With the election date being set for September 7, we all now have the opportunity to see in ‘real time’ how the issues of the campaign unfold, and how the competing interests of various community sectors are lining up in order to push their own agenda. An official election period is quite revealing about the state of our society and about the state of our democracy.
In these early days of the campaign we have already seen the obvious. We have seen polls indicating a probable Coalition win, we have seen and we have heard the first policy shots being fired (car industry assistance package, after school funding, corporate taxation relief), and we have witnessed the escalating confrontation between the Murdoch media and the elected government of Kevin Rudd.
What we have not seen or heard so far is the voice of ethnic and multicultural Australia. Hopefully, before this campaign is over, multicultural Australia might be able to make its voice heard and its mark felt, because it does have its own issues to address, something that is evident by reading the Neos Kosmos (English edition) lead story today.
It is good to remind ourselves again in this official pre-election period that politics, amongst other things, is a tug of war. It is about symbolic, perceived and real power. It is about ideology, principles and competing interests. It is about open or encrypted confrontations and alliances, involving demands, deals, compromises and outcomes that shape individual and collective lives in a very powerful and definitive way.
If the issues of ethnic and multicultural Australia are to be considered seriously, then one basic political question that has to be asked again, is whether or not there is such a thing as an ethnic vote in Australia.
The 2011 census had indicated that 26.5 per cent of Australians were born overseas. A substantial proportion of these citizens were born in an English-speaking country, or came to Australia at a very young age. Therefore, if we are to define ethnic and multicultural Australia, it might be more appropriate to define it in terms of languages spoken other than English, and in terms of cultural influences and preferences. If this is to be an acceptable definition, then there is clear evidence in the past few decades in Australia that there are a number of electorates where the ethnic vote does have a ‘preference’ and might make a difference in an election outcome. The ethnic vote goes to political parties with policies that address the needs of these communities, thus establishing historical associations of some endurance. This reality is acknowledged by political parties and that is why they pre-select ethnic background candidates on various occasions. Evidence of these ethnic considerations can be found not only in Australia but also in other immigrant and multicultural nations such as the USA, Britain and Canada.
However, in my opinion, scholars such as Nick Economou and others in this country rightly claim the influence of the ethnic vote in the overall electoral process might be overstated. It is traditional socio-economic factors, or class, in other words, rather than ethnicity that is the ultimate determinant of electoral behaviour. The state of the overall economy, the state of the voter as an economic unit with needs, income and expectations, his/her educational and professional status, his or her place of residency, are all factors that determine the political behaviour of a citizen.
If class rather than ethnicity is what mostly determines the overall political behaviour of ethnic or multicultural Australia, then we must not be surprised by the so far relative silence in this pre-election period of the more established immigrant communities in Australia such as the Greek community.
However, the ethnic vote was and still is a more important factor in influencing party pre-selections in Australia, because the major parties continue to have low membership numbers.