The line is back in fashion. Repeated at press clubs, on panels, in podcast monologues and by the same actors who have decided that Australia tried something called multiculturalism and that it did not work.

It is worth pausing on how strange that claim is.

Build it, then deny it

Failed how? Failed where? Because if you want to test the proposition, you do not need a poll or a focus group. You only need to look out the window.

Start with the obvious one. Between 1949 and 1974 more than 100,000 workers from over 30 countries built the Snowy Mountains Scheme. Around two-thirds of them were migrants. Displaced Europeans, Italians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Germans, Poles and Hungarians dug 145 kilometres of tunnel, raised 16 dams and stood up seven power stations. They generated the electricity and the irrigation water that opened inland Australia. They built this whilst also practising their own culture.

We remember the Snowy because it was visible and symbolic. But it was not the exception. It was the template.

Look at the roads. Migrant labour built the West Gate, the Monash, the Eastern and the Tullamarine. It built Sydney’s motorway spine and the tunnels underneath it. Southern European tradesmen, Greeks, Italians, Maltese and former Yugoslav communities, filled those construction crews in numbers that would reshape entire trades.

Look at the factories. The post-war manufacturing boom ran on migrant hands. Ford, Holden, Toyota, the BHP steelworks that became BlueScope. Whole suburbs around Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Wollongong were laid out around the people who clocked on at those plants. They worked their shifts, whilst also practising their own culture.

Dont forget the burbs, the rail and mining

Look at the suburbs themselves. Broadmeadows, Meadow Heights, Craigieburn, Tarneit and Point Cook in Melbourne. Cabramatta, Fairfield, Bankstown, Liverpool and Blacktown in Sydney, and the new south-west corridors at Oran Park, Leppington and Edmondson Park are going up now. These places were not handed to migrants. They were built by them. First-generation arrivals worked as labourers, bricklayers, concreters, plasterers, carpenters and electricians, and then bought homes in the streets they had poured. All this was done whilst they practised their own culture.

Look west. The Pilbara could not have happened without migrant labour. The mines, the ports at Dampier and Port Hedland, and the railways that carry the ore to the coast. The iron ore that funds the services governments now treat as a birthright was dug by successive waves of arrivals, Southern Europeans first, then workers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East. The same is true of the gas. The Northwest Shelf, Gorgon, Wheatstone, Ichthys. Skilled migrant engineers and tradespeople built the industry that underwrites the national accounts.

Look at the rail. The Metro Tunnel, Sydney Metro, and Inland Rail. Look at the housing, millions of homes since 1945, the public estates, the towers, the townhouses. Look at the irrigation districts of northern Victoria, the Riverina, South Australian horticulture, all transformed by Greek, Italian, Dutch, German, Macedonian, Croatian, Vietnamese and later Indian families.

Look at what is being built right now. Snowy 2.0. Hornsdale. Renewable energy zones are emerging across Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Today’s nation-building project looks remarkably like the last one. Migrants are heavily represented in the construction and engineering workforce putting up the wind farms, the solar fields, the batteries and the transmission lines that will power the country your children inherit.

Then there is the work that involves no ribbon cutting. Aged care. Disability support. Health. Childcare. The care economy is one of the largest nation-building efforts this country has ever undertaken, and it would not function for a week without migrant workers.

From farm to plate – over a 100,000 migrants

Now follow a single meal, from the paddock to your front door, and count the hands. Start with the scale, because the scale is important. As at June 2025, 32 per cent of people living in Australia were born overseas. That is 8.83 million people, the highest share since the 1890s. Nearly half of us have at least one parent born somewhere else. This is not a minority on the margins of national life. It is a third of the country, and it does a great deal of the work that keeps the other two thirds fed.

It starts in the dirt. The fruit and vegetables on the Australian table are picked by hand, and those hands are overwhelmingly migrant. Industry analysis has put the migrant share of the horticulture workforce above 80 per cent. At peak season roughly 75,000 people work the harvest, and around 20,000 of them arrive through the Pacific Australia Labour Mobility scheme from nine Pacific nations and Timor-Leste. Without them the fruit rots on the branch. Every grower in the country already knows this, which is why they keep asking Canberra for more workers, not fewer.

