Journal of Sociology

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Ethnic diversity and national identity

F.L. Jones
Journal of Sociology 1997; 33; 285
DOI: 10.1177/144078339703300302
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Ethnic

diversity and national

identity
F. L. Jones
RSSS

Sociology Program,
Australian National

University

Abstract

During the last two decades, there has been a striking and, so far as sociological theory is concerned, largely unanticipated resurgence of religious
fundamentalism and primordial ethnic loyalties across the world. We have
witnessed the dissolution of formerly inclusive but ethnically diverse states into
ethnically more homogeneous nations, the breakdown of social solidarity due
to competing ethnic claims, and a repugnant process called ethnic cleansing.
We have also seen the resurgence of religious fundamentalism and, in most
industrialised countries, the marginalisation of minority groups from a central
social institution (the paid labour market) as a result of high unemployment. The
threat, and the reality, of ethnic conflict is now widespread. In culturally diverse
countries such as Australia, ethnic diversity is sometimes seen as a threat to
national unity. It is therefore important to examine the extent to which
Australians today share a common civic culture that binds a culturally diverse
citizenry together. This article examines recent data on the sources of national
identity, its variation across ethnic sub-groups, and its relation to ethnic
prejudice and to views about immigrants and immigration.

Ethnicity and modern society

Across the world

and,

so

far

as

over

political

the past

decades, there has been a remarkable

theory is concerned, largely unanticipated

two

and social

resurgence of religious fundamentalism and primordial ethnic loyalties. This

social trend stands in apparent contradiction to a major tenet of modern-

theory, which holds that modernity weakens the ascriptive basis of

society and supplants the particularistic ties of kinship and tribalism with
universalistic principles of cultural tolerance and the impersonal rule of law
based on principles of common citizenship (Parsons 1977: 181-90; Waters
and Crook 1993: 539-42). All three major founders of modern sociological
thought, Marx, Durkheim and Weber, believed that the growth of modern
institutions would progressively weaken religion and ethnicity as central
social institutions (Giddens 1991: 207). Modernisation theorists did not
isation

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286

that the trend from traditionalism to modernism, from ascription to

achievement, or from particularism to universalism, would be ubiquitous or
even uniform across the institutional fabric of increasingly differentiated
societies. But they did see such a trend as more or less inevitable, and even
as desirable. One reason it seemed desirable was that it promised to promote
the growth of an inclusive society and a united citizenry with shared values.
It also promised a degree of social inclusion that was inconceivable in premodern times, when whole classes of the population were effectively
excluded from the polity.
That, at least, was the dominant theory. Modernisation theory has since
given way to postmodernism, which in turn has been overtaken by globalisation theory, and with it a return to themes emphasised by earlier
modernisation theory (Waters 1995: 3). Whatever ones preferred position
on these broad theoretical matters, the fact is that we have recently witnessed
the dissolution of formerly inclusive but ethnically diverse states into
ethnically more homogeneous nations, the breakdown of social solidarity as
a result of ethnic conflict (and that repugnant process called ethnic cleansing;
see Zelinka 1996), the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, and, in most
industrialised countries, the growing exclusion of marginalised groups from
at least one major social institution, the paid labour market. Rates of
unemployment in the industrialised nations have reached unacceptably high
levels, especially among the young (Roche 1995: 720). The threat, and the
reality, of communal conflict is now widespread. According to one recent
estimate, thirty five of the thirty seven major armed conflicts in the world at
the beginning of the 1990s were internal ethnic conflicts (Eriksen 1993: 2).
The root causes of this resurgence of ethnic and religious bonds vary across
social, political and historical contexts. In some regions of the world, the
resurgence reflects the expression of nationalistic sentiment following
decolonisation and the drive for political autonomy. In the industrialised West,
emergent and resurgent forms of religion and spirituality are sometimes seen,
following Freud, as a return of the repressed elements of the self caused by
the relentless march of civilisation (Giddens 1991: 207). According to
Giddens, this religious resurgence may even be a necessary rather than an
accidental feature of late modernity, simply because religious fundamentalism
offers a solution to existential dilemmas produced by the radical doubt central
to the modern scientific ethos (1991: 3). In a country of large-scale immigration like Australia, it is something of an irony that secular governments have
indirectly promoted religious diversity through multicultural policies that
celebrate ethnic difference, partly because of liberal humanistic values and
partly because of the potential electoral advantage that ethnic lobbies can
sometimes deliver to the party that pursues ethnic claims most vigorously.
In countries of immigration, however, ethnic differences can also pose a
threat to national unity. Despite a bipartisan convention that supports
continuing immigration and endorses a policy of multiculturalism, concern
about both the level and the composition of recent immigration has
periodically exercised social and political commentators (Blainey 1994; Jupp
1994; McPhedran 1995; Sawer 1996; Wear 1996). As it happens, the most
assume

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287

recent outbreak of racist bigotry in Australia was sparked not so much by

ethnic diversity due to immigration but by the allegedly favoured treatment
of Aboriginal Australians, whose ancestors predate European and Asian
immigrants alike. Despite being stripped of her endorsement as a Liberal
Party candidate in Queensland because of inflammatory and insensitive
remarks about Aboriginal Australians, Pauline Hanson was later elected to
the Australian parliament as an independent largely on the strength of racist
views widely shared (in her estimation) by mainstream Australians. According to Hanson, Aboriginal Australians today unfairly receive favoured
treatment by the state, which in turn practises a form of reverse racism
against mainstream Australians. However, her hostility is not confined to
Aboriginal Australians. She also targeted the level of Asian immigration. In
her maiden parliamentary speech, she had this to say:

I and

most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of
multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians
They have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate
A truly multicultural country can never be strong or united (Australia 1996).
...

...

The view that multiculturalism is

problematic is not confined to AusHansons Queensland electorate of Oxley. In a recent

overview of multicultural issues in Europe and America, John Rex refers to
what he calls the problem of multiculturalism (emphasis added). He
elaborates on the issue as follows:
tralia, let alone

to

The problem of a multicultural society may, therefore, be presented like this: the
host nation will have to decide to what degree immigrant minorities should be
allowed to enjoy citizenship rights and whether, in doing so, they should be required
to give up their own culture, or to put the matter in a reverse way, whether, if they
preserve their own cultures, their cultural distinctiveness should act as a marker for
separate kinds of treatment and control ... The problem of multiculturalism,
however, is falsely posed if it is seen as one in which a host culture confronts
minority cultures ... [There always is] a civic culture which prescribes the terms on
which culturally differentiated groups interact. It is possible for a society to accept
a civic culture based on the idea of equality and to require that all groups should
adhere to it, without it being required that incoming groups should become
emotionally and morally attached to the values and general culture of the host
country. Immigrants may, indeed, through their struggles for rights, actually
contribute to sustaining the civic culture and identify without becoming acculturated themselves to the national culture and identity (1995: 245-6). Reprinted with
the permission of Cambridge University Press.

There are, moreover, local critics other than Pauline Hanson who see
cultural diversity as a threat to the civic culture. According to the historian
Geoffrey Blainey, The big flaw in multicultural or multiracial nations is
obvious: they often fall apart (Blainey 1994: 23). But as the political
scientist James Jupp (1994: 2) retorted in a critical response to Blaineys
opinion, it is not clear whether nations fall apart because they are multicultural or because they are poor. In my opinion, an even more plausible
explanation is that nations fall apart because they fail to develop unified
political elites. It seems to be an historical law that consensually unified
national elites, once established, have successfully perpetuated themselves,
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288

and that nations with unified elites do not regress into disunity, that is to
say, fall apart (Higley and Burton 1989: 21; Etzioni-Halevy 1981: 147-9).
Since federation, the Australian political elite has been consensually unified,
and a central element of its postwar consensus has been a principled refusal
to stoke the flames of ethnic and racial prejudice in search of an electoral
advantage (McAllister 1993; Hawke 1993; Sawer 1996). Periodically,
political mavericks like Pauline Hanson, Graeme Campbell, and even, in
1984, a Liberal shadow minister for Immigration, Michael Hodgman (Kelly
1992: 128-9, 134), have challenged this bipartisan agreement, forcing the
political elite to reaffirm its commitment to immigration and multiculturalism and to disavow explicitly the politics of ethnic, religious and racial
intolerance. Of course, elites depend ultimately on mass support for their
political survival. So any disjunction between elite support for immigration
and the contrary views of ordinary Australians cannot be allowed to get too
wide (for an excellent discussion of these issues, see McAllister 1993). It is
therefore critical to examine the sources and extent of popular opposition
to immigration, and to monitor the extent to which elite consensus
penetrates the grass-roots level, creating a shared civic culture that unites
rather than divides a culturally diverse population (Australia 1994a). It is to
such empirical matters that I now turn.

Citizen beliefs about national identity and

multiculturalism
The general topic of identity, including the specific issue of national identity,
has produced a large and diverse literature (Phillips 1996). My approach to
this complex issue is through data from the 1995 round of the National
Social Science Survey (Kelley et al. 1995), which contained a module on
National Identity as part of its contribution to the International Social
Survey Programme. Although my earlier research dealt specifically with
aspects of ethnic diversity and disadvantage as reflected in labour and
marriage markets (Jones 1992; Jones and Luijkx 1996), it touches on the
wider issue of how ethnic diversity affects civic culture, citizenship and
national identity (Australia 1994b; Phillips 1996).
Only a few empirical studies of how Australians construct their identities
have so far been published. Two (Aitkin 1977: 129-30; Baxter et al. 1991:
279-305) focus especially on class identity, while a third (Phillips 1996)
develops a broader understanding of Australian identity in terms of a
Durkheimian four-fold typology defining internal and external groups
associated with positive and negative feelings. All three studies rely on recent
survey data covering the period 1969 to 1986. Among their more interesting
findings is that class is a weak source of personal identity relative to being
Australian (Aitkin 1977: 129; Baxter et al. 1991: 289). Also, it seems that
Australians with a strong attachment to the symbolic boundaries of the
national community are less supportive of multiculturalism, of assistance to
Aboriginal Australians, and of republicanism (Phillips 1996: 128). The
results that I report below tend to confirm this general finding. In what
.

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289

follows I develop some attitude scales from the 1995 NSSS, explore their
social structural underpinnings, and map their social consequences. There
are five scales in all. The first three deal with aspects of what it means to be
truly Australian; the fourth focuses on a particular form of nationalistic
sentiment; and the last is a group prejudice, or xenophobia, scale.
Figure 1 shows the cumulative distributions of responses for items in the
first set of scales, which respondents rated from not important at all to
very important. Cumulative distributions allow the reader to determine
visually where the majority view lies. As an example, take the line for last
item, feeling Australian. It crosses the halfway line (0.5 or 50 per cent)
between the response categories fairly important and very important. So
a majority of respondents believe that feeling Australian is very important
for being truly Australian. At the other extreme, being a Christian is not
seen as so important: a majority see this attribute either as not important at
all or as not very important. Other items lie between these two extremes.
Note that being born in Australia and having lived in Australia most of
ones life follow the same general response pattern and are not seen as being
so important as, for example, being able to speak English. Even so, a
majority of the population viewed Australian birth and residence as fairly
or very important. Of course, the fact that responses for different items
display the same aggregate pattern does not mean that they are closely
related at the individual level. It is possible that people who rate one item as

important rate other items as unimportant.

Figure 1: Importance of different factors for being truly Australian

Table 1 shows that some items are actually negatively correlated (being bom
in Australia or having lived for a long time in Australia, and respect for
Australias political institutions and laws). The reason for these negative
correlations is that those who discount the importance of birth and long
residence (that is, rate them as not very important) tend to compensate by
rating respect for Australias institutions and law as very important. Otherwise
most of the correlations are positive but weak. The one exception is the strong
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290

correlation between birth and residence, a result that is hardly surprising. Being
been born in Australia implies long-term residence for all except the few who
have spent some years living overseas before returning to Australia.
Table 1:

Reliability analysis of items for scale of being truly Australian

to the statistics in Panel 2 of Table 1, these seven items

reliable general scale of Australian identity. However, this
apparently satisfactory result is due partly to the redundancy between the
two items of birth and residence. Factor analysis suggests that these seven
items tap at least two related but distinct dimensions of Australian identity.
The first consists of Items 1, 3 and 5 (birth, long residence, and Christianity), and represents what can be described as an ascribed form of identity
associated with Australian nativism. The second scale revolves around the last
two items (respect for Australias laws and institutions, and feeling Australian), or an affective dimension of civic culture. Basically, it embodies a view
that what is important for Australian identity is not how long people may have
lived here, let alone where they were born, but whether or not they feel
Australian and respect Australian institutions. The two remaining behavioural
indicators (citizenship and English-language competence) load more or less
equally on both forms of identity, so I treat these as a separate scale that
provides a behavioural bridge between the other two. Obviously, the first view
of Australian identity, being largely ascriptive in nature, is a more restrictive
one than the second, which, being affective, is accessible to Australians of all

According

constitute

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291

origins. Australian nativism looks backward to a vision of Australia that is

fading. Affective civic culture, a more abstract and open concept, looks
forward to a future already in the making. Even so, we need to bear in mind
that these dimensions emphasise different aspects of contemporary Australian
identity, and are not totally opposed to each other. The two scales are
positively, albeit weakly, correlated (+0.15). Equally importantly, more
behavioural aspects of identity, like citizenship and language, form a bridge
between the two. They are not located unequivocally with one or the other
concept but equally plausibly could be linked with either. I describe this third
scale

as a

scale of instrumental civic culture.

Figure 2: Views about aspects of Australian life

Figure 2 graphs responses to a second set of questions relating to different

aspects of Australian life. Whereas respondents ranked the items in Figure 1
in terms of relative importance, in this case they were asked whether they
agreed or disagreed with the statement concerned. Responses range in the
figure from strong disagreement (minus 2) to strong agreement (plus 2), with
a zero point for persons who neither agreed nor disagreed with a particular
statement. Three items follow a similar pattern of responses: I would rather
be a citizen of Australia than of any other country in the world; when my
country does well in international sports it makes me proud to be an
Australian; and the world would be a better place if people from other
countries were more like Australians. These three questions commanded
strong majority support, with more than 80 per cent of respondents
registering at least agreement with these statements. There was much less
agreement about whether the world would be a better place if people from
elsewhere were more like Australians. Moreover, a majority of Australians
were ashamed of some things about the Australian way of life, and would
not support their country if they thought it was in the wrong.

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292

Table 2:

Reliability analysis of items for scale of aspects of Australian identity

Table 2 reports an analysis of how these items relate to one another. As

already noted, three items lie at the positive end of the scale, two at the
negative end, and one at the point of neutrality (the item stating that the
world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like
Australians). The items that tie together most closely are the first, fourth
and last in the scale. As the final column of figures in Panel 2 of Table 2
show, omitting any of these items would weaken the scales reliability.
However, the second item (There are some things about Australia today that
make me feel ashamed of Australia) is only weakly related to other items in
the scale. If it were omitted, the scales reliability would increase. Factor
analysis confirms the fact that this item forms a separate dimension from the
other items. So the final scale excludes it. I interpret this scale in terms of
Australian Chauvinism that taps into the affective content of one particular
aspect of Australian nationalism. It describes how each respondent feels
about different aspects of Australian life. This scale has positive correlations
with all three scales of Australian identity (+0.41 with nativism, +0.28 with
affective civic culture, and +0.40 with instrumental civic culture).
I turn now to two sets of items dealing with the social distance between
individual Australians and the members of different ethnic groups. The first
set deals with the degree of uneasiness respondents would feel about
neighbours of different ethnic origins, and the second with the uneasiness
they would feel about a close relative marrying a person from a different
group. According to Figure 3, most Australians would feel at least a bit
uneasy if an Aboriginal family were to move in as neighbours. They would
feel almost as uneasy about potential Vietnamese, Lebanese or Indian
neighbours. They would be less uneasy about Greek neighbours, and most
would be quite relaxed
about British neighbours.
These items obviously tap
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293

social distance

prejudice dimension that separates immigrants from

English-speaking backgrounds, and Aboriginal Australians,
from the rest of the population. As the statistics in Table 3 show, these items
form a highly reliable scale of ethnic prejudice.
a

Asian and

or

non

Figure 3: Uneasiness about ethnic origins of new neighbour

Reliability analysis of
neighbours
Table 3:

items for scale of social distance from

potential

The final column in Panel 2 of Table 3 shows that this scale would be
marginally improved if the item relating to British neighbours were omitted.
It has the weakest pattern of inter-correlations with the remaining items.
Although the statistical improvement is small, the conceptual gain is greater
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294

because the scale would then represent prejudice against persons of minority
(non Anglo-Celtic) status. As the column of alpha coefficients shows, this
reduced scale is very reliable. Factor analysis also supports this decision.
The response pattern about the degree of uneasiness respondents would
feel about the ethnic origins of a potential in-law parallels that for neighbours (the two prejudice scales show a strong positive intercorrelation of
+0.72). They also correlate positively with all the scales of Australian
identity already discussed, indicating that prejudice against others is a
significant component of the Australian character. The xenophobia scale
correlates most weakly with affective civic culture, partly because this view
of Australian identity is so universally endorsed. So this weaker correlation
simply illustrates the truism that one cannot explain variation (for example,
in xenophobic attitudes) using a concept that shows little variation itself (for
example, the affective civic culture scale). However, it is important not to
exaggerate the connection between xenophobia and Australian identity.
Fewer than one in five Australians could be described as greatly concerned
about the ethnic origins of their potential neighbours or in-laws.
As well as the scaling analyses already described, I also carried out a series
of factor analyses to see whether unequal weighting of scale items would
improve their reliability. In fact, simple additive scales and their variable
weighted factor analytic equivalents correlated with each other at the level
of +0.99 or better. Since there is no statistical or other gain to be had by
using more complex procedures, I retained simple additive scales for further
analyses reported below. To facilitate the comparison of the effects of
different variables across scales, I recalibrated scales scores to standard
scores (mean of zero, and standard deviation of one).
.

The social structural bases of Australian

identity

that reliable social indicators of constructs like Australian

be
found, we would expect them to vary in strength across
identity
different sub-groups of the population. It would be reasonable to expect, for
example, that immigrants would be less likely to endorse a view of Australian
identity that required Australian birth or long Australian residence (Australian
nativism), and that they might be more inclined to opt for a more open
concept like affective civic culture. We might also expect to find that older
people tend to be more chauvinistic than younger people; that those who grew
up in rural areas are more nativistic than the residents of large cities; and that
those with more education might adopt a more internationalist, and less
chauvinistic, perspective. We could make a similar range of predictions about
the distribution of xenophobia. Table 4 presents results from a series of
multiple regression analyses exploring the structural foundations of the
attitude scales described above. Note that the prejudice, or xenophobia, scale
combines responses about neighbours and in-laws into a single scale.
Australian nativism is an aspect of national identity that stresses the
importance of being born in Australia, having lived most of ones life in
Australia, and being a Christian. A majority (56 per cent) of respondents

To the

extent
can

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295

thought Australian birth was fairly or very important (see Figure 1); an even
larger proportion (62 per cent) thought the same about extended Australian
residence; but only a minority (31 per cent) thought being a Christian was
at least fairly important. A positive coefficient in the first column of Table 4
shows that this group of respondents is more likely to stress the importance
of this group of items, whereas

respondents

negative coefficient indicates that

likely de-emphasise them. The r-squared is a

of the overall predictability of responses in terms of the battery of
social attributes listed in the table. Part of the reason this statistic is larger
for nativism than other aspects of Australian identity is that responses to this
set of questions show greater variability than, say, the two items on affective
civic culture, which command almost universal support.
People who see nativism as an important element of national identity tend
to be older (over 64), second- and third-generation churchgoing Christians
with minimal levels of education. The occupational effects imply that,
relative to those outside the labour market (the retired, those remaining at
home), non-manual workers are less likely to endorse nativism than others.
The gender effect suggests that nativism is stronger among men than women,
but this difference is not reliably different from zero. On examining the
distribution of scale scores, we find that about a quarter of the population is
strongly committed to this view of national identity; another half is
moderately committed to it; while the remaining one-quarter does not see it
as especially important at all.
The affective civic culture view of national identity is strongly endorsed
by contemporary Australians: more than half (54 per cent) are strongly
committed to it; more than a quarter (27 per cent) are moderately committed
to it; and the remainder (19 per cent) do not see it as very important. Partly
because this view is so strongly endorsed, it is hard to locate any specific
social patterning to it. According to the results in Table 4, people under fifty
are less committed to this view than those over this age; immigrants are less
committed to it than the native-born; whereas persons with more than basic
education (over fourteen years when they left school) are more likely to
endorse it. There are no significant gender, regional or occupational
differences, and of the religion variables only members of the major
Protestant denominations are significantly more likely than those with no
religion to subscribe to this view of national identity.
The third scale analysed in Table 4 is instrumental civic culture, which
consists of items about the importance of Australian citizenship and Englishlanguage competence. A large minority (48 per cent) of the population
strongly endorses this aspect of national identity. A smaller but still large group
(38 per cent) gives it moderate support. The remaining one in seven sees it as
relatively unimportant. It is a view of Australian identity that is more strongly
held by those over fifty. Not surprisingly, immigrants, especially those of non
English-speaking (NES) background, rate it as unimportant. On the other
hand, Christians from all denominations strongly support it. There are no
other statistically significant effects, although the unemployed, like immigrants
from NES countries, are not favourably disposed.
are more

to

measure

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Table 4: Regression coefficients

aspects of Australian identity.

