The identity debate has exploded, with questions about the state of our democratic traditions, particularly the rule of law, entering the picture. But the racism debate is still creating all the angst – it’s raw, it’s emotional, it’s genuine, it’s reaching out, and it’s engaged. Thank you, to all contributors.
You are: Robert Lawton, a favourite regular, Paul Wilson-Brown, Ron Williams, Bradley Lonard, Jack Nalbandian, Peter Kelly, Paul Wright, Charles Richards, Susan Jenner, Hardy Martin, Michelle Stein-Evers, Sonia Foley and Matt Eggers.
I begin with a poem by Brisbane boy David Peetz, in Quebec at the moment.
Is this “my country”?
I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains,
Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains.
I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror – The wide brown land for me!
But where like far horizons, our minds were once so wide
We’d welcome all and sundry, live with them side by side
The jewel-sea’s load we fear now, we scorn their ragged clothes
And beauty turns to terror if your eyes stay tightly closed
So if your land’s been swept away by droughts and flooding rains
If you seek a new beginning to escape from terror’s reign
Don’t come to our horizons, if we see you coming near
We’ll stand and sing our anthem, and this is what you’ll hear
“Australians all – watch us rejoice –
But we won’t hear your plea.
The Taliban may do their worst –
We’ll tow you back to sea!
Our land abounds in nature’s gifts
That we don’t want to share.
In history’s page, the world’s outraged
But we don’t really care.
We’ll show them we forget how to
Advance Australia fair.”
Notes: First verse by Dorothea Mackellar, ‘My country’, 1908; in last verse lines 5, 10 and half of line 7 from ‘Advance Australia Fair’ by Peter Dodds McCormick, 1878)
RACISM IN OZ
Robert Lawton in Adelaide
I’ve been reading the enormous triple and quadruple editions of Webdiary recently and feeling swamped. Swamped by the torrent of words on this issue, and sad that politics has become so routine that many people only feel driven to speak on a topic like this.
There’s been some joy as well: just seeing the monolithic Lab and Lib wedges splinter as people make their own choices rather than allow the party to think for them.
The pro-Howard Laborites may perhaps nail down some of the sillier policy ideas in a Beazley administration; the hard-to-kill Lib moderates will clearly have their day again, and on other issues than this perhaps.
A few comments on anti-Muslim feeling, speaking from an experience of Islam through Iranian, Bangladeshi and Malian friends; time spent travelling in Turkey, Jordan and Muslim India; and the old linkages of NW Pakistan to the Flinders Ranges through the Ghantowns of Farina and Marree…and the people of mixed Afghan/Aboriginal lineage now living through that area.
I say to people like Piers Denton (in Why we are racist): open your eyes to people like Nasser Hussain, captain of the England cricket team; Zinedine Zidane, a sensible, talented man perhaps the best all round footballer on the planet; Mohammed Ali Jinnah, who worked so hard to avoid the partition of India into what became India, Pakistan and Bangladesh; those brave judges of the High Court of Malaysia who have defied Mahathir in their decisions in favour of an open society; Malcolm X; Frantz Fanon of Senegal, who wrote so movingly of racism in the 1950s; Ataturk who promoted self confidence, democracy, feminism and openness in Turkey in the 1920s when Europe was going the other way; King Hussein of Jordan, who used dialogue and respect to counter Israeli
chauvinism and fear; even Gus Dur (the former President Wahid) of Indonesia who continues to use Islam as a way forward rather than a wall to contain the past.
I laugh at my 76-year-old mother’s anti-Catholic prejudices, because I can see the naked chauvinism behind them for what it is. Then I ask her why she cried so much when Robert Kennedy was shot.
Anti-Lebanese Muslim feeling is just the same as anti-Catholicism: the Lebanese happen to be in the gun in this country at present. In Germany it is expressed against the Turks, in France against the Algerians and other North African Arabs, in Britain against the Indian Muslims from everywhere from Uganda to Pakistan, Malaysia and Fiji. And in Israel.
There are still some people who hate Catholics for what they are. But in time anti-Muslim feeling will be just as marginalised.
Salaam wa laykoum: May peace be upon you. An Arabic phrase worth learning and using!
Paul Wilson-Brown
I never ring talk back lines, participate in online forums or normally have anything to do with media biased based debate of any sort. I’m too busy working. But I got a rare afternoon off so just thought I’d put my one cent in before John Howard changes the cross media ownership laws and I give up paying attention to the media all together (except for the wonderful ABC or what’s left of it).
