The diaspora dividend: lessons from the United Kingdom
Latika Bourke, Journalist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
Before Rishi Sunak was elected, Latika Bourke took a look at the diaspora dividend in the UK.
British Conservative Party members are being asked to choose between a woman and a billionaire of Indian descent as the country’s next prime minister. There are three remarkable things to note about the contest to replace Boris Johnson.
The first, is that Rishi Sunak was one of many candidates who were either black or from an ethnic minority background to run.
The second, is that the demographics shaping the leadership contest are almost unremarkable because modern-day Britain has already produced two women prime ministers, and the cultural diversity in the Commons, particularly in the executive, makes a non-Anglo-Saxon prime minister almost an inevitability.
And the third, is there are few demands or expectations of Sunak to govern for any interest other than hard-working Britons striving for a better future for their children. To put it simply, his heritage is only a sliver of his story, not the driving factor for why he is running or wants to be elected.
As former cabinet minister Michael Gove said, it is a testament to Britain’s multiculturalism.
“The diversity of candidates, and the fact that so many of them are so impressive tells us something about the success of the United Kingdom – a multinational, a multi-ethnic state,” Gove said.
But Britain’s diversity success in politics is no accident.
Candidates from different backgrounds were deliberately sought out and tapped to run almost two decades ago, when David Cameron set out to regenerate the Conservative Party so it would reflect the society it sought to govern. UK Labour has a target for black and minority candidates.
Australia too, prides itself on its multicultural success story, yet it is difficult to see the country producing an Indian-Australian prime minister anytime soon.
Victorian MP Kaushaliya Vaghela – the first Indian born Hindu to be elected to any parliament in Australia – is still a rarity. The Australian Labor Party is doing better at fielding more diverse candidates.
Sri Lankan-born Cassandra Fernando, English-born Michelle Ananda-Rajah whose family also hail from Sri Lanka and Zaneta Mascarenhas, the Australian daughter of Goan immigrants, are among a new cohort of MPs with Asian backgrounds elected at the last election.
Maiden speeches by MPs elected to the 47th parliament will speak of migrant beginnings more than ever before.
But the historic and systemic underrepresentation means that it will take some time before we see more diverse faces joining the Malaysian-born Penny Wong around the Cabinet table.
That is despite the most recent census showing that in 2021, India overtook China and even New Zealand as the third-largest country of birth for Australian residents.
On Census night August 10, 2021, 673,352 people living in Australia reported India as their country of birth, representing a whopping 48 per cent increase since the last census conducted in 2016.
Only Australia and England beat India in terms of where people here were born.
While some might attribute the Indian migrant success story, both in Australia and Britain, to the Commonwealth linkages, it is something else.
Australians largely perceive Indian migrants to be highly educated and highly skilled – although that is beginning to change as younger migrants move to Australia. They are also seen as universally hardworking and peaceful contributors to the society and economy.
But while Australia’s face is changing, its institutions and corporate sectors are shamefully slow to keep pace. And it has real and devastating consequences for Australians who weren’t born in Australia.
In 2021, the Australian government threatened to jail and fine citizens returning home from India, which was grappling with a devastating outbreak of COVID-19.
Indian-Australians had already faced vastly more difficult circumstances getting home before this ban was introduced, due to the cancellation of flights between the two countries.
When the government closed the border to Indian-Australians, denying them even the opportunity of securing a scarce hotel quarantine spot, those affected by these rules found little sympathy amongst politicians or the public.
Only two of members of the cabinet were born overseas, both to English parents.
In the unlikely event they even wanted to raise any concerns, there was no opportunity. Federal Cabinet never discussed the ban which was announced in a media release on a Friday evening by Health Minister Greg Hunt.
Indeed, Queensland Premier Annastacia Palasczuck questioned why people would travel to India when reporters asked her about the ongoing ban on Australians leaving the country in September 2021.
“Well, where are you going to go? Are you going to go to India? In Tokyo, you have to sit in Perspex screens with masks on, and if you remove your mask you can’t talk while you’re eating,” the Premier told reporters.
Her office later issued a clarifying comment in response to backlash.
There was little effort from politicians of any stripe to shut down the ugly public commentary that circulated online, some wrongly accusing Indian Australian citizens of holding citizenship to their birth country.
India does not allow dual citizenship, something I know all too well, having been born in Bihar and adopted to Australia in 1984.
Federal government sources at the time told this correspondent that the India ban would be loved by the public.
The Indian-Australian community is owed an apology for the way it was singled out. COVID ravaged plenty of countries with similarly strong people-to-people ties with Australia, including the United Kingdom, but the border was never singularly closed to Britain.
But an apology, particularly to students whose lives were upended by the broader border ban, will not come.
And so the lesson of the India ban is that the Indian diaspora needs to better advocate for itself, primarily because no-one else will.
Of course the Indian diaspora should not be treated as a homogenous group with the same interests always at heart.
But there are enough commonalities for all Indians who have made Australia home that should bind this community together, and at the very least demand they be treated as equal citizens.
The task of improving their visibility in the community to levels akin to Britain, will take more time and require crafted advocacy.
We saw some nascent signs of the Indian-Australian community speaking out with greater force during the pandemic, but overall, the community lacked its own representation.
Many formed Facebook support groups and some members were proactive in contacting people in the media, including myself to ventilate their stories. But it was not enough to combat public opinion which shamefully drew divides between Australians who were here and those overseas, showing little compassion for those who might find have found themselves stranded on the other side of a COVID-infected world.
When I wrote about the case of a Melbourne family whose toddler was stuck in India while the parents were in Australia, government officials told me that they had never been made aware of the case, and if they had of known they would have acted before the family had felt the media was their only recourse.
This shows that the diaspora itself has struggled to access resources where and when they are available.
As the backlash of Chinese voters against the former federal government showed, Australia’s increasingly muscular migrant vote should not be underestimated, taken for granted or abused.
Geopolitics will continue to test the usefulness of the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue and the closer security ties that Australia and her allies are trying to achieve with India, but the true backbone of the alliance will be its people-to-people links.
More and more Indians are choosing to make Australia their home. It’s time our institutions finally recognised and welcomed them.
Latika Bourke is an International Reporter for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She was previously the National Political Reporter based in the Press Gallery in Canberra before relocating to London where she is currently covering British and Australian politics. In 2010, she was named the Walkley Young Australian Journalist of the Year for her outstanding coverage of the Liberal leadership crisis which also earned her the Radio/Audio Journalism prize. Latika has also worked at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), Radio 2UE and 2BS Radio in Bathurst. In 2015, she published her own memoir, From India with Love.