Official attempts to find satisfactory titles and descriptions for the post-war settlement of a multicultural immigrant population have gone through many stages from ‘New Australians’ to ‘Culturally and Linguistically Diverse’. Descriptions of desirable outcomes have gone from ‘assimilation’ to ‘cohesion’. All these formulations have been developed within a bureaucracy corresponding to political imperatives, rather than emerging from the ethnic or religious communities, expert opinion or the general public. None have much of a basis in community demands or in serious academic inquiry. As in the United States a century ago, many of the majority population have resented ‘hyphenated’ terms (even ‘Anglo-Australians’) but many of the newcomers have been happy to use them. Indigenous Australians (also a bureaucratic term) have preferred North American terminologies like First Nations, stressing prior occupation during many centuries. What has been lacking is in-depth analysis of public opinion about a multicultural society and the attitudes of the several million Australians whose ancestors were not derived from the British Isles. This lack has partly been due to the limited interest in such issues by the Commonwealth bureaucracy and its monopoly of official definitions and funding. The growth of a controversial Muslim population has revealed the importance of knowing whether this threatens ‘cohesion’, even when cohesion has not been effectively defined. Undue reliance on opinion polling has tended to blur the complexity of Australian society and its responses.

The Monash University and Scanlon Foundation research programme, ‘Mapping Social Cohesion’, tackles cohesion through opinion polls and focus groups (Markus 2013). The ongoing surveys suggest a high degree of satisfaction with immigration and multiculturalism. There is very little alternative study in Australia that might modify or endorse these regular findings. A Scanlon-Monash Index (SMI) of Social Cohesion explains and develops this. It brings into question the excited media treatment of relevant issues. It distinguishes the opinions of respondents by their ethnicity, which is normal in North America but very rare in Australia. It has been produced in a period when ethnic relations and immigration were apparently tense in response to the Islamic revival and the corresponding organization of racist and militant opposition.

Over the past 15 years there has been little to justify the high excitement of organizations like Pauline Hanson's One Nation or the recent and more militant Australian Liberty Alliance.