfax Ipsos Poll, 2 – 4 July 2015 - Constitutional Recognition available at http://ipsos.com.au/shorten-records-lowest-approval-ratings-as-opposition-leader-fairfax-ipsos-poll/ (accessed on 3 November 2015).

[9] Oliver, A., ‘The Lowy Institute Poll 2015’, Lowy Institute for International Policy, June 2015, p 15.

[10] McAllister, I., The Australian Voter: 50 Years of Change (2011), pp 65-71.

[11] Bongiorno, F., ‘How Australia learned to be cosmopolitan’, Guardian Australia (online), 30 October 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/australia-culture-blog/2015/oct/30/how-australia-learned-to-be-cosmopolitan. These quotes are taken an edited extract from Bongiorno’s The Eighties: The Decade That Transformed Australia (2015).

[12] See Borgiorno above.

[13] SBS News, ‘Kebab Kinds offers bite of multicultural Australia’, 26 October 2015 available at: http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/2015/10/26/kebab-kings-offers-bite-multicultural-australia (accessed on 3 November 2015).

[14] Markus, A., ‘Mapping Social Cohesion: The Scanlon Foundation Surveys 2015’, Scanlon Foundation 2015.

[15] Booth, A., Leigh, A., and Vargonova, E., ‘Does Ethnic Discrimination Vary Across Minority Groups?> Evidence from a field Experiment’ (2012) 74, Oxford Bulletin of Economics and Statistics, 547.

[16] Soutphommasane, T., I’m Not Racist But... 40 years of the Racial Discrimination Act, NewSouth Publishing and the Australian Human Rights Commission, 2015.

[17] Oxford Dictionaries

[18] Mo, C.H., ‘Why Asian Americans don’t vote Republican’ 2 November 2015. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2015/11/02/why-asian-americans-dont-vote-republican/?tid=sm_tw (accessed on 3 November 2015).

[19] Cited in T Soutphommasane, Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives (2009), p 80.

[20] Cross, T., Bazron, B., Dennis, K., & Isaacs, M., 1989. Towards a culturally competent system of care: a monograph on effective services for minority children who are severely emotionally disturbed. Washington, DC: Child and Adolescent Service System Program Technical Assistance Centre, Georgetown University Child Development Center. Chapter IV.

[21] Soutphommasane, T., I’m Not Racist But... 40 years of the Racial Discrimination Act, NewSouth Publishing and the Australian Human Rights Commission, 2015.

[22] Soutphommasane, T., ‘Don’t Go Back to Where You Came From’, NewSouth, October 2012.

[23] B Schwartz and K Sharpe, Practical Wisdom (2010), p 8

Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner