After Bondi: Social Cohesion, Multiculturalism and Nation-Building in Australia

For European societies confronting their own social unrest and conflict, Australia presents an instructive case for the study of social cohesion. As an immigration nation ten generations old, constructed upon the foundations of the oldest continuous cultures in the world, Australia has long navigated the tensions between diversity and unity, difference and commonality, rights and responsibilities. The attacks directed at Jewish Australians on and before 14 December 2025 have concentrated these tensions into a moment of acute national reckoning. The Australian government has established a Royal Commission - Australia’s most powerful investigate body - to examine the rise of antisemitism, failures in security, and the implications of the causes of the events in Bondi for social cohesion.

No cohesion without resilience

This has triggered considerable public debate over what social cohesion means in practice. Too frequently it is deployed as a synonym for public order: the maintenance of law, the absence of visible conflict, the management of difference within acceptable limits. This framing places the analytical weight on constraint — on what communities must not do — rather than on what a cohesive and resilient society affirmatively produces.

A more adequate conception of social cohesion requires the mutual recognition of a shared, civil and complementary society — one to which all can contribute and in which all feel a genuine stake. It must conceive of cohesion as being underpinned by resilience.

Resilient social cohesion in an immigrant society is produced through the interaction of three distinct but interdependent processes. First, settlement denotes the processes by which newcomers to a society are enabled to establish themselves as full participants in social, economic and civic life. Settlement policy therefore encompasses practical support — language acquisition, housing, employment pathways, health and education access — but its deeper purpose is the cultivation of belonging and of civic investment. Secondly, Multiculturalism is the recognition that cultural diversity constitutes a resource for nation-building rather than an obstacle to it. A genuinely multicultural policy framework ensures that all communities have a voice in the processes that shape collective life — that they are participants in the construction of national culture, not merely its passive recipients.

From coexistence to cooperation

Finally, Interculturalism extends the logic of multiculturalism from recognition to engagement. Where multiculturalism affirms the value of diverse communities, interculturalism requires that those communities encounter one another — in common tasks, shared institutions, collaborative enterprises — at every level of social life. It constitutes a move from coexistence to cooperation. The Australian policy tradition has been considerably stronger on the former than the latter, and while the conceptual framework outlined above is not, in itself, novel, the persistent failure to act on these recommendations represents a significant policy gap with measurable social costs, which the attack in Bondi has painfully underlined.

It is therefore necessary to revisit and expand on available policy recommendations: The Multicultural Framework Review proposed the establishment of a national institution to build intercultural engagement, stimulate cooperation and widen public understanding. It was accepted in principle but has not been implemented. The National Anti-Racism Framework recommends training, education and social integration measures to address the deep structural harms of racism. It remains under consideration. The reports of the Antisemitism  and Islamophobia Envoys have been received — one with greater urgency than the other, given the events of December 2025 — yet the findings of both carry significant challenges of their own to social cohesion and democratic rights.

A new infrastructure for moving beyond social cohesion

Australia certainly has the conceptual resources to build a genuinely cohesive and resilient multicultural society. For that, the three interlocking processes of settlement, multiculturalism and interculturalism must be understood as mutually constitutive: each depends on and reinforces the others, and their convergence is the condition of the resilient social cohesion that all three serve. We now require not so much a refinement of existing policies but a reconceptualization of the institutional infrastructure for social cohesion through the lens of resilience: a dedicated national body should be established to coordinate the settlement, multicultural and intercultural dimensions of social resilience within a single coherent mandate. The key task of such a body would be to create the conditions for expanding intercultural engagement, civic participation across and between ethnic and religious communities and the necessary and sustained education efforts that will underpin them.

Andrew Jakubowicz is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Technology Sydney and a consultant sociologist in private practice. He has published widely in the fields of cultural diversity, social policy, refugees, Jewish cultural studies, media sociology, and new media. He was an appointed member of various government bodies including the Advisory Board to Multicultural NSW (2016 - 2019). He co-ordinates the website Making Multicultural Australia in the 21st Century, designed for teachers and students interested in cross-curriculum diversity perspectives.