Our Cultural Heritage: Professor L. J. M. Cooray: The Immigrant Scholar Who Challenged Australian Multiculturalism

One of the most interesting voices in Australia's great immigration and multiculturalism debates of the 1980s has almost disappeared from public memory. Professor L. J. M. Cooray did not fit the script. He could not conveniently be dismissed as an Anglo-Australian nostalgic fearful of foreigners, because Cooray himself had been born in Sri Lanka and had made Australia his adopted country. Yet he became a vigorous critic of official multiculturalism and a defender of Australia's inherited political and cultural traditions. At the very moment when Geoffrey Blainey was being subjected to extraordinary hostility for questioning immigration policy, Cooray was making an argument that cut across the increasingly rigid racial categories through which the debate was being conducted.

Leonard James Mark Cooray had formidable academic credentials. Born in Sri Lanka in 1938, he graduated with first-class honours in law from the University of Ceylon in 1961 and subsequently went to Cambridge, where he completed a PhD in 1968. He later received another doctorate from the University of Colombo. After academic work in Sri Lanka and Britain, he came to Australia in 1976 and joined Macquarie University, where he taught Australian government and politics. His scholarly interests extended across constitutional law, jurisprudence, government, civil liberties and political philosophy. His books included Conventions, the Australian Constitution and the Future, Human Rights in Australia, The Australian Achievement and works on constitutional and legal questions in Sri Lanka. His biographical account records 38 years in universities and an enormous output of books, academic articles and contributions to newspapers and journals.

Cooray was therefore neither an outsider to Australian intellectual life nor an amateur offering casual opinions about immigration. He was a migrant, a constitutional scholar and a student of liberal democratic institutions who had experienced political conflict in Sri Lanka before settling in Australia. That background makes his intervention in the multiculturalism debate especially interesting. It deprived his opponents of one of the easiest rhetorical responses to critics of multiculturalism: the assumption that opposition must simply reflect racial hostility by members of Australia's European majority.

His most readily identifiable contribution was the April 1986 Quadrant essay "Multiculturalism in Australia: Who Needs It?" The title itself captured Cooray's scepticism about a policy which, by then, was becoming entrenched in Australian political and bureaucratic life. Cooray did not deny that Australia contained people from many cultural backgrounds. Nor did he advocate persecuting migrants for maintaining private attachments to their languages, religions and traditions. His target was something quite different: the transformation of multiculturalism from a description of social diversity into a government-sponsored political doctrine.

Cooray drew an important distinction between helping immigrants overcome the practical difficulties of settlement and using public money to perpetuate separate ethnic cultures. New arrivals could obviously require English-language assistance and help adjusting to unfamiliar institutions. That did not, in his view, establish an obligation upon the Australian state to preserve indefinitely every immigrant culture as a separate publicly supported entity. He was particularly troubled by versions of multiculturalism asserting that ethnic communities possessed a right to maintain their language and culture in Australia with government assistance. The fundamental question, as Cooray framed it, was whether Australia wanted a recognisable Australian culture or merely a collection of distinct ethnic cultures occupying the same country.

That question went to the heart of an argument which has never really disappeared. There is an enormous conceptual difference between saying that citizens should be free to preserve their ancestral traditions and saying that the state should organise national life around the permanent maintenance of ethnic difference. The first follows naturally from freedom of religion, association and expression. The second is a political programme. Cooray's complaint was that supporters of official multiculturalism too often treated opposition to the second proposition as hostility to the first.

This was also where Cooray's position intersected with the controversy surrounding Geoffrey Blainey. Blainey's intervention had generated an atmosphere in which criticism of immigration policy could readily be redescribed as racism. Cooray rejected that way of closing down the argument. Immigration policy is necessarily discriminatory in the literal, non-pejorative sense that a government must decide who may settle in the country, in what numbers and under what criteria. No country has an immigration programme without making such choices. For Cooray, the crucial democratic issue was whether Australians were permitted to debate those choices openly, including their consequences for the country's cultural character, without the debate itself being morally prohibited.

The deeper principle involved was popular sovereignty. A democratic people cannot meaningfully govern itself if some of the most consequential decisions about its future are removed from legitimate political discussion. Immigration changes more than labour-market statistics. Over sufficient time and at sufficient scale it can change languages, religions, customs, political constituencies, patterns of association and the cultural assumptions upon which institutions operate. Cooray's general position challenged the proposition that acknowledging these consequences was inherently racist. The fact that human beings possess equal moral and legal worth does not by itself dictate a particular immigration intake or multicultural policy.

This is where Cooray's own life gives his argument unusual force. Here was a Sri Lankan-born Australian telling the established population that accepting him as an equal citizen did not require it to renounce its historical inheritance. He did not appear to regard Australia's predominantly British institutional origins as an insult to his presence. On the contrary, much of his scholarship concerned precisely the constitutional traditions, rule of law, limited government and civil liberties that Australia had inherited and developed. He could distinguish between equality before the law and the much larger proposition that a nation was obliged to reconstruct its culture whenever its demographic composition changed.

