When my wife and I visited East Germany in 1984 it was still under communist rule.
We were planning a European holiday that year to celebrate our 20th wedding anniversary and wanted to include visits to places associated with the Reformation leader Martin Luther, such as the famous Schlosskirche in Wittenberg where he nailed his controversial 95 theses to the church door in 1517.
Luther spent most of his life in regions that, after the second world war, became part of the Russian-controlled German Democratic Republic. Did we dare risk visiting a communist country? Could we find our own way in a rental car? No one would speak English, as German schools taught only German and Russian. I would need to rely on my schoolboy German.
Clearly, the Soviet regime forced German schools to teach the Russian language to foster allegiance to ‘Mother Russia’.
This is not the only example of language being used to shape national identity.
Following the creation of the State of Israel in 1948, Jews began arriving from many different countries, often to escape persecution. These immigrants spoke many different languages, including Russian, Yiddish, Ladino, Arabic, Romanian, Polish, English, Cushitic, French, and Persian. The government faced a huge quandary: How to create a nation from such a polyglot people?
In Ottoman Palestine during the 19th Century, Jews from different linguistic backgrounds commonly spoke Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, or French. Communication between these communities used a kind of Medieval Hebrew. This inspired Russian-Jewish linguist, lexicographer and journalist Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, to propose reviving Hebrew as a Jewish national language.
The subsequent development of Modern Hebrew during the British Mandate period led to its adoption in 2018 as the sole national language of the State of Israel. This is a remarkable achievement, as one writer observed:
The process of Hebrew’s return to regular usage is unique; there are no other examples of a natural language without any native speakers subsequently acquiring several million native speakers, and no other examples of a sacred language becoming a national language with millions of native speakers.
Linguistically, Australia had an ideal beginning. A group of English-speaking colonies federated in 1901 to become a nation united by the English language. However, the young nation’s monolingual culture was soon challenged in the aftermath of the second world war.
The experience of Japanese forces bombing Darwin, sinking HMAS Kuttabul in Sydney Harbour, and sending a naval fleet to threaten Australia was a wake-up call. The American-Australian naval victory in the Coral Sea removed this immediate threat, but the vulnerability of Australia was glaringly evident.
To strengthen Australia’s defence capabilities, then-Prime Minister Ben Chifley established the federal Department of Immigration to administer a large-scale immigration program. The first Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, promoted this program with the slogan ‘populate or perish’.
The massive increase in immigration that followed included not only ‘ten-pound-Pom’ British migrants, but also Italians, Poles, Yugoslavians, and Greeks. Under the bipartisan federal assimilation policy, non-English-speaking immigrants were encouraged to learn English and assimilate into Australian economic, social, and cultural life.
To facilitate assimilation, the government sponsored English language classes and English lessons on radio. It published a monthly bulletin The New Australian designed to inform migrants in simple English about current events relating to their economic and social well-being. Good Neighbour Councils and other non-official bodies provided further opportunities to become familiar with the Australian social and cultural environment.
A hilarious snapshot of the immigrant experience in Menzies-era Australia is told in the novel They’re a Weird Mob by Nino Culotta (pseudonym of John O’Grady). The final message of the novel is that New Australians should:
‘…get out there and embrace the local way of living, of “[which] there is no better”, and not cleave to their own language and customs.’
That all changed when the bipartisan assimilation policy was abandoned in favour of a policy of multiculturalism by the Whitlam government in 1973. That year, Immigration Minister Al Grassby issued the first Australian Multiculturalism policy paper. It was titled, A Multi-cultural Society for the Future.
In that paper, Grassby envisioned a society of ‘greatly increasing social complexity … producing new national initiatives … and ensuring great strength in diversity’. He acknowledged critics who saw the pluralistic approach ‘as leading to a fragmented society, lacking in cohesion and threatening to produce a complete, permanent, and hostile segregation of one part of our population’. Personally, he remained optimistic ‘that Australians of all backgrounds will always be proud before the world to say in whatever accents, “I am an Australian”’.
Now, half a century later, we can assess whether he or his critics were more accurate.
One consequence of embracing multiculturalism is the growing number of people in this country who are not fluent in English. The 2021 census revealed that six million Australians, or 23 per cent of the population, don’t speak English at home, including many who cannot converse in English. Migrants who lack English may face difficulties when shopping, banking, seeking medical care, or government services. In emergencies, this deficiency could be life-threatening.
Migrants lacking adequate English can be assisted by TIS National, the translating and interpreting service run by the Department of Home Affairs. This has been estimated to cost some $250 million per year. This is an important service to help newcomers, but it is one of the many costs of Australia’s mass immigration program.
An important question arising from multicultural immigration is the allegiance of migrants. One’s mother tongue has a profound influence on a person’s individual identity and cultural allegiance. Newcomers who lack facility in English may rely on their mother tongue for news and opinion, and thereby retain an allegiance to their country of origin.
