ABSTRACT

Multiculturalism has been heralded in Creative Nation (1994) as ‘one of our great national achievements’, and since that time, Australia’s national cultural policy has consistently stressed the need to cater for the needs and interests of Australia’s culturally and linguistically diverse ethnic communities. This chapter describes some of the tensions in the way that multiculturalism has been inserted into cultural policy making in two areas: the arts and the media. In the past few decades Australia has witnessed cultural transformations defined not only by increasing marketization and globalization, but by the increasing diversity of migration flows and a ‘diversification of diversity’ through generational change. The resulting proliferation of cultural practices does not map neatly onto extant notions of national and ethnic community articulated in policy. As a result, we argue, the evolution of Australia’s multiculture is as much an organic result of the increasingly pervasive cultural diversity ‘on the ground’ as the outcome of deliberate policy settings, where commercialization is an enabling driver rather than a hindrance to cultural development.