Let us not throw stones at those we perceive as being different and therefore not acceptable, but examine our own motives and deeper understandings of Australian values, writes Good Samaritan Sister Clare Condon.
In the 1990s I was privileged to live with young Vietnamese women who came to Australia as refugees or migrants. They had experienced dislocation, even abuse, on their journeys to Australia as they sought a new life. During my time living with them, I grew to appreciate the strength of cultural diversity and the richness it offers our society. But also, I needed to learn how to listen more deeply to the gifts of their cultural values and to not assume that I understood their experience.
These women continue to cherish their first culture as well as being engaging Australians in the best sense of the word. They straddle life in a multicultural reality. They do so as contributing professionals who add strength to the richness of our society.
In 2026, there is a debate initiated by some political figures for Australia to become monocultural. How ludicrous is that when Australia has never been monocultural.
Around 4% of Australia’s total population is Indigenous. This means that 96% of Australians have an immigrant heritage (Australian Bureau of Statistics). Over 31% of the current population was born overseas. Around half of our total population has at least one parent who was born overseas, while 20% of people speak a language other than English when at home. How rich is that!
Alan Gamlen, director of the Australian National University’s Migration Hub, said “monoculturalism” was the idea that everyone followed a uniform set of norms and rules for behaviour. That included the foods they ate, the clothes they wore, the gods they worshipped, the language they spoke, and much more (‘What is ‘monoculturalism’ and what does it look like in practice?’, ABC, 25 June 2026).
I believe that most Australians are not interested in a culture that imposes such narrowness and exclusivity on their interactions with others. I would never aspire to the values of the exponents of a monocultural way of life.
We have advanced from my childhood in the 1950s where our family diet was meat and three veg. Thank goodness! As women we are not controlled by rigid standards about what we are permitted to wear; remember the time of no trousers or boots for women.
What a rich experience it is to engage with religions other than my own, to welcome and share ideas with Muslim friends, Jews, Hindus, and diverse Christian followers to discover the similarities and the differences in beliefs, and to do so in a nonthreatening manner, which benefits us all.
Instead of going backwards to anything that resembles monoculturalism, I believe we would be better served by moving forward with strong engagement with one another. The gift of diversity in Australia is a powerful strength. This is often identified as an intercultural approach where people of different first cultures have engaging interactions with each other. They develop strong relationships through the sharing of ideas and values and show mutual respect and understanding.
Interestingly, the Australian Values Statement includes the following: a ‘fair go’ for all that embraces mutual respect, tolerance, compassion for those in need, and equality of opportunity for all.
However, in practice, these Aussie values do not necessarily characterise much of the current debates, e.g. a ‘fair go’ can be very unfair across various sections of society. It is not a ‘fair go’ to live perpetually in poverty while wealthy people can avoid paying their fair share of taxes. There is a dramatic lack of a ‘fair go’ when it comes to the reality of remote Indigenous Australians and their fair share of the common wealth and their experience of perpetual poverty.
I cannot see how derogatory banners displayed by certain political parties or vested interests demonstrate mutual respect.
If Australia is to be defined as a Christian country, as stated by some politicians, then these human values of mutual respect, tolerance, compassion and equality of opportunity should be paramount for all Christians who call Australia home. Christians would serve society best if each sought to live by Gospel values rather than promote some ideological fantasy of bygone years.
With the debate about multiculturalism, let us move forward with a sense of interculturality. Rather than inciting fear about the few, we would do well to excite the many with confident exchange and compassionate understanding and find ways to actually live the values we purport to have as Australians and, for some, as Christians.
Christians have a checkered history of speaking about these values while acting with disrespect, intolerance and demonising of others. A clear example in Australia is the lingering rejection of the generational trauma of colonisation on First Nations people where well-meaning Christians were aligned with the colonists and so justified exclusion and violence.
Let us not throw stones at those we perceive as being different and therefore not acceptable, but examine our own motives and deeper understandings of Australian values. Let us confidently engage with the stranger, or the other. For Christians, a rereading of the Gospels, especially the parable of the Good Samaritan, might assist us in becoming a country where respect, tolerance and compassion override prejudice aligned to self-interest, arrogance and ignorance.
