Abstract
This chapter explores the extent to which the direction of Australia’s official multicultural and civic integration policies, reflects the social attitudes and networking practices of migrant youth. The chapter pays particular attention to the Federal Government’s “Anti-Racism Strategy” announced in 2012 as part of its Multicultural Policy. On a theoretical level, direct efforts to mitigate racism have the potential to augment strategies that reaffirm pluralism and address disadvantage often associated with the migrant experience. On an empirical level, it is important to explore the extent to which such top-level discourses have actual founding in the social lives of migrant youth. Therefore this chapter presents the empirical findings of an empirical longitudinal on “Social Networks, Belonging and Active Citizenship among Migrant Youth” (Australian Research Council Linkage project 2009–2013). Migrant youth in this study pointed to a number of instances of racism, which act as significant barriers to cross-cultural networking. Analysis of the data shows, among other things, that there is a persistent tendency among migrant youth to point to their social distance from the metaphorical “Aussie Aussie” people of Anglo origins who are perceived as symbolising Australia’s mainstream. Such manifestations of racial discrimination preclude the emergence of a genuinely inclusive society that supports and nurtures cultural diversity as a significant part of the Australian national identity, as well as the stated objectives of its social policy repertoire.
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- 1.
With the election of the conservative government under Prime Minister Tony Abbott in September 2013 the Social Inclusion Unit was disbanded, but the Multicultural Policy, The People of Australia, remains in place. The clear direction to be taken by the new government is yet to be elucidated, and so this chapter will concern itself with social policy under the former Labor Government.
- 2.
This may be dubbed the three Rs of legitimate democratic governance of culturally diverse or ‘multicultural’ societies such as Australia.
- 3.
In policy terms, engagement with social networks is seen as a key means of promoting and achieving social inclusion, and cross-cultural networks in particular are promoted by the People of Australia Multicultural Policy (as well as at the state level in Victoria in the 2009 Victorian Multicultural Policy “All of Us”, which endorses commitment to “bringing together people across cultures and faiths” and in Queensland’s Multicultural Policy (2011); particularly the “Inclusive Communities” initiative which advocates for young people’s access to and participation in a range of multicultural networks).
- 4.
After the implementation of the Social Inclusion Agenda in 2009, the Commonwealth Government developed a national Social Inclusion Measurement and Reporting Strategy to monitor social exclusion.
- 5.
The term “migrant youth” in the project was defined as an age-specific category (15–23 years of age) comprising Australian and overseas-born youth. Such a definition of migrant youth cuts across generational definitions of migrants (Skrbis et al. 2007) and practitioners’ requirements for a comprehensive and inclusive treatment of the category of youth that responds to their everyday realities. It is during late adolescence and early adulthood that individuals commence the process of integrating identities into coherent wholes (Damon and Hart 1988) and developing a sense of self.
- 6.
Most of the people who visit detained asylum seekers in Melbourne are Anglo-Australians, who do not know detainees prior to their detention, but get to know them through the volunteer networks that organise these visits.
- 7.
Noting that “being too busy” is often used as a general, evasive response when a task or activity seems difficult or unattractive to pursue, and therefore may be bound up with issues of trust racism and identity as well.
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Effeney, L., Mansouri, F., Mikola, M. (2015). Migrant Youth and Social Policy in Multicultural Australia: Exploring Cross-Cultural Networking. In: Mansouri, F. (eds) Cultural, Religious and Political Contestations. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16003-0_12
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