SYDNEY, Australia — Australia prides itself on its fairness and multiculturalism. But wander through Sydney’s corporate towers or Canberra’s halls of Parliament, and you’ll notice that Australia’s power structure is overwhelmingly white, nowhere near as diverse as the country at large.

That gap between self-image and reality is the focus of a new report released early Wednesday by the Australian Human Rights Commission, which scrutinized the backgrounds of more than 2,400 senior leaders across business, government and academia.

It found, in simple terms, that white Australians with European roots still run nearly everything.

“Although those who have non-European and Indigenous backgrounds make up an estimated 24 percent of the Australian population, such backgrounds account for only 5 percent of senior leaders,” the report states. “Put another way, about 95 percent of senior leaders in Australia have an Anglo-Celtic or European background.”

[Join the discussion about this issue in our Facebook group, NYT Australia.]

The report — the government’s most comprehensive study of Australia’s multicultural identity to date — reveals a country opening to the world but still resisting equality. Even with an immigration system that prioritizes the highly skilled, and even as the children of immigrants outperform, on average, the children of Australian-born parents in school, Australia’s racial and ethnic realities remain stuck in place.