Australia Built Multiculturalism. The Next Challenge Is Building Multicultural Power.
Peter Gutwein inherits a portfolio that solved the challenge of arrival. His opportunity is to build the capability for influence.
Former Premier Peter Gutwein - Chair of the Australian Multicultural Council
On 20 July 2026, former Tasmanian Premier Peter Gutwein became Chair of the Australian Multicultural Council. He arrives with governance experience, deep engagement with migrant communities, and a warning already on the record: the “lurch to the right” in the national discourse on immigration, he told The Examiner, “needs to be addressed.”
The timing is not gentle: a Royal Commission is examining antisemitism and social cohesion, and the debate over migration and belonging is sharpening. Gutwein’s brief rests on five words that recur throughout the Government’s announcement: social cohesion, belonging, participation, inclusion, community engagement.
Those were the right priorities for a young multicultural nation. They are no longer enough.
But the problem Gutwein inherits is not, at bottom, a multicultural problem. It is a national one. Australia has systematically underestimated the infrastructure its citizens need to participate in an increasingly complex democracy. The multicultural portfolio is simply the place where the gap shows first, and shows worst.
What follows is an argument about power. Not ethnic power: ordinary democratic power and the infrastructure that produces it, which Australia has never built.
The national blind spot
Participating effectively in Australian democracy requires more capability than it did in the past. The decisions that shape people’s lives are increasingly made through complex systems that are difficult to see and navigate: automated government services, overlapping responsibilities across federal, state and local governments, and policy decisions made through technical processes that rarely receive public attention.
At the same time, the information environment citizens rely on to understand public decisions is becoming harder to navigate, with AI generating convincing false content, misinformation spreading faster, and local journalism declining. The result is a widening gap between having the formal right to participate and having the practical capability to do so effectively.
So the capability required to be an effective citizen is increasing.
Citizenship grants formal membership in a democracy; capability determines whether that membership can be exercised.
Now look at the supply side. The 2024 National Assessment Program found just 28% of Year 10 students met the proficient standard in civics — down from 38% in 2019, the lowest since testing began in 2004.
The OECD’s 2026 results show trust in Australia’s federal government at its highest recorded level — 51%, up from 38% in 2021. Yet the same survey finds fewer than half of Australians believe the political system allows people like them to have a say. Confidence in institutions is recovering faster than people’s sense of agency within them. Trust without capability is spectatorship, and spectators are the first recruits of every campaign that says the system is rigged.
Here is the strange part. When Australia decides a capability matters, it builds infrastructure:
workforce capability has TAFE and apprenticeship systems;
research capability has universities and national research infrastructure;
innovation capability has incubators and R&D incentives.
The one capability we have never built infrastructure for is the capability to operate the democracy itself.
Others have. Germany has run a Federal Agency for Civic Education since 1952 on the reasoning that democratic capability is public infrastructure, like roads. Australia’s own Strengthening Democracy Taskforce recognised this challenge in 2023: that a healthy democracy depends not only on strong institutions, but on citizens having the capability to understand and participate in them. Its work helped validate the need for new approaches, including pilot initiatives designed to test what stronger civic capability could look like in practice. COMPELL’s PELPOL pilot in 2023, was one such model, focused on building practical civic capability — from understanding institutions and decision-making processes to developing the confidence to participate effectively.
But pilots are not infrastructure. The broader challenge remains: Australia still lacks a permanent national framework or institutional home responsible for building democratic capability at scale. This is the national blind spot. To see its cost most clearly, look at the fifty-year policy field that has done everything except address it.
The clearest window: Multicultural Australia
It has been more than fifty years since Al Grassby declared a “multi-cultural society for the future”, and nearly as long since the Galbally Report built the scaffolding of settlement policy. In that half-century, Australia constructed one of the most sophisticated multicultural architectures on earth and the whole of it points one way.
Australia has built institutions that help people enter society. It has not built institutions that help people shape it.
Shaping is a question of power, so let me define the word before it is misread. By power, I do not mean privilege, special influence or control. I mean ordinary democratic power: the capacity to understand institutions, enter decision-making spaces and influence outcomes — the same capacity Australia has long built, without controversy, for other organised parts of society.