The most common non-English languages spoken in Australia, according to the 2021 census, are Mandarin 685,274 people or 2.7 per cent and Arabic 367,159 or 1.4 per cent. Many of these people have a poor grasp of English. We need to consider how many Mandarin-speaking and Arabic-speaking migrants maintain a primary allegiance to their mother countries.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is known to be interfering in Australia via social media and in other ways. For example, a Chinese-born Australian dissident told the Senate Select Committee on Foreign Interference through social media:
I have been receiving death threats almost on a daily basis… WeChat has become this very toxic headquarters for misinformation and propaganda for the Chinese government, but at the same time for users, no matter whether you’re inside China or outside China in Australia, the rate for free speech to survive is zero.
In Australia, CCP methods have included:
…monetary inducements to politicians to change their stance on key issues; … financial support for research institutes that carry a pro-Beijing line; threats to mobilise Chinese Australian voters to punish political parties who do not support Beijing’s policy preferences; … coopting Chinese-language media and local civic organisations to promote narratives and individuals who are friendly to Beijing; and a variety of efforts to drown out or silence critics.
An indication of the proportion of Australian residents with Chinese ancestry who prefer to use Chinese language rather than English is provided by a survey conducted by the Lowy Institute: 2023 Being Chinese in Australia: Public Opinion in Chinese Communities. Respondents had the option to complete the survey in English or Chinese. Some two-thirds (65 per cent) chose Chinese over English (35 per cent). Clearly, Chinese-language media have a huge influence on Chinese-Australian residents.
In short, many Chinese-ancestry people living in Australia rely on Chinese-language media for information and opinion. This may leave them vulnerable to influence and pressure from China.
The second most common non-English language spoken in Australia is Arabic.
The Chinese and Arabic languages and cultures are very different. Chinese culture has a strong written tradition, whereas Arabic culture has a strong oral tradition. The Chinese language is ancient, with literature dating back to about 1000 BC. Arabic is a relatively young language based on a spoken dialect of a small tribe in Mecca used by the prophet Muhammad when reciting the Quran from 610 to 632 AD.
Written Chinese uses thousands of symbolic characters representing things or ideas but not pronunciation. Written Arabic is phonetic, indicating how words are spoken, and was formalised when Muhammad’s prophecies were committed to writing. The Arabic language spread with the expansion of Islam and became the language of the growing Islamic empires. Thus, the Arabic language and the religion of Islam are closely intertwined.
The primary Arabic-speaking country seeking to interfere in Australia is Iran. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese recently took an extraordinary diplomatic step of declaring Iran’s ambassador to Canberra persona non grata. He ordered senior Iranian diplomats to leave the country immediately and suspended operations in Australia’s embassy in Tehran. The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO):
…had made the assessment that Tehran’s security services — principally the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — used intermediaries to direct at least two antisemitic attacks on Australian soil. These were the arson attack on Lewis’ Continental Kitchen in Sydney last October, and the firebombing of the Adass Israel Synagogue in Melbourne last December.
Clearly, the Islamist threat to Australia’s peace and harmony is real.
A consequence of the strong oral tradition in Arabic-speaking communities is that their people tend to make decisions and navigate their lives through personal contact. This is provided through Muslim mosques. The importance of the Arabic language for maintaining the identity of Australian Muslims is indicated by a recent survey of community members of a Mosque. The study found that:
…the Arabic language is maintained among the Arabic speakers due to the high exalted status that Arabic holds as a language of Islam which represents the Arab and Muslim identity.
We need to ask what is being communicated to Muslims in Australian mosques. A possible indication can be gained from websites which provide Muslims with answers to questions about living in Islam.
In answer to a question about a Muslim living in a non-Muslim country, the popular website paraphrases the Islamic scholar and author Shaykh Ibn ‘Uthaymeen in saying that it is essential for the person to:
…harbour in his heart resentment towards the disbelievers (non-Muslims), and should keep away from taking them as close friends and allies, and loving them, because taking them as close friends and allies and loving them are things that are contrary to faith.
This type of teaching inside a multi-faith society is of concern.
Another source of Islamic teaching from the Qatari government provides authoritative answers to questions about Islam. The answer to a question about taking a citizenship oath in a non-Muslim country includes this statement:
The pledge of allegiance is one of the greatest blights associated with endeavouring to get the citizenship of a non-Muslim country. It consists of various vicious matters, including what is related to Kufr (disbelief) itself, like allegiance to the laws of those countries.
In their view, a true Muslim cannot pledge allegiance to a non-Muslim country such as Australia. A Muslim who does so may be using taqiyya, the practice of dissembling to conceal an actual allegiance to Islam.
Where does all of this leave us?
After 50 years of multiculturalism, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the well-intentioned Al Grassby was wrong. Unfortunately, his critics had remarkable foresight in predicting that multiculturalism would lead to ‘a fragmented society, lacking in cohesion and threatening to produce a complete, permanent, and hostile segregation of one part of our population’.
We could do worse than have a fresh look at a policy of assimilation, which served Australia well for the first seven decades of our federation.
The Australian government could start by strengthening the role of the English language in fostering national unity. Applicants for permanent visas or citizenship could be required to meet higher standards of English competence.
Let’s aspire to being a nation united by the English language.
Dr David Phillips is a former research scientist and founder of FamilyVoice Australia