(and t-ratios) for social structural effects on different

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297

Table 5: Distribution of views about the nature of Australian

support (percentage of total sample and ns in brackets)

identity by strength of

The analysis to this point has addressed the issue of how attitudes about
Australian identity hang together, and how support for them varies across the
population. In the next step, I develop a typology by grouping responses on
the first two, relatively independent scales of Australian identity into three
categories: strong, moderate and weak supporters. The results are shown in
Table 5. The modal grouping in this broad typology consists of persons with
a moderate commitment to Australian nativism and a strong commitment to
affective civic culture (just over one-quarter of the population). Four other
groups are of roughly equal size, ranging from 11 to 16 per cent of the
population. One of these groups consists of persons who strongly endorse
both aspects of Australian identity, and in the analysis that follows, I label
members of this group as dogmatic nativists, because they base Australian
identity not merely on nativistic sentiments but require a commitment to
affective civic culture as well. The civic nationalists group consists of persons
who also have a strong commitment to both feeling Australian and respect
for Australian institutions, but have a weaker commitment to Australian
nativism (39 per cent of the population). The literal nativist group is quite
small (only 8 per cent), and consists of those who combine a strong commitment to Australian nativism with only a weak or moderate commitment to
affective civic culture. Members of the top-left quadrant I describe as moderate
pluralists because they express only a weak or moderate commitment to either
aspect of Australian identity (38 per cent of the total).
These labels are not intended to describe real social groupings but simply
identify broad clusters of like-minded Australians. Before discussing other
differences among these four broad groupings, we need to consider briefly
the two remaining attitude scales, Australian chauvinism and xenophobia
(Table 6). The chauvinism scale measures the extent of pride in Australia and
its achievements (see Figure 2 and Table 2 above). Women are less likely than
men to be chauvinistic in this sense, as are persons under fifty years of age,
immigrants and second-generation Australians. Adherents of the Christian
faith are more chauvinistic than non-believers. Persons who completed
secondary school and those with a tertiary qualification are less likely to
endorse chauvinistic sentiments. The only occupational effect to reach
statistical significance involves the comparison between manual workers and
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0:;

298

those not in the labour force. It is difficult to venture a plausible explanation

for this difference. Note, however, that manual workers are not significantly
more (or less) chauvinistic than other workers.
Table 6: Regression coefficients (and t-ratios) for social structural effects
chauvinism and xenophobia

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on

299

The xenophobia, or ethnic prejudice, scale displays a similar pattern of

social structural effects (it is positively, though weakly, correlated with
chauvinism, with a coefficient of +0.22). Women are less prejudiced against
the members of minority groups than men; younger Australians are less
prejudiced than older Australians; people who grew up in country areas are
more prejudiced than those who grew up in towns or cities; and those with
tertiary qualifications are less prejudiced than those with less education.
Notwithstanding Christian teaching against intolerance of all kinds, the
members of the major Christian faiths are more likely to admit to xenophobic feelings than those with no religious affiliations. Of course, respondents
report their nominal affiliations only. Regular churchgoers are less likely to
harbour xenophobic views. So the teaching of the churches seem to have
some effect, though not enough to counterbalance entirely the chauvinism
and xenophobia of their nominal adherents.
For interpretive purposes, I also grouped respondents on these scales into
weak, moderate and strong adherents of these views. About three in ten
Australians (29 per cent) held strongly chauvinistic views; half were
moderately chauvinistic; and about one in five (21 per cent) held weakly
chauvinistic views. As for xenophobia, about one in five (18 per cent) were
strongly xenophobic, while half expressed only weak xenophobic views. The
remaining 31 per cent held views that could be characterised as moderately

xenophobic.
We are now in a position to provide a conspectus of what differentiates
the four main groups of Australians identified above: dogmatic nativists,
literal nativists, civic nationalists and moderate pluralists. Table 7 lists their
responses to a series of other attitudes about contemporary social issues.
Six out of every ten Australians report that they feel very close to Australia. This figure is highest among the dogmatic nativists and lowest
among the moderate pluralists. The weaker attachment to Australia
evinced among members of this latter group is echoed in their readiness to
move to another country to improve their life. One in four would be
prepared to move, compared with only one in eleven of the nativists.
On the basis of these two items, the nativists show the strongest attachment to Australia, followed by the civic nationalists, and then the moderate

pluralists.

The next two items deal with aspects of multiculturalism, the second in a
more direct fashion than the first. A large minority of the population believes
becoming Australian requires a commitment to Australian customs and
traditions (whatever they might be). But opinion on this topic is divided,
with about as many disagreeing with this proposition (one in six could not
decide either way). The nativist groups, however, are more likely to agree
with this sentiment, whereas moderate pluralists are more likely to disagree.
There is only minority support for any version of multiculturalism that
involves government support for minorities to maintain separate cultural
traditions, and support does not vary too markedly across groups (the range
of difference is only 7 percentage points).

