Most of Australia's residents live on the coast.
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Compared with their older selves, Australians--especially the younger ones--are a tolerant people. Few of the extreme emotions set off in the U.S. by the idea of multiculturalism have been awakened by its Australian version. We are, in fact, one of the world's most successful multicultural democracies, and this is an ethical triumph of no small consequence. Australians on the whole realize that multiculturalism, that forbiddingly bureaucratic polysyllable responsible for so much hot air, really means learning to read other people's image banks, not a forced renunciation of one's own. They realize, quite naturally and instinctively, that the desire to "give people a fair go," which is one of the traditional moral imperatives of Australian life, also applies to immigrants, including those of a different color.
This does not, however, mean that Australia's road to multi-culti has been stoneless. Translated into government policy, multi-culti in the 1980s became, its critics say, not just a neutral recognition of diversity but a pork barrel for buying the temporary loyalties of ethnic groups.
Maybe, but it doesn't ultimately matter. Immigration has done its work. It has changed Australia irrevocably. Nobody old enough to remember the dullness of its old monocultural cuisine can regret that. The British Empire has gone. The British Commonwealth is no longer, to put it mildly, a decisive linkage between nations. The Australia Act of 1986 formally defined Britain as a foreign country. Australia's economic links to Britain, though not insignificant, are small and dwindling in comparison with its trading ties to the Near North, once known as the Far East. Britain is in the European Union, and will act in accordance with its interests there, giving no priority to Australia. Australians who feel they are British because they speak English are fooling themselves but no one else. You can no longer "be" Australian and, without conflict, "feel" British. The two nations are too far apart.
Once upon a time, back in the 1950s, the hot emblematic issue in Australia's politics, as in America's, was communism. We feared Stalin and subversion by the enemy within; the "red menace" was played on, crudely but efficiently, by conservative politicians. Today all that is gone. Australian politics has a new emblematic issue, a different moral center. It has nothing to do with ideology. It is race: the politics of identity, of Aboriginal rights, and the obligation to face a murky and cruel history.
About 2% of Australian citizens are black, roughly the same percentage of Aborigines as there are Jews in the U.S. This amounts to roughly 390,000 people out of 20 million, a tiny minority. Unlike American Jews, however, Australian blacks have very little power, economic, political or cultural. There are no rich Aborigines, no Aboriginal-owned newspapers, no Aboriginal CEOs of Australian companies. Out of the 224 elected members of the Senate and House of Representatives, which form the Australian Parliament in Canberra, only one is Aboriginal, the brilliant and resolute young politician Aden Ridgeway. Aboriginal influence is exerted mainly through bureaucracy, committees and the courts; for political clout, Aborigines depend largely on the sympathy and support of whites.