There is an irony here which deserves emphasis. Much contemporary discussion assumes that migrants necessarily have an interest in weakening the established national culture while members of the historic majority have an interest in defending it. Cooray demonstrated how crude that assumption can be. An immigrant may value the civilisation into which he has migrated precisely because he has chosen it. Cooray had experience outside Australia against which to measure Australian institutions. His appreciation of the Australian political inheritance was therefore not merely ancestral sentiment. It could arise from comparison.

Nor did Cooray's argument require hostility towards the cultures from which immigrants came. He distinguished the special situation of Aboriginal Australians from immigrant ethnic communities on the straightforward ground that Aboriginal cultures originated in Australia and existed nowhere else, whereas Greek, Italian, Chinese and other immigrant cultures possessed their historic centres elsewhere. Whatever one thinks of that distinction, it demonstrates that his argument was more sophisticated than a blanket demand for cultural uniformity. He was trying to identify what obligations followed from immigration and what obligations did not.

His critique also anticipated a problem that has grown rather than disappeared: the emergence of an institutional multiculturalism industry whose interests need not be identical with those of ordinary migrants. Cooray questioned whether ethnic organisations and publicly funded advocates could automatically be treated as speaking for everyone assigned to their ethnic category. Migrants are individuals. They may wish to assimilate rapidly, retain some ancestral customs, retain almost all of them, marry outside their group, abandon their ancestral language, or simply regard themselves as Australians without consulting organisations claiming to represent their ethnicity. A policy supposedly celebrating diversity can paradoxically become another means of putting people into boxes.

The significance of Cooray today is therefore larger than the particular controversies of the 1980s. He represents an alternative conception of immigration and citizenship: newcomers are welcomed as individuals into an existing political community rather than the existing community being understood as culturally empty territory awaiting continuous reconstruction. Under that conception, migrants enjoy the same civil liberties as everyone else, including the liberty to preserve their heritage privately and voluntarily, while Australia retains a common public culture capable of binding people of different origins together.

That position can certainly be challenged. Critics of assimilation have argued that supposedly neutral national cultures often reflect the traditions of historically dominant groups, and defenders of multiculturalism maintain that recognition of minority cultures can assist integration rather than undermine it. Those are legitimate arguments. Cooray's importance lies partly in insisting that the opposite argument was legitimate too. Calling a proposition racist does not answer an argument about democratic sovereignty, immigration numbers, social cohesion or the desirability of a common national culture.

Cooray's writings are particularly valuable because his biography prevents the history of this debate from being reduced to the simplistic morality play that later generations sometimes impose upon it. Australia in the 1980s contained migrants who supported multiculturalism and migrants who opposed it; native-born Australians who welcomed high immigration and others who wanted less; people who regarded assimilation as oppressive and others who regarded a common culture as essential to national solidarity. Cooray stood within that complexity rather than fitting comfortably into today's political categories.

There was something refreshingly confident in his conception of his adopted country. Australia did not need to apologise for possessing a culture before he arrived, and Cooray did not apparently believe that respecting him required Australians to erase themselves. The traditions of parliamentary government, common law, individual liberty and civic responsibility could be inherited by someone born in Colombo just as surely as by someone whose ancestors arrived with the First Fleet. Citizenship could enlarge the Australian nation without requiring the nation to deny that it had a history.

That may be the most enduring lesson in Cooray's neglected contribution to the multiculturalism debate. Equality between citizens and national self-determination are not logically incompatible. Respect for immigrants does not require the proposition that immigration policy must be beyond democratic control, any more than pride in an inherited culture requires contempt for people born elsewhere. Cooray himself embodied that distinction: an Asian-born immigrant, Australian citizen and distinguished scholar who defended the right of Australians to possess a common culture and to argue openly about the policies shaping their country's future.

In today's far more cautious intellectual climate, some of Cooray's arguments would undoubtedly generate controversy. That is precisely why they deserve to be remembered rather than airbrushed from Australian intellectual history. He refused the easy equation of opposition to official multiculturalism with hostility towards migrants. He challenged the idea that ethnic organisations necessarily spoke for individuals. He defended a common Australian culture while himself being living evidence that membership of that culture need not depend upon birthplace. Above all, he insisted that fundamental questions about immigration, culture and national continuity belonged within democratic argument rather than outside its permitted boundaries.

L. J. M. Cooray therefore deserves rediscovery. His life makes nonsense of the assumption that there has ever been only one authentically "migrant" position on multiculturalism. He chose Australia, studied its institutions, defended its liberties and argued that Australians were entitled to preserve a national culture of their own. Whether one agrees with every conclusion he reached is secondary to the intellectual principle his intervention represented: neither ancestry nor ideological fashion should determine which citizens are entitled to speak about the future of their country.