It is a balmy night, on the eve of Australia Day, 2010. In Canberra’s Federation Mall, just outside Parliament House, Patrick McGorry has just been named Australian of the Year. A free concert, part of the official celebrations, is getting underway before a mall that is awash with blue. The majority of the youthful concertgoers are wearing the Australian flag one way or another. Many wear it draped over their shoulders or have fashioned it into a sarong. As I wade my way through the growing crowd I feel like I’m navigating a sea of national pride.

It isn’t until I’m driving away from parliament, however, that I experience my biggest dose of flag-waving patriotism. Out of the corner of my eye I see a young blonde-haired woman caped in a flag, leaning out the back window of the car alongside. She is yelling, ‘Go home!’ and making slit-eyed gestures at me – a tribute to my Asian ancestry. Her companions laugh and jeer. Figuring that a civilised conversation is out of the question I respond with my own one-fingered salutes and robust compliments. Two of the blonde’s friends in the car, both male, respond in turn as we wind around one of Canberra’s circuitous roads – like chariots in the Colosseum, wheel to wheel. And then we come to a stop at a red light together. ‘Why don’t you come out and say that?’ one challenges me. For a moment I consider testing my courage. Then the lights turn green. The other car speeds off into the distance.

Such episodes are enough to convince many of the perils of patriotism. They would say Barry Humphries was right when he quipped that, ‘Xenophobia is love of Australia.’ That may well be true of many self-described patriots, but a love of country needn’t be expressed as a desire to exclude others. It can be a humble and generous sentiment. You can be devoted to Australia and wish to see it do well, without beating your breast or telling others to ‘Love it or leave it’. Patriotism can be an expression of civic virtue, of a desire to improve one’s tradition and community. But it clearly isn’t always understood this way. Given the resurgence of national pride during the past decade or so, it is worth reflecting upon whether there has also been an accompanying increase in racism.

This is one tension that exists within today’s multicultural Australia. Obviously, things have changed since the days of the White Australia policy and cultural assimilation. Laws have been passed to outlaw discrimination against citizens on the basis of ethnicity or race. Official multiculturalism welcomes the expression of cultural diversity as a right of citizenship. Diversity is widely accepted as an ordinary and positive feature of everyday Australian society. Surveys consistently show that close to two-thirds of Australians would agree with propositions like ‘Australia should be a multicultural society’ or ‘Immigrants have enriched the Australian way of life’. And yet many would say that Australia remains incorrigibly racist. At the very least, as prominent neurosurgeon Charlie Teo observed in his widely reported Australia Day address in 2012, ‘Racism still exists in Australian culture today’. Somewhere between 10 to 15 per cent of Australians have experienced discrimination in the past 12 months because of their skin colour, ethnic origin or religion.

We shouldn’t be surprised by the persistence of racism. For two centuries racism was a conspicuous feature of Australian society, guided as it was by an ideal of white, British nationhood. Any project of multicultural nation-building remains incomplete. Some observers would ask whether ‘nation-building’ is itself the problem. Some contend that multicultural policy has the effect of masking discrimination and prejudice by placing an Anglo-Celtic culture at the core of Australian national identity, while quarantining immigrants and ‘ethnic’ cultures to its periphery. Whereas conservatives believe multiculturalism has given immigrant minorities too much power and privilege, such cosmopolitan critics believe it has fooled us into believing in a fantasy of cultural progress. This thesis warrants closer attention. It is true, after all, that the policy of multiculturalism was introduced in the 1970s when the challenge of immigrant diversity was confined to predominantly European immigrants and cultures.

The critical question is whether Australian multiculturalism has since adapted itself to a diversity which is much more profound than its original architects anticipated. Multiculturalism can only be judged a success to the extent that Australians of minority ethnic and cultural backgrounds are able to imprint themselves into Australian life. While we are fond of saying that diversity is now a part of everyday Australia, there is a danger of premature self-congratulation. Multicultural policies have been successful in ensuring a well-integrated national community, but have they done enough also to transform hearts and minds in Australian society? Have they done enough to transform our national institutions? The extent to which racism exists will speak volumes about the precise scale of the Australian achievement.

This is an excerpt from Tim Soutphommasane’s Don’t Go Back to Where You Came from: Why multiculturalism works, available now from NewSouth.