Kevin Rudd's recent refusal to countenance his Immigration Minister's eminently sensible suggestion to remove the reference to Don Bradman from the Australian Citizenship Test shows that our new Prime Minister is still afraid of the political power of conservative cultural warriors.

The most out and proud of these was, of course, former prime minister John Howard, who, highly placed sources suggest, was personally responsible for the question that asks prospective Australians to name the ‘greatest Australian cricketer of the 1930s'. The culture wars, in which he and his cronies championed an Anglocentric, militaristic and sport-centred version of Australian history and society against a ‘leftist' view of Australia that had supposedly led us into moral relativism and cultural separatism, were a central theme of Howard's years in power.

Howard's cultural warriors like to portray this as a common sense return to "old ideas [or traditional values] that should never have been discarded", and invariably misrepresent Australia's multicultural policies as weapons wielded by "cultural elites" against the "host country". What such voices shout so loudly to disguise are their fear of difference, and their evident inability to recognise value in any cultural tradition other than that of their own experience. Their calls to reject multiculturalism in favour of social cohesion are misguided at best, but, more often, are completely disingenuous, setting up a false opposition between the two concepts. Social cohesion and multiculturalism are, in Australia, two sides of the same social/cultural policy coin: Australian multiculturalism was a tool by which to achieve and manage social cohesion in the face of increasing, and increasingly inevitable, cultural diversity.

Despite the attempts of reactionaries to conflate the two terms in the public consciousness, ‘multiculturalism' and ‘cultural diversity' are not the same thing. One - multiculturalism - is a policy response to the other - the increased racial and cultural diversity within nation states which is an inevitable, social reality in our globalised world. Perhaps the former needs a re-think and a re-focus in the face of some obvious failings and inadequacies - as does any social policy after more than three decades. But the latter, which results from the free movement of people, is the inevitable outcome of globalisation and must be embraced as readily as was the free movement of goods and money.

When reactionary voices call for the abandonment of multiculturalism and the reinstatement of social cohesion, they are deliberately misusing language to disguise their real agenda: the rejection of cultural diversity itself and a return to the Anglo-conformist policies of the White Australian past.

Conformity, in the more politically correct guise of popular conservatism, was at the heart of Howard's culture wars, which reached their zenith with the content of the Citizenship Test, and the history curriculum that the Howard Government put together in its last, desperate months. These highly prescriptive documents sought to dictate once and for all exactly what it meant to be Australian, and offered the narrowest and most exclusionary definition our young nation had ever seen.

Howard's concession speech on election night alluded to what he saw as his great achievement in making Australia a "stronger, prouder" country than it had been when he took power, and his recent addresses to the American neo-conservative elite have continued this theme. The former PM and his ideological bedfellows doubtless believe that Howard left Australia "a stronger, prouder and more prosperous nation than it had been twelve years earlier". But they're wrong.

Conformity is the enemy of everything Australia is and needs to be in the twenty-first century. It stifles creativity and innovation, threatens security and peace, undermines individual and social health, and limits economic growth.

After more than a decade of leadership that relentlessly pushed conformity on the Australian people, it's time to reassert the power and potential of cultural diversity. The subject was conspicuously avoided by the Australian Labor Party in the lead up to last year's election, a deliberate tactic adopted by Rudd to avoid being wedged by Howard in a debate that was seen as unwinnable. It worked. But now that he's in power, Rudd must pull his head from the sand and re-engage with an issue that goes to the heart of Australia's future.

What this doesn't mean is a revival or continuation of the culture wars. The back and forth accusations of self-appointed cultural warriors do little to advance the debate, and rarely make sense to most people.

What it does mean is re-framing the debate in terms everyone can understand and, crucially, in a way that does not divide Australians into "us" and "them". Just as the climate change debate took a decisive turn with the release of Nicholas Stern's report on the economic impact of global warming, so the diversity debate can only be won when the arguments are removed from the emotive realm of the culture wars and repositioned within the framework of a rational, evidence-based argument that demonstrates both the inevitability and the potential of diversity in our everyday lives.

Of course, while climate change, or global warming, is a scientific phenomenon, the concept of cultural identity is much more nebulous. Arguments about diversity and social cohesion are complicated by the intensely personal, and often highly emotional, responses of people to any perception that government or the state is attempting to impose upon their individual sense of self. In the face of myriad different interpretations of the role of cultural identity, and opposing views of the rights of individuals to maintain divergent cultural traditions while participating in and contributing to a single "national" culture, applying the scientific logic of the Stern Report to the issue of a culturally diverse but socially cohesive Australia may appear to be impossible. But the value of cultural diversity can be measured, and proven, against many apparently disparate policy objectives.

