As a Director of the Institute for Cultural Diversty, I am interested in the scope of the social questions which research needs to address.

1. A new agenda for Australian cultural diversity must engage groups of Australians that, for various reasons, felt peripheral or marginalised in the old Multicultural agenda – in particular, Indigenous Australians and Anglo-Australians. Research around Cultural Diversity must engage the various participants in ways that give all a stake in the process.

2. In the current proliferation of multifaith dialogues which surround the question of Islam in the West, many Australians who have a cultural rather than religious identification as Moslems, Jews, Buddhists, Christians etc) feel left out of the discusssions dominated by imams, reverends, monks and rabbis. How do we open a space and give a voice to those whose engagement may be secular and cultural, rather than religious?

3. Media and cultural diversity as identified by Dreher and McLean is a key issue for the agenda. Could this be extended to include literature in a broader sense as a bridge to understanding and engaging with different worlds. If you can’t hear the voice of another culture how can you understand it?