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here has, then, been an Asianization of Australia, and it has been part of multiculturalism'€™s emphatic success. Even so, an honest appraisal would say that the cultural impact of Asian immigrants on Australian national identity remains open to debate. I say this not because there has been a negligible impact, but because the impact may not yet be fully known. It may take more than a few generations to gauge the cultural effects some groups have on a prevailing national identity.

To be sure, there was a significant presence of Asian people '€” primarily Chinese '€” in Australian history. We can trace this to the gold rushes of the 19th century.

Yet apart from the legacy of phrases such as '€œFair dinkum'€ '€” which some believe originated from Chinese miners on the goldfields '€” there is little that has been carried over from the early colonial days. Perhaps the greatest cultural impact of Asians in Australian history has been their exclusion. Anxieties about yellow hordes played a crucial, if not decisive, role in the development of what came to be known as the White Australia policy.

Even with all that has happened since the 1970s, it would be premature to proclaim that waves of Asian immigration have seen a comprehensive Asianization of Australia. Asianization seems a misnomer if we are merely referring to something like 10 percent of the population.

Here, the very reason behind Australian multiculturalism'€™s success may also explain the limited nature of any Asianization of Australia. Being defined by citizenship, a nation-building multiculturalism is premised on certain values and institutions being protected from political contest.

Those who arrive as immigrants may have the right to express their cultural identities, but there is no right to repudiate, say, a commitment to parliamentary democracy. This may ensure that Australian society is highly adept at absorbing cultural difference.

But it also restricts the ways in which new arrivals may be able to shape or transform the countries in which they settle.

Australia'€™s immigration experience is marked by remarkable social mobility. The children of Australians of migrant background outperform the children of native-born Australians when it comes to educational attainment and employment. If in doubt, you need only look at the undergraduate faces of those who are enrolled in the faculties of our prestigious universities.

All this is grist to the mill for our self-image of egalitarian meritocracy. Progress, though, is never
complete. Our achievement is not quite perfect.

Because while Australia does extremely well in social mobility for immigrants, including those from Asia, equality of opportunity isn'€™t enjoyed in all spheres. We may boast about education and employment, but our efforts in opening the doors of power to all who knock are more questionable.

Our cultural diversity is far from proportionately represented in positions of leadership.

For example, in the current Federal Parliament, there are only a handful of MPs and senators who have non-European ancestry. There are only two Aboriginal people in the Parliament: Ken Wyatt (the Member for Hasluck) and Nova Peris (Senator for the NT). To my count, there are only four who have Asian cultural origin: Senators Penny Wong, Lisa Singh and Dio Wang, and Ian Goodenough (the Member for Moore). In percentage terms, only 1.7 percent of those who sit in the Federal Parliament bear an Asian cultural background.

The private sector doesn'€™t fare much better. Last year Diversity Council Australia studied the cultural origins of Australia'€™s business leaders. They found a very low representation of leaders with an Asian background. Compared to 9.6 percent of the Australian community with an Asian background '€” based on a methodology using names '€” only 1.9 percent of executive managers and 4.2 percent of directors have Asian cultural origins.

To be fair, the issue of representation and power isn'€™t confined to Australians of Asian background.

Turning specifically to those of Asian backgrounds, however, there is a question to be asked. Is there a bamboo ceiling that exists in the same way that a glass ceiling exists for women?

A charitable view would be that any under-representation of Asian backgrounds in leadership positions simply reflects a time lag. Diverse leaders are still in the '€œpipeline'€. We should be confident that time will take care of the issue.

Then again, people were saying that 10 or 20 years ago. If we were to adopt a more critical view, we could ask whether unconscious bias is contributing to the pattern of representation. The poor level of Asian Australians in leadership positions appears to replicate a pattern of invisibility that exists within Australian culture.

Such invisibility may point to some persistent cultural assumptions and stereotypes about people of Asian background. In particular the apparently positive '€œmodel minority'€ stereotype of Asians '€” that of law-abiding, hard-working and studious Asians '€” can disguise a more negative stereotype. Those seemingly laudable qualities of being inoffensive, diligent and prodigious can sound a bit like the qualities of passivity, acquiescence and subservience. These are the sort of qualities that map nicely on to the state of invisibility.

There is one thing that we must avoid. We must avoid the creation of a new class: a class of professional Asian-Australian coolies in the 21st century. A class of well-educated, ostensibly over-achieving Asian-Australians, who may nonetheless be permanently locked out from the ranks of their society'€™s leadership.