The recently released Victoria Multicultural Review – Final Report presents itself as a decisive blueprint for an inclusive and harmonious state. It invokes the rhetoric of trust, cohesion, and the elevation of multicultural affairs to the highest echelons of government. Yet, on closer examination, it discloses more about the anxieties and blind spots of an Anglo-centric polity than it does about the aspirations of the communities it claims to represent. While its pages are filled with exhortations and symbolic gestures, ultimately, it falls short of articulating the kind of structural vision that could weave disparate identities into a shared narrative of belonging. What emerges is less a roadmap for integration than a reaffirmation of a hegemonic class still uncertain about how to move beyond spectacle towards genuine partnership.
The Review situates its narrative in Victoria’s long history of diversity. We are reminded of the forty Aboriginal languages once spoken across the state, of the Chinese miners of the goldfields, of John Joseph the African-American rebel at Eureka. These references are marshalled as evidence of an enduring tradition of inclusion, yet they remain disconnected fragments, curated more as exhibits than as histories with contemporary resonance. Rather than interrogating the ongoing exclusions that mark Victoria’s past and present, the narrative reassures the majority that tolerance has always been the state’s hallmark. Postcolonial theory draws our attention to this manoeuvre: the coloniser selects which fragments of the colonised past to display, curating them into a story that comforts the centre while obscuring the silences and dislocations at the margins.
The means by which the ruling class prefers to acknowledge cultural difference is evidently through performance. The Review recommends funding between twenty and thirty large multicultural events and up to sixty smaller ones annually, while also elevating the beleaguered, largely isolated and limited in scope Immigration Museum as a “cultural icon.” These initiatives invite communities to display their identity through costumes, food, music and ritual, in forms that can be consumed by the mainstream. Such gestures are not without merit, but they relegate multiculturalism to the realm of ornament rather than structure. Communities are celebrated for their difference so long as that difference entertains or educates. They are rarely situated as co-authors of policy or as interlocutors in shaping civic culture. The result is what Bhabha terms mimicry: migrants permitted to reproduce their heritage in ways sanctioned by the dominant culture, while genuine parity of voice is withheld.
The proposed reforms to the Victorian Multicultural Commission illustrate this dynamic. Once envisaged as a conduit between government and community, the Commission is now deemed too ceremonial, too focused on celebration, and insufficiently strategic. The Review proposes replacing it with “Multicultural Victoria,” a statutory authority led by three commissioners and advised by an appointed Multicultural Community Advisory Group. Yet these changes do not redistribute authority. Commissioners remain government appointees, advisory groups remain advisory, and oversight remains firmly within the Premier’s office. This is not empowerment, but consolidation. What is presented as reform is in fact the reinforcement of a hierarchy in which multiculturalism continues to be administered from above rather than shaped in dialogue.
The rhetoric of trust in the document is particularly telling. Communities are said to have lost faith in government institutions, to feel unsafe, unheard, and marginalised. Yet the onus is subtly redirected back onto them: they are invited to participate more actively, to consult, to pledge allegiance to social cohesion. The implication is that trust is mutual, eroded equally on both sides, to be rebuilt together. What is not acknowledged is that trust was first broken by a state that has long instrumentalised migrant loyalty while disregarding migrant exclusion. It is the government, not the communities, that must do the greater work of rebuilding. To suggest otherwise is to indulge a false equivalence that masks the asymmetry of power.
Throughout the Review there are gestures towards deeper engagement. Multicultural communities are quoted as insisting that they do not wish merely to apply for programs but also to shape them, that they are not vulnerable but visionary, that policy without them cannot serve them. These voices are acknowledged but not embedded in the recommendations. Instead, the familiar machinery of committees, frameworks, grants, and reports proliferates. The structures multiply, but the central narrative of who leads and who follows remains unchanged.
Consider the recommendation that all Cabinet submissions include a multicultural impact statement. On the surface progressive, it positions multiculturalism as an afterthought, to be appended once decisions have already been conceived within Anglo-centric frameworks. Similarly, the requirement that government boards reflect community demographics, though laudable, depends upon appointment processes that remain firmly in government hands. Diversity here is managed, not re-imagined.
The “social cohesion pledge” illustrates the same logic. To access government funding, multicultural organisations must first commit themselves to upholding laws and promoting harmony. While framed as neutral, this requirement subjects them to a moral test not imposed on mainstream organisations. It implies that they are potential risks to cohesion, requiring additional scrutiny. In effect, multicultural organisations are placed in a perpetual state of probation, compelled to perform loyalty more conspicuously than others. Postcolonial critique reminds us that the subaltern is admitted to the polity only when compliance with dominant norms has been demonstrated.
Youth initiatives are treated in much the same way. The establishment of a multicultural youth worker program, the expansion of support groups, and the creation of youth-led grants do respond to genuine needs. However, they appear to situate multicultural youth as a distinct cohort to be managed, rather than as citizens integral to the mainstream youth policy framework. Separation is thus maintained even as inclusion is promised.
Language services are similarly framed. The Review rightly calls for declaring interpreting and translation an “essential service” and for ensuring that only credentialed interpreters are used. Nonetheless, language is treated as a technical barrier to be managed, rather than a positive cultural resource capable of transforming public discourse. The multiplicity of languages spoken in Victoria is cast as an obstacle requiring service provision, not as an opportunity to reconceive civic identity on equal terms.
This trajectory is familiar to scholars of multicultural theory. The Australian model, formalised in the 1970s, rested upon three pillars: cultural identity, social justice, and economic efficiency (Lopez, The Origins of Multiculturalism in Australian Politics 1945–1975). Over time, the balance has shifted. Cultural identity has been reduced to spectacle, social justice diluted, economic participation commodified. The Review reproduces this pattern. It cites numbers of languages spoken and festivals funded, but articulates no vision of how these elements are to be integrated into the civic centre. Difference may be acknowledged but this not woven into the political fabric.
The Review’s approach to racism underscores this limitation. It acknowledges the rise of Islamophobia, antisemitism, and anti-Asian sentiment, praises the Anti-Racism Strategy, and recommends expanded data collection and education campaigns. This notwithstanding, racism is depicted as an external problem, imported from global conflicts or amplified by social media, to be countered through management. There is no sustained recognition of racism as structurally embedded within institutions, the dominant culture or within the narratives of statehood itself. Communities are asked to combat racism, but not invited to interrogate the Anglo-centric frameworks that perpetuate exclusion and give rise to systemic racism.
Taken together, the recommendations serve to increase governmental control while appearing to empower communities. Advisory groups proliferate, but remain advisory. Grants increase, but reinforce dependency. Data is collected, but interpretation remains with bureaucrats. Communities are urged to participate, but only within structures they did not design. This is multiculturalism as management, not as shared authorship.
What the Review does not offer is a narrative of integration that transcends performance. A society does not cohere merely by staging festivals or erecting heritage museums. It coheres when institutions mirror the diversity of the people, when decision-making power is genuinely shared, and when cultural difference becomes an integral component of civic identity. Achieving this requires more than bureaucratic adjustment. It requires a transformation of imagination: away from Anglo-centrism as the invisible norm, and towards a polity in which multiple heritages constitute the centre.
Until such a vision emerges, the trust the government seeks to invoke will remain elusive. Trust is not rebuilt through proclamations but through deeds. Ethnic communities have long demonstrated their trust in the state through their labour, resilience and creativity. It is the state that must now demonstrate itself worthy of theirs. Without that, the multicultural project will remain what this Review inadvertently discloses: a spectacle of difference, presided over by a dominant class still uncertain how to move from performance to partnership, from tokenism to transformation, from Anglo dominance to genuine plurality.
