Multiculturalism, Liberalism and Australian Culture: A Conversation with Dr Alex Naraniecki

Alex Naraniecki joins Jonathan for a conversation about multiculturalism. Among other things, they discuss the origins of Australia's bipartisan policy of multiculturalism, how that policy morphed from a strategy for managing migrant integration to a celebration of cultural diversity, the Cronulla riot and its fall out, the role of law in successful multiculturalism, the reasons why multiculturalism has fallen out of public discussion, Australia's "thick" and "thin" culture, the intersection of multiculturalism and political liberalism and the potential threat of civilisational states on Australia's cultural cohesion and security.

Dr Alex Naraniecki is a researcher from the Institute for Ethics, Law and Governance at Griffith University’s Law Futures Centre. He did a post-doc at Deakin University on multiculturalism and is also a scholar of Karl Popper.

The Political Animals is hosted by Jonathan Cole, an academic, writer, speaker and translator who specialises in political theology: the intersetion of religion and politics. He is currently Assistant Director of the Centre for Public and Contextual Theology at Charles Sturt University. Previously, he worked as a Senior Terrorism Analyst at Australian intelligence agency The Office of National Assessments. You can follow Jonathan and the show on Twitter and Facebook.