Multiculturalism is a neologism, a term recently invented to describe something for which there was no previous satisfactory description. It was coined and developed in Canada in response to political pressure from minority cultures, especially the Ukrainians and other Slavs. Although there were still only two official languages, it was designed to cater for a multiplicity of cultures, including those long established as well as those of more recent immigrants.

From the beginning, Canadian multiculturalism accepted that cultures had relevance beyond the immigrant generation. This was not so obviously the case in Australia, where responsibility for multiculturalism has rested for all but nine of the past thirty-five years with the Immigration Department. The Canadian Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism of 1970 researched two questions:

Australian multiculturalism

The Australian approach, which followed the Canadian in less than five years, was quite different. It has been argued by Mark Lopez, in his detailed study of the origins of multiculturalism, that little attention was paid to the Canadian model even while the terminology was accepted. Policy development was seen as concerned with the immigrant generation. Indigenous Australians were not regarded as relevant until 1989. Religious minorities were not taken into consideration either. Language was seen as the core of ethnic diversity.