A ‘seismic shift’ from multiculturalism to assimilation or civic integration discourses is, as Christian Joppke notes, a global, twenty-first century phenomenon.^[54] Yet as I have argued, the underlying foundation of assimilation narratives is the idea that social cohesion can only occur with cultural homogeneity. At the same time these narratives often conflict with equally held ideas about democratic citizenship. Historian Ann Mari Jordens has argued that a country’s citizenship legislation ‘reveals its conception of the ideal citizen, and the qualities required by foreigners if they are to be accepted into the community of the nation’.^[55] Since 1901, successive Australian governments have implemented a number of citizenship models as part of the material instrument of socially engineering a nation. Although these government policies (immigration restriction, assimilation and multiculturalism) have differed radically in scope, all have relied on the premise that citizenship is the teleological end point of Australian identity. The promise promulgated to migrants is that the bureaucratic award of citizenship automatically conveys a sense of belonging in the imagined community of the nation. As Geoffrey Brahm Levy notes, however, this ‘overlooks the fact that one can enjoy equal citizen[ship] rights and equal opportunities and still be socially alienated’.^[56]

As I have argued in this essay, and as the work of artists Liu Xiao Xian, Hou Leong, Owen Leong and Kate Beynon so effectively illustrate, while Australian policies of multiculturalism have been effective in repositioning Australia as a culturally diverse nation, they have failed to secure a sense of true belonging for many of its citizens. Likewise, multiculturalism’s proposed ‘antedote’, integration or assimilation, currently promotes a model which by its very nature successfully resists true social parity. Surely there is scope for a narrative that can celebrate the achievements of the nation as a pluralist democracy, which recognises that the commonality of being Australian comprises myriad different experiences and backgrounds. The material reality of a multicultural population versus the ideational imaginary of white Australia needs to be effectively negotiated. This disjuncture will need to be mediated by government in ways more sophisticated than a retreat to a nostalgic longing for the past or a blithe assertion that ‘we have always been multiculturalists’.