The Golden Country: In Conversation on the Changing Identity of Australia

Join us at the Whitlam Institute for a panel discussion on The Golden Country: Australia's Changing Identity - a new book from Tim Watts MP, the member for Gellibrand. In the book, Tim notes that in The Lucky Country, Donald Horne wanted to capture ‘what the huge continent was like…before it was peopled from all over Asia’. Sixty years later, we need to ask what Australia is like today, as it is being ‘peopled from all over Asia’, and what a century of nation building in the image of White Australia has meant for our country. Tim opines that John Howard was the unlikely reformer of contemporary Australia. He transformed the migration system, creating the first immigration boom since the White Australia policy ended and dramatically diversifying the population. Yet his divisive rhetoric about national identity has hamstrung discussion about what these changes mean. As a result, Australia is a successful multicultural society with monocultural institutions and symbols. Tim Watts’ family personifies this contradiction. His children are descendants of Hong-Kong—Chinese migrants and of pre-Federation politicians who sought to build a nation that excluded anyone who wasn’t white. As the representative of a diverse federal electorate, Watts asks: why is Australia’s imagined community so far behind its lived community, and what can we do about it? Tim will be joined in discussion by Dr Stephen FitzGerald AO - Whitlam Institute Distinguished Fellow, Australia’s first ambassador to the People’s Republic of China, and one of Australia’s foremost China specialists, Sally Sitou, International Media and Communications specialist and former media and policy advisor for Federal MP Jason Clare and Jason Yat-sen Li - with professional background in law, Jason runs corporate advisory firm - Yatsen Associates, chairs investment firm Vantage Asia Holdings, and is a fellow of the University of Sydney. EVENT: Thursday 30 January 2020, 6:00 - 8:00 pm. Refreshments will be served. This is a free event but registration is essential. Visit: https://www.whitlam.org/events/2020/1/30/the-golden-country-in-conversation-on-the-changing-identity-of-australia VENUE: The Female Orphan School, The Whitlam Institute within Western Sydney University, Parramatta South Campus, corner Victoria Road and James Ruse Drive, Rydalmere