The fruit and vegetables on the Australian table are picked by hand, and those hands are overwhelmingly migrant. Photo: Supplied

The market gardens that ring Sydney and Melbourne tell the longer version of the same story. Chinese growers first, then Italians, Maltese and Greeks, then Vietnamese and Cambodian families working the same soil. The salad in the bag began in ground turned over by people who arrived with very little and grew food for a country that was not always sure it wanted them.

Then production. The meat on the plate passed through an abattoir or a processing plant, and the red meat sector runs on migrant labour. Most plants sit in regional towns where local workers are scarce, and processors have told government plainly that without overseas workers some of them would close. A large share of the workers brought in under the Pacific scheme are placed in abattoirs, in the boning rooms and on the kill floors, the hardest jobs in the food chain. Food and grocery manufacturing employs more than 280,000 people all up, and the red meat sector alone has added tens of thousands of roles in recent years that it cannot fill from the local labour market.

Then the road. Around 200,000 truck drivers move the nation’s food from farm and factory to depot and shelf, and the industry is running short. The shortfall sits near 28,000 unfilled positions today and is forecast to reach 78,000 by the end of the decade. Nearly half the drivers already on the road are over 55. The trucks stay loaded because the industry is now recruiting from the Philippines, India, the United Kingdom, South Africa and New Zealand to replace the drivers it is losing. Road freight is projected to grow by more than three quarters between 2020 and 2050. There is no version of that future staffed by locals alone.

Then the warehouse. Between the truck and the shelf sits the distribution centre. The pick-and-pack floors of the logistics network, expanding fast on the back of online grocery and e-commerce, run overnight on migrant and temporary-visa labour, turning freight around before dawn so the shelves are full when the doors open.

Then the shelf. It is stacked, scanned and sold by migrant workers in the supermarket and at the local greengrocer, the shop that stays open after everything else has closed.

Then the kitchen. The restaurant that cooks the meal is, very often, a migrant story from end to end. The chef, the kitchenhand, the owner who put the family home on the line to open the doors. The food Australians now call their own, the laksa, the banh mi, the souvlaki, the butter chicken, arrived in suitcases and stayed, built family, community and love for this country.

Then your door. When the meal is delivered, it is carried up the stairs by a rider, frequently an international student, frequently new to the country, finishing the last leg of a journey that multicultural Australia ran from the first row of the paddock to the door handle.

Count the hands again. The picker, the grower, the boner, the driver, the warehouse hand, the shelf-stacker, the cook, the rider. At almost every step, the work is done disproportionately by the people some now insist have failed to integrate. They did not fail to integrate. They are the reason the country eats, and the reason it can still build.

The myth that won’t die

So when someone tells you multiculturalism has failed, ask them to be specific. Failed at building the dams. Failed at the roads, the rail, the ports, the mines, the power stations, the factories, the hospitals, the schools, the suburbs. Failed at the housing they live in. Failed at the renewable grid being switched on now. Failed at staffing the ward where their parents will be cared for.

The honest answer is that none of it failed. The physical Australia that emerged after 1945 bears the imprint of every migration wave since. The roads we drive on. The suburbs we live in. The factories that once employed millions. The mines that pay for the government. The grid is taking shape today.

The argument that multiculturalism has not worked survives only because it is never tested against the country itself. It is the peak of a political class whose time stood still in 1947. And it is a politics of subtraction, an invitation to imagine that Australia would be richer, safer and more cohesive if you removed the people who poured its foundations.

You cannot subtract your way to a stronger nation. Every serious project this country has attempted in the last 75 years says the opposite. Multiculturalism is not an experiment that might one day fail. It is the scaffolding the nation was built on and is still being built on this morning. The people declaring it a failure are standing inside the proof and would starve without it.

*Kosmos Samaras is a pollster and director at RedBridge, a leading political research and consultancy firm. This was first published on Substack.