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Table 7: Differences in attitudes and social

views about national identity

background of Australians with different

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301

As for the effects immigrants have on Australian society, about one in

three Australians believes they increase crime rates. Although research shows
this belief is largely ungrounded (Hazlehurst 1987; Easteal 1989), significant
minorities of civic nationalists and moderate pluralists believe the claim to
be true, and it is believed by small majorities of the nativists. A similar belief
pattern characterises responses to the item about whether or not immigrants
take jobs away from the native-born. Empirical research shows this belief is
untrue. In fact, unemployment rates are higher among immigrants than the
native-born. New immigrants, if anything, create a demand for services that
improves the job prospects for those already in Australia (for a review of
these issues, see Wooden et al. 1994: 144-6; Williams 1996). Nonetheless,
there is a popular perception that migrants take jobs away from other
Australians, even though two out of three agree, somewhat inconsistently,
that migrants are good for the economy. There is an even greater acceptance
of the idea that migration has opened Australia up to new ideas.
All things considered, about three in every ten Australians agree that the
number of immigrants to Australia should be reduced a lot. It is
important to juxtapose this figure against Hansons claim in her first
parliamentary speech that most Australians want our immigration policy
radically reviewed. Not even a majority of nativists (Hansons mainstream ?) believe immigration should be radically reviewed (reduced a
lot). In fact, the dominant, or mainstream, position held by 59 per cent of
Australians is that immigration should either remain the same or be
reduced a little. Another 11 per cent even believe that immigration should
be increased.2 Hanson also exaggerates the backlash against Aboriginal
Australians, as the next item shows. Two out of every five Australians (and
even one out of every three nativists) believe we should spend more to
improve conditions for Aboriginal people. This proportion exceeds by a
small margin the number who disagree with the same proposition. About
one-quarter is undecided.
The remaining attitudinal items fill out our mental picture of the sorts
of Australians who make up these broad identity groupings. Nativists are
more likely to stress the importance of citizenship and ability to speak
English for Australian identity than civic nationalists or moderate pluralists. Even so, the reader should bear in mind that even the latter think these
matters are important, just not so important as the nativists. Nativists also
tend to be more chauvinistic, more xenophobic, and more attached to the
British monarchy than other Australians. Many of my findings parallel
those of Phillips (1996), even though he approached these issues from a
different angle.
The second panel of statistics in Table 7 describe the socio-demographic
composition of the four identity groupings. Nativists tend to be older. Partly
because they are older, they left school at younger ages and are less likely to
have a tertiary qualification. They are more likely to live in country areas,
less likely to be immigrants, and more likely both to adhere to a major
Christian faith and to be a regular churchgoer. They are less likely to have
voted Labor in the 1993 election.
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302

Concluding remarks
While it would be unreasonable to stress unduly the relative sizes of the
national identity groupings I have identified (if only because a different set
of similar questions would inevitably produce a somewhat different
classification), it is clear enough that only the two nativist groups display
the constellation of attitudes and beliefs that Pauline Hanson associates with
her mainstream Australia. Yet together these groups constitute only a
minority (around one-quarter) of the Australian population. That does not
mean, of course, that their views can, or should, be ignored. But it does mean
that their views can not, and should not, be accepted as representative of
mainstream Australia. Rather, their views reflect a traditional, and by now
a minority, view of Australian identity. It is, moreover, a view that is being
superseded by a more open, and more inclusive, sense of national identity.
National identity is not a fixed property assigned at birth but an emergent
and constantly evolving sense of what it means to be Australian, including a
commitment to basic social institutions like parliamentary democracy, the
rule of law and equality before the law, freedom of the individual, freedom
of speech, religious and other forms of tolerance (for example, a fair go),
and equality of opportunity.
Popular support for values like tolerance and equality of opportunity is
easier to win when economic times are good than when they are bad. In
recent years, the progressive dismantling of Australias protective walls has
effectively transferred thousands of jobs off-shore. The gap between rich and
poor has widened dramatically, and unemployment, especially youth
unemployment, remains at levels that were totally unacceptable to the
electorate thirty years ago. While there is probably no way back to the
protectionist policies that delivered Australians one of the highest living
standards in the world for over a century, it is far from clear what advantage,
if any, a small economy like Australia has earned by opening up its economy
faster than its main trading partners (Pierpont 1996). For too many
Australians, the immediate outcome has been unemployment, job uncertainty and poverty.
In the search for scapegoats, minority groups like Aboriginal Australians
and Asian immigrants are easy targets. But they, too, are victims, not causes,
of harsh economic times. Back in 1984, when the historian, Geoffrey
Blainey, sparked a similar debate about the alleged dangers of Asian
immigration to Australia, there were more experienced politicians than
Pauline Hanson who toyed with the idea of playing the race card in the runup to the next election. The Liberal shadow minister for immigration at the
time (Michael Hodgman) predicted then that the Hawke government would
be overthrown in an electoral backlash against its immigration policies likely
to cost it twelve seats (Legge 1984). The Liberal leader at the time (Andrew
Peacock) vacillated over this issue, and it fell to his Deputy (John Howard)
to lance it in a parliamentary speech denouncing racism. His performance,
later described by one political commentator as brilliant (Rubenstein 1993:
151 ), earned him tremendous media support and contributed to his
accession to the Liberal leadership (Kelly 1992: 133-4). However, when the
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303

