ABSTRACT
One of the most innovative dimensions of the conservative political strategy in Australia in the decade after the election of the Labor government in 1972 was the development of a policy of ‘cultural pluralism’. Increasingly, a conservative government faced with apparently intransigent social problems sought comfort in ideological forays against the state and the working class, its weapons drawn from the armoury of that curious collectivity sometimes called the ‘New Right’. This chapter provides an examination of how this contradiction has been managed, and how an apparent paradox within the neo-conservative state has masked a concerted strategy to reconstruct and extend the Australian ruling class, while at the same time demobilising significant sectors of the Australian proletariat. One of the apparent paradoxes of the politics of ethnicity has been the steady criticism of ‘multiculturalism’ from a right libertarian perspective.
