Australia as “the most successful multicultural society in the world”
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores in what ways and to what extent Australia's claim to exceptionalism as "the most successful multicultural society in the world" can be supported by evidence.The reiteration of this claim by successive Australian national governments, most recently in 2020, is tested in a series of increasingly focussed analyses.Beginning with a comparison at the international level with other multicultural societies in liberal democracies (Canada, New Zealand, UK, US, Sweden and the Netherlands), the thesis then investigates the nature of power in multicultural Australia on the basis of equity and inclusion, key ideas in the multicultural mantra.What might be expected if "multicultural" is introduced as an additional modifier into claims of being a successful and even the most successful society in the world?Four parameters -those of economic participation and opportunity, state policies on cultural diversity, social equality and opportunity, and levels of human development -are used to test the comparative claims at a global level.These parameters are then applied through a detailed analysis of both formal and informal power positions and structures in Australia.Finding an appropriate single marker of "multicultural" is complex, as there are both objective and subjective factors that can be operationalised.Typically in Australia the current officially sanctioned terminology "culturally and linguistically diverse" (CALD) refers to an ensemble of criteria including at least one of country of own and parents' birth, language spoken at home, faith, and self-identified heritage.Choosing the self-identified cultural/ethnic heritage -of ancestry -as recorded in the Census return captures the subjective aspect and some of the objective overtones.The research then explores how this independent variable is associated with the dependent variable of occupational status as expressed in both professional and income groups.The approach also demonstrates similar patterns in the realms of social, cultural and political power, leadership and influence.The key outcomes point to an apparent hierarchy of power, class and status in which whiteness (Anglo-Celtic and Northern European origin), Abrahamic faith (Christian or xxvii Jewish rather than Muslim), and male gender characterise those who hold the dominant positions across the board.These patterns reflect the persistence of an ethnocracy founded in an earlier period marked by White Australian values and practices, rather than an inclusive and open democracy reflecting multicultural values and opportunities.However the disjunction between rhetoric and reality appears to be bridgeable, should public policy be implemented that better institutionalises the aspirations of equity and inclusion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".