Does Cabinet colour matter?

Would governments have made different decisions if Australia’s cabinets were less white, asks Rajan Venkataraman

THIS year, Australians saw another prime minister bite the dust. A new prime minister came in promising a new start and a new team was appointed to govern the country.

One thing didn’t change though: the Australian Cabinet remains a “whitesonly” zone.

Malcolm Turnbull was fond of saying Australia was “the most successful multicultural society in the world”. Whatever he meant by this, one thing is certain: it’s not reflected in the federal Cabinet.

It’s risky to make statements about a person’s ethnicity based on their appearance and name. Nevertheless, it’s probably safe to say that among the Morrisons, McCormacks and McKenzies, Paynes, Pynes and Porters, Taylors, Duttons, Hunts and Littleprouds, there are few, if any, people around the Cabinet table of indigenous, Asian, African, Middle Eastern or Pacific Island heritage.

This is true not only of Mr Morrison’s current government. It applied equally to Mr Turnbull’s and to the previous governments of both political parties. With few exceptions, the same can be said of the states and territories.

Does this matter? Why should the race of its members affect a government’s ability to make wise decisions in the national interest?

For example, would Australia’s policies on mandatory detention and offshore processing of asylum seekers have been any different over the past 20 years? Maybe not, but imagine if some of our ministers saw the footage of people arriving desperate and afraid and thought, “Gee, they look and talk and dress just like my parents, my cousins, my children”.

Would successive governments have seen Nauru and Manus Island as just convenient locations for our detention facilities?

Imagine if some of our ministers thought of Pacific Island nations as “the old country” — just like many of them think of the UK — a region from which their parents and grandparents migrated, with which they maintained family connections, and to whose music, literature and history they had been exposed from an early age.

Would the Home Affairs Minister, Mr Dutton, have singled out white South African farmers for special consideration for humanitarian visas if he had discussed his policy with a cabinet that included people of Sudanese, Afghan and Vietnamese background?

The former AttorneyGeneral, George Brandis, devoted time and effort trying to change racial vilification laws — defending the “right to be a bigot”, as he put it.Would a Cabinet including “people of colour” have recommended a different policy?

Imagine if one of our recent prime ministers had been indigenous. How different would his or her annual Closing the Gap speech to Parliament have been? Would they have responded differently to the evidence of incremental advance in some areas and lack of progress in others?

If we had indigenous people in the Cabinet, I doubt we would have the strange spectacle of Tony Abbott being appointed as envoy to Australia’s indigenous people.

Maybe if some of our ministers spoke Cantonese, Tamil or Swahili at home, the teaching of foreign languages would have been a higher priority over the years.

This year, Government senators supported a motion by Pauline Hanson on “antiwhite racism”. This was later described as an administrative error. I doubt such an error would have been made by a government with people who knew first-hand about racism.

Maybe migrants have not been in this country long enough to rise up the political power structures.

But migrants of diverse backgrounds have been coming to Australia as long as Europeans have. And, besides, even first-generation migrants from England and Wales have had no problem rising to the very top of Australian politics.

Australia’s history of migration is seen in the diversity of people in every workplace across the country. Our governments are the glaring exceptions.

In America, when the Motion Picture Academy overlooked AfricanAmericans and other people of colour in their awards, a social media campaign sprang up called #OscarsSoWhite. The Academy changed its rules and the composition of its committees.

Why should the race of its members affect a government’s ability to make wise decisions in the national interest?

There have been no such campaigns here. As far as I can tell, no one in the media has questioned the new Prime Minister about the lack of diversity in his Cabinet. Perhaps this is because there is a similar lack of diversity in the morning variety programs on television, and among the radio talk show hosts and opinion columnists in our newspapers. They just don’t see anything strange in yet another all-white Australian government.

What can be done to increase the diversity of our governments? The parties could look at their traditional sources of recruitment. Is

there a similar lack of diversity in the unions, the legal fraternity, student politics, and local government?

We could also ask whether our confrontational parliamentary system, its archaic language of “Chief Whip” and “Usher of the Black Rod”, and the reciting of the Lord’s Prayer, exclude people for whom all that is unfamiliar. And we might pause to consider whether the retention of the constitutional monarchy on the grounds that it is a link to “our past” and “our traditions” actually applies to everyone.

There are a lot of things we could think about. But the first step would be for us to notice and to care.

Rajan Venkataraman is based in Hobart. He is a member of the board of Civil Liberties Australia and was a federal public servant.