Victorian Multicultural Commission, Melbourne (Image credit: Pramuk Perera, via Unsplash)
In August, Australia’s Acting Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, Alan Tudge, announced the extension of the Adult Migrant Education Program (AMEP) as well as a stronger focus on Australian values in the Australian citizenship test.
Increasing the provision of free English classes through the AMEP is undoubtedly a good thing. Although it needs to be mentioned in brackets that most classes will be online, which is highly problematic because language in use actually involves collaboration and communication.
Here, I am concerned with the rationale for the extended provision of English language lessons.
Non-English speakers a fifth column
In his address to the National Press club, “Keeping Together at a Time of COVID”, the minister claimed that national cohesion in Australia was at risk because of communities who have poor English. He explained that “poor English” made them “more reliant on foreign language sources.” This is a problem, according to the Minister: ‘‘Despite now being proud Australians, some communities are still seen by their former home countries as ‘their diaspora‘ – to be harassed or exploited to further the national cause.”
This negative understanding of “diaspora” is selective because, in fact, the overwhelming majority of Australians are part of some diaspora or other. After all, all non-Aboriginal Australians have ties and loyalties to ancestral cultures and languages that come from somewhere else. This is true even if their family has lived in Australia for generations. When I grew up in Australia in the 1960s, we learnt Scottish, Welsh, and Irish folk songs at school, about heather and misty braes, and we swore allegiance to an English queen.
Diaspora, then, is the lived experience of millions of Australians. But does a diasporic sense of belonging – the experience that various cultural traditions may touch your heart or that your palate has a taste for cuisine associated with more than one place – necessarily involve dual loyalty in the political sense?
Non-English media as sources of misinformation
The Minister says so and his reasoning is this: “malign information or propaganda can be spread through multicultural media, including foreign language media controlled or funded by state players.”
The connection between English language proficiency and “multicultural or foreign language media” consumption is spurious. After all, in a globalized world, direct contact with home country media is just a few clicks away. Even fluent bilinguals are likely to access news from their home country and keep in contact with family members, who are often dispersed across the world and intertwine other languages with English in their home.
The choice of media and language is complex, depending on the time, the place, the users and the context. A Chinese friend who has lived in Australia for 25 years tells me that she and her husband access multiple daily sources of information in both languages, of both local and international provenance. Her Australian-born children use only English-language media and her elderly parents-in-law rely exclusively on Chinese language media and their family members as sources of information. She reports that this diversity of information sources sometimes leads to lively family discussions!
English doesn’t make national cohesion and multilingualism doesn’t break it
Furthermore, the Minster confuses community and foreign languages when he claims that “through the pandemic […] it has been difficult to communicate with all Australians through the mainstream channels.” “Mainstream channels”, in Australia, of course, include local multilingual sources, including government notifications and the extensive local ethnic media, as well as recognizing that most immigrant families and networks include some fluent English users who pass on information.
Finally, “malign information or propaganda” does not only spread through languages other than English. English monolinguals are just as prone to draw on malign sources and fall prey to “fake news”. And many of the English-language media sources they draw on are not Australian at all and emanate from foreign countries.
Ultimately, the link that the Minister makes between English language proficiency and national cohesion is unfortunate. Instead of building bridges between communities and enhancing national cohesion, as was presumably intended, the framing of English language learning as a matter of national loyalty can only increase barriers between communities and lead to distrust.
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Thanks Miriam, for this very important breakdown of the problematic ideology behind the expansion of the AMEP program. You make the really important point that the Minister simply doesn’t seem to understand the multilingualism present in the community, and is very selective about who he understands as part of a diaspora.
Also, what I find particularly pernicious about the link the Minister makes between English proficiency and belonging – and it’s one successive Immigration Ministers have spoken to – is that it denies and seeks to hide the structural disadvantaging of many groups in Australia due to their particular identity and socioeconomic status behind the fantasy that it’s just about being able to speak a named language: “English”. This kind of thinking blames the individual for their lack of opportunity to acquire what is really a high status form of Australian English rather than acknowledging the multiple ways that minoritised identities are kept in their place – away from power codes and away from centres of power. There are many excellent people working in this space, suggesting ways to create a more socially inclusive society, and seeking to scapegoat migrants with low English language proficiency is not one of them, in my view.
