Whatever happened to multiculturalism? Here Come the Habibs!, race, identity and representation
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2017
Authors
Stratton, J.
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Journal article
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Continuum, 2017; 31(2):242-256
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Abstract
In February 2016 Channel Nine broadcast six episodes of Here Come the Habibs!. The show was a comedy about a Lebanese-Australian family who win 22 million dollars in the lottery and move from working-class Lakemba to upper-class Vaucluse where they buy a house next to the very white O’Neills. The show invokes key tropes of official multiculturalism most importantly race and identity. At the same time, official multiculturalism has been in decline in Australia since the advent of John Howard’s conservative prime ministership in 1996. Official multiculturalism focused on ethnic groups and their cultures. It has been supplanted by the ideas of neoliberalism which is concerned above all with individuals and the market. In this article I argue that Here Come the Habibs! is, in the end, nostalgic for a multiculturalism which is no longer privileged in Australia. The dynamics of the tension between the Habibs and O’Neills has been displaced, as is signalled in the final episode of the show, by the entry into Australia of a mobile, cosmopolitan elite whose worth is measured not in their culture but in what they can economically contribute to the country.
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Copyright 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group