issue resurfaced four years later, following the release of the Fitzgerald
report (Australia 1988), Howard, as Leader of the Opposition, vacillated by
openly canvassing the possibility of a cut in Asian immigration. According
to a senior political journalist, this saga of disastrous events originating with
Howards personal interpretation of the new immigration policy divided the
Liberal Party, created new tensions within the coalition and undermined
Howards leadership ... Within the Asia/Pacific his standing as shadow
prime minister was distinctly compromised (Kelly 1992: 428).
This history of political ambivalence over Asian immigration seems to
have contributed to Prime Minister Howards recent tardiness in condemning Pauline Hansons current exploitation of the race issue. As the authors
of the Fitzgerald report observed (Australia 1988: 7), the potential for racial
bigotry sleeps within many Australians. It is the responsibility of opinion
leaders in politics, in the media, and in schools, colleges, and universities to
make sure its sleep is long and undisturbed, by constantly asserting the
primacy of racial tolerance over racial bigotry. Not before time, on
30 October 1996, the Prime Minister moved a motion in the Australian
Parliament denouncing racial intolerance. The same motion reaffirmed a
non-discriminatory immigration policy and a commitment to the process of
reconciliation with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, including
the rectification of the profound social and economic disadvantage they
suffer as a group. The rest of us now wait to see how his government will
translate such lofty commitments into social and economic reality.
same

Notes
*

first presented to the Annual Meeting of The Australian

at the University of Tasmania in 1996. An
Association
Sociological
abbreviated version appeared in 1996 in People and Place 4(4):17-26.
1 The sample on which these analyses are based has 2338 respondents.
Prior to constructing attitude scales, I reallocated missing data conditional
on the distribution of valid responses. Because this method assumes that
data are missing completely at random, it does not change the overall
distribution of responses. It does, however, marginally reduce correlations
to the extent that how people answer one item in a set of questions is not
independent of how they answer another. Sensitivity analyses with
observed and adjusted counts indicate that substantive interpretation is
not materially affected by the reallocation of missing responses. For
example, inter-correlations such as those reported in Tables 1 through 3
change only at the third decimal place. Reallocating missing attitudinal
data in this way reduces sample attrition.
Each scale described in the text is the simple sum of responses to
component items, divided by the number of items in the scale, and
standardised to a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. Regression coefficients in Tables 4 and 6 can be interpreted as the average
response shift due to each structural effect. Taking the first column of
Table 4 as an example, we find that a Christian respondent (whether
This paper

was

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304

Protestant or Other) was significantly more likely to endorse

items associated with the nativism scale (about half a standard deviation).
Bearing in mind that around 95 per cent of cases in a normal distribution
lie in the area bounded by two standard deviations of the mean, we can

Catholic,

that, on a four-point scale, an effect equal to half a standard deviation

scale is about half a response category shift (e.g., from not very
important towards fairly important).
2 These figures are not very different from those reported in Betts (1996:
Table 7), where opinion is about evenly divided among three response
categories. The categories she reports equate as follows: gone much too
far equals reduced a lot; gone too far equals reduced a little; and
about right equals remain the same. My interpretation, however, puts
as much weight on the last two categories as the first. Throughout the
postwar period, there has been popular opposition to large-scale immigration, especially from non-traditional sources. Survey responses vary
depending on the form of the question used. For useful reviews of such
data, and their interpretation, see Goot (1991), McAllister (1993) and
see

Betts

(1996).

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