Look at what exists. There is infrastructure for settlement, for language, for services, for grants, for festivals, for consultation. There is none for civic capability, governance capability, institutional literacy, or pathways into decision-making. The machinery of arrival was built; the machinery of influence was not. We count attendance, consultations held, grants acquitted — almost never whether participation changed anything. Influence was never the design objective.
Multicultural policy hasn’t failed. Its first phase has finished.
To be precise: my claim is not that multiculturalism has failed. By most international measures the settlement project succeeded. My claim is that the settlement phase — the first phase — has finished. It completed its mission, and then kept running, because nobody designed the second phase.
Policy machinery built for one problem keeps processing long after the problem changes shape, because it is funded, staffed and familiar. Test that against the field’s own most recent work. The Multicultural Framework Review, delivered in July 2024 as the Towards Fairness report, produced 29 recommendations under three themes: connection, identity and belonging, and inclusion in services.
The review was not wrong; it answered, seriously, the questions its framework was designed to ask. But its title tells you its horizon. Fairness is what you owe people inside a system others designed. Even its most ambitious proposal — a national Multicultural Affairs Commission, floated but not adopted — was merely a better machinery to serve communities, not machinery through which communities shape decisions. The Government’s formal response committed to the review’s three principles; it did not commit to new institutions of influence. The most forward-looking document in the field is still, structurally, a settlement document. The next generation requires a different question.
The pattern is not one review’s oversight; it recurs across jurisdictions. Victoria’s own Multicultural Review, reporting in September 2025, heard submissions warning that “the current reliance on personal connections and relationships for selecting community representatives must be replaced by a transparent, merit-based, and diversity-sensitive approach.” That is the review’s own record of the problem this article describes: who gets to shape policy is still decided informally, inside the sector, rather than through any capability pipeline open to the people the policy is for.
The generational shift nobody has priced in
Meanwhile, the population the machinery was built for has changed underneath it. More than a quarter of Australians were born overseas, and almost half have at least one parent who was. Multicultural Australia is entering its third and fourth generations — people who have never needed a settlement service and whose English is a birthright. A policy architecture designed for migration settlement cannot indefinitely serve a society in which migration is no longer an event but a permanent feature of national life.
Multicultural Australia is not just “settlement issues” anymore.
For these generations, the policy question is not “how do people integrate?” They are integrated; many have never been anything else. The question is “how do they govern?” The fifty-year architecture has no answer; it was never designed to have one.
So the system keeps offering the third generation what it built for the first — programs of welcome, surveys of belonging, invitations to be consulted. It answers a question they stopped asking decades ago. It stays silent on the one they ask now: how do we move from being served by institutions to shaping them?
Why the representation question never dies
This is why Australia’s multicultural debate keeps circling the same exhausted question: how do we improve representation? Every review asks it; every advisory body inherits it. It never resolves, because representation is an output — the visible end of a pipeline that was never built. Representation is not a recruitment problem. It is a pipeline problem. And the missing pipeline is not only into politics. It is into the full architecture of decision-making: boards, commissions, advisory bodies, public institutions and elected office.
Consider how organised constituencies routinely build pathways into influence. None of them has solved democracy; all of them built pipelines.
Business built industry associations, board networks and secondments into government.
The union movement built delegate structures and a well-worn path from organiser to minister.
Rural Australia built the National Farmers’ Federation and a century of agrarian political infrastructure.
The comparison reveals something uncomfortable: what those constituencies built is power infrastructure, in the ordinary sense — and none of them would accept festivals and consultation rounds as a substitute. Yet that is the deal multicultural Australia has been offered, and the offer has been called inclusion.
Picture the community leader every minister has met: she runs a cultural association, sits on two reference groups, and by every metric government collects is a participation success story. Yet she has been helped into every room except the ones where decisions are made. Multiply her by ten thousand and you have Australia’s multicultural civil society: dense with participation, starved of leverage.
What multicultural Australians are telling us
Our own listening points the same way. The People’s Mandate — the national civic voting infrastructure run by Allies in Colour, whose first wave drew 1,273 responses from multicultural Australians in June 2026 — found 87% had been consulted by an institution and never saw an outcome. Fewer than 1% felt ordinary Australians have meaningful influence over the decisions that affect them.