The Rudd Government is urgently engaged in developing a series of policies and programs that seek to build human and social capital, to increase productivity, and to encourage innovation in business, all in the pursuit of continued economic growth and the security of Australian society in the face of globalisation. Embracing diversity is the only sensible approach by which to make progress on these very worthy goals.

The best local and international research backs this up. Philippe Legrain, author of Immigrants: Your Country Needs Them, makes a forceful case for cultural diversity, demonstrating that its greatest economic benefit is the generation of new ideas and innovative entrepreneurship: "Instead of following the conventional wisdom, immigrants tend to have a different point of view...as outsiders, they are more determined to succeed". Legrain points out that twenty-one of Britain's Nobel Prize winners arrived in the UK as refugees. Similarly, in The Rise of the Creative Class, Richard Florida explains the benefits of cultural diversity in attracting talented people to areas in need of economic regeneration, noting that "...regional economic growth is powered by creative people, who prefer places that are diverse, tolerant and open to new ideas".

Moreover, while diversity is often blamed for insecurity and mistrust, insistence on conformity can actually be counter-productive when it comes to social cohesion. A society that celebrates diversity rather than insisting on a conformist way of life is more likely to make people of different backgrounds and beliefs feel welcome, and more able to accommodate a plurality of views. As Rosemary Hollis of Britain's Chatham House has pointed out when speaking of the "homegrown" terrorist threat within the UK, people who feel included in society are less likely to become violent or radicalised.

This point was made forcefully in the recent Four Corners program, Dangerous Ground, in which Sally Neighbour canvassed the views of Australian Muslims who have suffered increasing prejudice over recent years, and of those community leaders who are working to overcome the dangerous sense of marginalisation this has produced.

Until the return of cultural conformity under Howard, Australia had largely avoided the kind of "ethnic tension" which has often threatened social cohesion in many European countries. This is largely due to Australia's proud, if recent, tradition of recognising diversity as a positive force. Since the embrace of multiculturalism by the Whitlam and Fraser Governments in the 1970s (perhaps the only issue on which these bitter political foes agreed at the time), the Australian approach to immigration was one of give and take, rather than the "with us or against us" mentality that was espoused by Howard and his xenophobic neo-conservative cronies.

Unlike the policies of many European countries, which saw immigrant populations as separate from the mainstream and, in many cases, did indeed lead to the creation of cultural silos.

Australia's approach to multiculturalism always involved an equal emphasis on cultural rights and social responsibilities. The Australian covenant offered respect for individual cultural identity and the embrace of diversity in return for a commitment to the rules and mores of the new, or "host", nation and an active contribution to its cultural development and social cohesion. For more than two decades, this covenant put Australia in the vanguard of the international approach to managing cultural diversity: it is this, not the destructive conformism of the Howard years, that produced the harmonious multicultural society that is now held up as a model for other, more culturally fractured, Western nations.

In order to recover Australia's diversity advantage, the Rudd Government should make a clean break with the sullied recent history of cultural diversity debates, and perhaps consider replacing the sadly discredited term "multiculturalism" with one that accurately reflects the objectives of maintaining social cohesion in a culturally diverse society. Such an approach must, most crucially, reject the stultifying conformity called for by reactionaries in the culture wars, and stress the benefits to all Australians of a pluralist, diverse, creative and innovative national culture.

A strong first step might be to establish an Office for Diversity and Social Cohesion (ODSC) within the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, to replace the Office for Multicultural Affairs which was abolished in the first Howard Government.

This office could then oversee a whole-of-government approach to promoting creative diversity and economic growth within a socially cohesive and peaceful Australia, ensuring our cultural diversity is both nurtured and exploited to the ultimate advantage of every Australian, from every walk of life.

There will always be those who want to lock our borders, put up walls and retreat from the reality of the modern world. It cannot be done. Technologies of communication and transport won't be contained; at an ever-increasing pace, people will move around the world in search of a better life, as they have since time immemorial. Australia, a country of immigrants, must leave its conformist era behind and once again embrace the diversity that has been, and will continue to be, our greatest source of strength.