Multiculturalism and its discontents : majorities, minorities and toleration

Australian politics over the last four years has been haunted by a spectre thought by many of us to have been long since laid to rest" the spectre of anti-immigrant and anti-multicultural sentiment. In the protective climate of long-term Labor rule in the 1980s and early 1990s, many critical intellectuals" who otherwise found much to complain about in Labor's political priorities" nevertheless came to believe that multiculturalism, in the idiosyncratic Australian usage of the term, had become an unchallenged fixture in the political firmament. (For the collapse of this illusion, see Adams, 1997.) This rather complacent belief, or perhaps hope, was uprooted with the emergence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation organization.