These findings are not presented as a national estimate; the instrument is designed as structured listening rather than a probability sample. Their value is diagnostic: they reveal a recurring experience among politically engaged multicultural Australians — participation without visible consequence. These are not people absent from democracy; they are people trying to enter it. Two in three had already contacted an MP.
The message they sent was not a demand to be shielded from democratic debate. When 66% called for stronger institutional accountability and only 3% supported speech restrictions, they were asking for something more fundamental: the capability to participate with greater confidence, influence and consequence. They are not asking to belong from the outside. They are asking for the tools to shape the society they already inhabit.
The missing layer: a national civic capability function
What would taking that seriously mean? Not another program. Programs are what we have: leadership courses that reach dozens, grants that expire with the funding cycle, consultations that collect sentiment and archive it.
Programs expire but infrastructure compounds.
The answer is not another research project, inquiry or national conversation either. Australia is not short of diagnoses. The challenge has been recognised repeatedly — through reviews, taskforces and consultations — but recognition has not produced the institutional capability required to respond.
A democracy does not become stronger because it understands the problem better. It becomes stronger when citizens are equipped to act within it. What is missing is a national capability function — standing infrastructure whose job is civic capability, in the way TAFE’s job is workforce capability — whether delivered through an existing institution or a new one.
Civic capability is not civics education, though education feeds it. It is what a person can do: read a budget paper; know which tier of government owns their problem; write a submission that lands; sit on a board or committee and shape a decision rather than decorate it; move from participant to office-holder.
A serious version has four features.
A shared national framework that names the capabilities.
Delivery embedded in the systems people already move through, so capability compounds instead of expiring.
Deliberate governance pathways from community participation into boards, advisory structures and public office.
And measurement: if Australia can report annually on literacy and workforce skills, it can report on whether citizens’ capacity to operate their own democracy is rising or falling.
Nor is the model hypothetical. At Allies in Colour, we have built and tested components of what this infrastructure could look like:
ACE Civic Capability Infrastructure for civic capability development;
The Governance Authority for pathways into decision-making;
COMPELL for political literacy;
The People’s Mandate for structured civic voice, which includes our future citizens.
These are not offered as the answer. They are evidence that the answer is practical.
This is infrastructure and Australia knows how to build infrastructure once it admits something is infrastructure. Built nationally, it would serve every Australian the blind spot touches: the regional town that lost its newspaper, the young voter failed by the civics curriculum, the outer-suburban electorate no one doorknocks. Multicultural Australia is where the gap is most visible. It is not where the gap ends.
Leading the next stage
The proposition for Peter Gutwein is not repudiation, and it is the one I hope he hears: he is not being asked to abandon multiculturalism. He is being asked to help articulate what its next stage requires.
The institutions responsible for multicultural policy were built for a different era. Their task now is not simply to maintain belonging, participation and inclusion, but to ask a harder question: how do people move from being participants in society to being contributors to the decisions that shape it?
Gutwein’s role does not give him the power to build this architecture alone. But it gives him something valuable: a platform to recognise that the next era of multicultural policy requires a shift from settlement to capability, from consultation to influence, and from participation to power.
Peter Gutwein’s opportunity is not to defend the past fifty years of multicultural policy. It is to help lead the conversation about the next fifty.
Australia built the settlement foundations of multiculturalism, and it succeeded. The next challenge is whether multicultural Australia is equipped not only to belong to Australia, but to build it.
That requires a new policy function: developing the civic, governance and institutional capability that allows people to move from participation to influence. This is the emerging Multicultural Power sector — the next layer of multicultural infrastructure.
About Allies in Colour
Allies in Colour is Australia’s independent multicultural peak body focused on closing the gap between participation and influence. It works to build the civic, governance and institutional capability required for multicultural Australia to move from being consulted by institutions to shaping them.
Through its civic capability, political literacy, governance and civic voting initiatives, Allies in Colour is developing the foundations of what it identifies as the next phase of multicultural infrastructure: the Multicultural Power sector.
Its work includes ACE Civic Capability Infrastructure, COMPELL for political literacy and leadership development, The Governance Authority for pathways into decision-making, and The People’s Mandate for structured civic voice and democratic participation.
Allies in Colour’s focus is not advocacy for particular communities or outcomes. It is infrastructure: building the capability, pathways and systems that allow more Australians to participate confidently and consequentially in the institutions that shape the nation’s future.
A very important topic and lots to do here.