Whatever happened to multiculturalism? Here Come the Habibs!, race, identity and representation

Abstract

In February 2016 Channel Nine broadcast six episodes of Here Come the Habibs!. The show was a comedy about a Lebanese-Australian family who win 22 million dollars in the lottery and move from working-class Lakemba to upper-class Vaucluse where they buy a house next to the very white O’Neills. The show invokes key tropes of official multiculturalism most importantly race and identity. At the same time, official multiculturalism has been in decline in Australia since the advent of John Howard’s conservative prime ministership in 1996. Official multiculturalism focused on ethnic groups and their cultures. It has been supplanted by the ideas of neoliberalism which is concerned above all with individuals and the market. In this article I argue that Here Come the Habibs! is, in the end, nostalgic for a multiculturalism which is no longer privileged in Australia. The dynamics of the tension between the Habibs and O’Neills has been displaced, as is signalled in the final episode of the show, by the entry into Australia of a mobile, cosmopolitan elite whose worth is measured not in their culture but in what they can economically contribute to the country.

Notes

1. At this point I shall distinguish between caricature and stereotype using the Merriam-Webster dictionary definitions: a caricature is ‘someone or something that is very exaggerated in a funny or foolish way’; a stereotype is ‘a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment’. I shall have more to say about stereotypes later in this article.

2. Concerned with another show, Kavoori (2008, 59) writes: ‘Tecumsah is a fish-out-of-water tale in the tradition of Greenacres, The Beverly Hillbillies, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and perhaps most closely, Northern Exposure.’

3. To my knowledge I was the first person to set up this distinction in Race Daze (Stratton) in 1998.

4. The term ‘official multiculturalism’ has come to Australia from Canada. There are now many discussions of official multiculturalism in Australia. For an early example see Mistaken Identity: Multiculturalism and the Demise of Nationalism in Australia (Castles et al. 1988); for later discussions see White Nation: Fantasies of White Supremacy in a Multicultural Society (Hage 1998) and Race Daze: Australia in Identity Crisis (Stratton 1998).

5. For a detailed discussion of the claimed relationship between Australian society, a shared moral order and Christianity, see ‘Whiteness, Morality, and Christianity in Australia’ (Stratton 2016, 17–43).

6. I have discussed some of the cultural impacts of neoliberalism on Australia in Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia (Stratton 2011b).

7. The concern with who is legitimately able to stay in Australia pervades Here Come the Habibs! When in police custody, Olivia expresses her great fear that she would be sent back to South Africa where she was born but never lived.

8. On the Cronulla riots see, for example, Lines in the Sand: The Cronulla Riots, Multiculturalism and National Belonging (Noble 2009).

9. This playing of a Chinese man by a Japanese man can be viewed, among other readings, either conservatively as an example of (white) Australians assuming that all east Asians ‘look alike’ or more radically as an example of globalization and the malleability of racial identity construction.

10. There is an article by William John Wingert ‘Closing the Door on Asylum Seekers: Persecution on account of Political Opinion after INS v Elias Zacarias’ (1993, 287–316). There is an earlier 1987 article by Sidni Lambb ‘Denmark: Knocking on Haven’s Door’ (9–11). This usage is clearly styled after the Bob Dylan track, released in 1973, ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’. Whatever its origin, the rhetorical trope of a door that gives or stops access to asylum seekers became common across the Western world in the late 1990s.

11. On neoliberalism and citizenship in Australia, and the Cronulla riots, see ‘Non-Citizens in the Exclusionary State: Citizenship, Mitigated Exclusion and the Cronulla Riots’ (Stratton 2011a, 299–316).