This quick guide provides an overview of the past decade of government policy on multiculturalism in Australia.

It follows on from the Parliamentary Library’s 2010 paper Multiculturalism: a review of Australian policy statements and recent debates in Australia and overseas in providing an update to the first part of that paper on federal government multicultural policy statements, along with a section on current state and territory multicultural policies.

This paper looks first at Labor Government policy, beginning in 2010 with the development of its multicultural policy statement, The People of Australia, which was launched in 2011. This policy carried with it a number of initiatives, including those on anti-racism and access and equity, which the paper tracks over the subsequent years.

The paper next looks at the Coalition Government statement on multiculturalism, Multicultural Australia—united, strong, successful which was launched in 2017, and remains the current statement on multicultural policy.

The paper also outlines various government inquiries and reports on multicultural issues in the period since 2010.

Current state and territory multicultural policies are summarised in the appendix.