Governing superdiversity: learning from the Aboriginal Australian case

Like many nations, Australia is becoming superdiverse. Influenced by international conflict, tourism, migration and other global transfers, minorities proliferate and enjoy multiple intersecting affiliations associated with ethnicity, religion, language, class, transnational ties and more. Though in the everyday this interculturality works quite well, the multicultural mode of governance is finding its limits insofar as minority groups live parallel lives and drift to a separatism that can problematise national cohesion. Indigenous Australians are a component of this, both of and not of the nation, the same as and different from other Australians, and internally diverse. In their respect, multicultural governance predicated on bloc difference and a singular categoric subject is inadequate. That approach has spawned policies, programs and practices poorly directed at the real-life diversity. Examples include ‘Aboriginal learning styles’, cultural competence, ‘Aboriginalised’ workplaces and Aboriginal Child Placement Principle. These policies are applied to a populace that is differently Aboriginal and embedded in the nation around the country. I argue that multicultural governance is having counter-productive consequences as a result of its inadequacy to superdiverse realities and that reforms predicated on Aboriginal bothness are critical for Aborigines and instructive for the nation in governing superdiversity generally.