Social cohesion, and government attempts to improve it, have received a lot of attention in recent months. Government ministers repeatedly invoke it. There’s a program to help social cohesion in Palestinian-Australian and Muslim communities being rolled out right now. Even Peter Dutton refers to it.
But it’s hardly new. Back when he was Home Affairs minister, Peter Dutton presided over a “$71 million package of social cohesion measures“, announced just before the 2019 election, in what was a fairly transparent attempt to woo multicultural communities. The “Community Languages Multicultural Grants Program” was aimed at “eligible community languages schools to help students learn and use another language and connect young Australians to languages and cultures of their community to build strong communities and strengthen social cohesion.” As much pork-barrelling as social glue, Dutton’s program saw hundreds of small grants handed to faith schools of all kinds.
The Turnbull government had also established an ongoing “Fostering Integration Grants” program in the immigration portfolio, to assist migrants to integrate and thus “build upon Australia’s multicultural success with a particular focus on building social cohesion.” State governments hand out funding for social cohesion too.
It’s all separate from, but related to, other programs like countering extremism in communities, which the federal government has been funding for nearly a decade, or funding for extra security for communities identified as facing a security threat — especially, but not only, the Jewish community.
The current Palestinian-Australian and Muslim grants were announced in a peculiar media release two weeks after the Hamas atrocities that sparked the Hamas-Israel conflict. It shoehorned together announcements about social cohesion funding and an extra $25 million in funding for the Executive Council of Australian Jewry for additional security at Jewish schools and preschools (Australian Jews, it seems, are doomed permanently to have to send their kids to schools that partly resemble fortresses in order to prevent antisemitic violence and terrorism). This is in addition to an existing program to fund the protection of faith schools and places of worship.
The other $25 million — matched to the security funding to look balanced — was for a variety of ethnic, religious and community groups that had unsuccessfully applied under previous rounds of the Fostering Integration Grants to put forward the same or new projects. The project list from invitees includes youth workshops, sports, self-defence classes for women, a “Festival to celebrate the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday”, an art group for women from non-English speaking backgrounds, an employment skills program for youth from Arabic-speaking backgrounds, programs to determine the needs of Muslim women in regional Australia, a workshop bringing together young Muslims and Jews “to undergo a transformative peace building process”, migrant integration programs, “workshops on civic responsibilities, the English language and the citizenship process and test”, development of multicultural seniors groups, mosque open days, and support for vulnerable youth.
While a sufficiently malicious journalist might snark at, say, funding a therapeutic art group for Muslim women, governments of both sides have funded such community programs in the hope of improving integration, reducing isolation and lifting basic skills around employability, as well as signalling inclusive support.
But it’s a micro response to a macro problem. The myth, peddled by both sides of politics, is that Australia has a national social cohesion to preserve. It is a cohesion of a dominant culture that demands compliance with its values and rules.
Peter Dutton put it very well a couple of weeks ago, when he said “central to Australia’s social cohesion is a social contract”. That is, social cohesion in Australia is based on a demand for compliance.
Indigenous peoples have never been part of our social cohesion; they have been deliberately excluded, and remain so after the majority of Australians last year rejected recognition of the historical reality that Australia is founded on invasion and dispossession. It is only within recent years that the most overt forms of exclusion of LGBTQIA+ Australians has ceased; trans people still remain targets of vilification. Muslim communities remain excluded, treated as a threatening Other, demonised by politicians and the media even as they’re handed money for integration programs and festivals and courted by political parties.
With two of our biggest media companies, News Corp and Seven, basing their business models on encouraging division, grievance and victimhood among white Australians, cohesion in Australia is a game only the powerful — powerful white people — are allowed to play.
The Hamas-Israel conflict has exposed just how exclusionary our idea of “social cohesion” is. Only pro-Palestine protesters have been targeted by politicians, law enforcement and the media, smeared and threatened with dramatic escalations in police powers. Only pro-Palestine activists who pushed back against attempts to destroy their careers have been singled out for “doxxing” and threatened with new laws.
“Political leaders are reluctant to say it in public,” one senior press gallery journalist sniffed recently, “but many feel that the protesters for Palestine are more aggressive and troubling than those in favour of Israel.”
“Troubling”. “Aggressive”. That’s people objecting to mass slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians, the murder of aid workers and the complicity of Western governments. They’re excluded from “social cohesion” for failing to accept the demands of a white government and media elite.
All the festivals and workshops and transformative peacebuilding processes in the world can’t paper over that social cohesion is a demand for silence and complicity.