DR. Faine and the Right Honourable Alan Tudge, MP, in measured tones articulately in polite language put forward well researched and well-resourced divergent points of view that are widely aired – but are not new, other than that Covid now enters the fray. Given that well-meaning highly educated people of high calibre find the task of attaining national cohesion so fraught with linguistic challenges how do students, parents and other taxpayers discern a long term solution to such a vexing and important and inveterate question as the language issue?
The greatest instrument for promoting harmony and understanding is the officially agreed upon adopting in sensible stages of an international auxlang that is taught in all the schools of the world from the age of six or seven. The League of Nations nearly pulled it off (with only 50 member states) at the height of the Spanish flu pandemic! (Free essay available) That Germany was not invited, the USSR joined very late and the USA avoided the League altogether hindered the adoption of an auxlang in 1920, and again in 1921, and then things spiralled way out of control politically, first in Ethiopia and Manchuria and then in the Rhineland, all the way to 1939. As the English language is extremely popular at this time no reason exists as to why it may not be adopted very soon in that historic role. The lessons of history indicate that there is no other solution than for nation states to ask the UN itself (not UNESCO) to seriously start consultations on the process of selecting a planetary auxlang for all kids.
I’m afraid that wouldn’t do much. The presence of a common language has not stopped a single civil war or the murderousness of the collapse of Yugoslavia. International auxlangs have all sorts of benefits, but world peace is not one of them.
All the “media siloing” (people only using news sources they already agree with) in the US is in English.
Never mind my preferred choice of Esperanto! I’m cool with the language of Shakespeare! But, if common ground is impossible among anglophiles it becomes a question of placating the implacable here if even the English language is ruled out as a vehicle for making peace: Once a civil war, or any war, has started in the Balkans or anywhere, David’s comment about the impotence of a common language (as distinct from a global auxlang yet to be adopted and taught to all kids from an early age) vis-a-vis stopping said war(s) is valid. To draw his conclusion about an international auxlang, without any expanding, is to draw a long bow if you’ll pardon the militaristic terminology.
“No doubt you are aware that in the past ages a common language shared by various nations created a spirit of interdependence and solidarity among them. For instance, one thousand three hundred years ago [writing shortly before WW1]there were very many divergent nationalities in the Orient. There were Copts in Egypt, Syrians in Syria, Assyrians in Musel, Babylonians in Bagdad along the river Mesopotamia. There existed between these nations divergence of opinion and hatred, but as they were slowly brought near to one another, finding common interests, they made the Arabic language a common vehicle of speech among them. The study of this common language by all made them as one nation. We know very well today that the Assyrians are not Arabs, that the Copts, Syrians, Chaldeans and Egyptians are not Arabs. Each one of these nations belongs to its own sphere of nationality, but, as they all began to study the Arabic language, making it a vehicle of intercommunication, today, they are all considered as one. They are so united that it is impossible to break this indissoluble bond. Today in Syria there are many religious sects, such as Orthodox, Mussulman, the Dorzi, Nestorians and so on. As they all speak Arabic they are considered as one; if you ask any one of them, he will say – I am an Arab, though in reality he is not. Some of them are Greeks, others are Jews etc. In short, there are many different nations and religions in the Orient that are united through the benefit of a common language. In the world of existence an international auxiliary language is the greatest bond to unite the people… Just as in the Orient a common language created common interests between the various nations, likewise, in this age a universal auxiliary language would unite all the people of the world. The purpose of my remarks is, that, in the world of humanity, the greatest influence which will work for unity and harmony among the nations is the teaching of a universal language. Every intelligent man will bear testimony to this and there is no further need of argument or evidence.” Sir Abdul-Baha Abbas KBE (Knighted by Field Marshall Allenby for services in Palestine fighting famine in WW1), Esperanto banquet, Hotel Moderne, Paris.
Thanks for pointing out the serious flaws in Tudge’s claims Miriam. His statements connecting English and social cohesion echo those promoted by One Nation. Such general statements are careless and can really damage the efforts of various cultural groups to contribute to Australia’s supposedly celebrated “rich multiculturalism”.
thanks Niru. Yes, I agree his comments are potentially dangerous, more so because they come from a government minister.