NSW is set to become the first jurisdiction in Australia to make Easter Day a public holiday.
Surprisingly, the State Government's decision passed without controversy in the mainstream media, announced with little fanfare and virtually no complaint.
In the 1990s, a decision giving such favour to a Christian holiday would have had the secular-left claiming the undermining of our multicultural society. "What about Muslim, Buddhist, Jewish and Hindu holy days?", the chorus would have sung.
So why is this decision treated as unremarkable today? There are two main reasons :
1. The campaign to protect Easter Day was initiated by the unions not the churches.
As I reported last year, this decision follows a 2009 review of workplace legislation by labour law expert Professor Joellen Riley from the University of Sydney.
A number of business organisations were against the idea, but Riley agreed with the shop workers union that Easter Day was "a special case". Basically the old 1912 Bank Holidays Act hadn't caught up with the implications of Sunday trading, which created an anomaly over the Easter weekend.
Professor Riley said:
Although not specifically named as a public holiday in either the Fair Work Act (or the Workplace Relations Act 1996) or the BBH Act, this is because all Sundays were traditionally holidays, before the extensive liberalisation of trading and working hours in recent decades. By declaring Easter Sunday as a public holiday, the State legislation would ensure that employees requested to work on Easter Sunday would have the same protections as those required to work on Easter Saturday or Easter Monday.
2. Multiculturalism in Australia is dying.
Although no one in high office has actually said so, it is clear that Australians of nearly all stripes have stepped back from the logic of multiculturalism since September 11.
Officially the term 'multicultural affairs' was dropped from the Department of Immigration by the Howard Government in 2007 and has not been reinstated under Labor.
It is also particularly instructive to look at local responses to President Angela Merkel's recent comment that multiculturalism had "utterly failed" in Germany.
Even left wing commentators didn't bother defending the concept.
Writer John Birmingham rather naively plumped for better integration, not realizing multiculturalism was explicitly conceived as it's opposite, while political theorist Tim Soutphommasane acknowledged "the slow death of Australian multiculturalism" while wishing we could come up some un-named and ill-defined alternative.
At the same time John Howard has been promoting his autobiography which is far more explicit about his unpicking of multiculturalism than he ever was while in office, saying his preferred approach was ‘multi-racialism’.
Christian response?
I have to admit to feeling somewhat ambivalent about the death of multiculturalism.
Social harmony is a worthwhile goal. And there is a danger we will slide into unhealthy forms of nationalism if the Government fails to articulate its vision for how different ethnic and religious communities in Australia can inter-relate peacefully.
There is a flipside to this recent Easter Day decision. Multiculturalism often made it easier to defend religion in the public square - Special Religious Education (SRE) in schools being just one example. We are moving into an era where the secular-left are quite explicit about their 'intolerance' of all religion.
Nevertheless, the logic of multiculturalism was always pushing us towards moral relativism, which is why it no longer resonates in this post-9/11 world.
The Bible does not advocate multiculturalism. When there is cultural tension within the church, the New Testament offers 'reconciliation in Christ' as the path to harmony. But this is hardly a policy program for a society made up of many faiths.
So what do you think is the way forward? Do you think the death of multiculturalism is a good or bad trend?