It just seems to me that most of the people who call up the talkback jerks (Sandy McCutcheon excluded) are older white people who grew up in a Menzies induced torpor where white and might was right and whose only engagement with multiculturalism was a bit o’ Chinese food on a Fridee night. I’m generalising and making assumptions about a group of people and I really shouldn’t do that should I? But I wanted to say …
I was at a lunch party on Sunday afternoon with my Japanese girlfriend and we came across a pleasant fellow who spent several years in Japan. Well, she and he were chatting away quite nicely in Japanese when this (blonde OZ) girl stated form across the table ‘Jesus that shits me, you’re in Australia why don’t you speak Australian!? (Gee I thought we spoke English here but anyway)
“I’m so over all this shit,” (Multiculturalism I presume) she said to her friend.
Just yesterday I received a work-related call from a woman who lived in Strathfield in Sydney who in the course of the conversation calmly mentioned that the suburb was ‘overrun’ (a word usually associated with vermin I think) by Koreans!
“How rude they are!” she remarked (and remember she doesn’t know me from a bar of soap). “The young ones won’t get out of your way if you want to pass by”. I told her that anyone under the age of 18 is likely to be like that and on my recent trip to Korea, the Koreans were complaining about how rude the Americans were!
Actually I know a lot of Koreans and if it’s at all permitted to generalise (as it seems to be these days) they are some of the most earnest, honest, family oriented and generous people I know actually …. But I wanted to say.
An environment has been created where racists (and there are many levels of racism, from the subtle to the sick) feel very comfortable about airing their views in the confidence of an assumtion that the majority of “Australians” (read white Australians) agree. The 77% may see it as a breakdown in political correctness but actually it’s just a breakthrough in racism. I see it for the hard hearted empty headed crap that it is as does the rest of the world.
My family migrated to Australia from Scotland in 1970 when I was 7. We stayed in a crappy army barracks in Wacol in Brisbane. Man, it really sucked but I can only imagine (shudder) what the Afghanis are going through sitting in a shit heap in Pakistan and I don’t think I’d want to hang around in a drought stricken desert waiting for the Taliban to skin me alive and hang me from the flagpole.
WHAT I REALLY WANTED TO SAY WAS … It matters little what rhetoric you care to dabble with or how you attempt to rationalise your backward stance. You can feel strongly about something and still be completely and totally wrong.
So wake up, you racist shits. Cast off that cloak of self serving bigotry you’ve wrapped your “Australian” values in. Expel all the racist poison your parents injected into you when you were young and impressionable. Grow up and grow into the world.
Australia is the best country in the world, even though it’s now 77% thought free.
A FAIR GO
Ron Williams
What happened to a fair go? Nothing, mate, except that some of those people we’ve generously allowed into our country are busily turning it into a place I wouldn’t want to live in.
There are limits to the ‘fair go’. After all, if a beggar comes to your door, you don’t invite him in, say “Here, sit down at the telly, I’ll fetch you a cup of tea’. Nor do we.
There are limits, and I’m afraid I, along with many other Australians have reached ours.
OUR DEBATING STYLE
Bradley Lonard
Certainly one of the more amusing parts of the post-Tampa fallout has been watching the breathtaking hypocrisy of some prominent political and media figures.
Let’s start with our Prime Minister, John Winston Howard. The Australian today reports that while making an address, Mr Howard vehemently denied making political hay out of the refugee crisis: “I mean, what a ridiculous proposition.” The same story reports, with presumably a straight face, that the PM ‘spent more than half of the address talking about the refugee crisis.’ Quite.
Or there’s our old friend P P McGuinness, who decided to devote his Herald column to exposing the abusive emails and letters he’s received from readers unhappy with his hard line against the Tampa refugees. Some people might think it a bit rich that the man who turned Quadrant magazine into a vehicle for tirades against those with whom he happens to disagree – such as Robert Manne or Sir William Deane – should be complaining about receiving abusive emails.
Just as some people might be bemused at how McGuinness – a journalist, politician and long-time resident of one of Sydney’s pricier, trendier suburbs — regularly launches diatribes against ‘the elites’.
Over in the Australian there’s good old Frank Devine, who scores with a column sneering at those ‘halfwits’ who want to let refugees be processed in Australian, proclaiming that ‘hard hearts’ should rule; and then follows it up with a column warning Kim Beazley that he’s far too nice
Back in the Herald, Devine Jnr, Miranda, nips any thoughts of admiration we might have for the way NZ PM Helen Clark has handled the crisis by reminding us that the country’s a basket case that isn’t fit to lick our own country’s shoes. So there: New Zealand has a conscience so it’s obviously a wreck.
And then we come to the Webdiary. Well, there’s been some intelligent, reasoned criticism from both sides of the divide. There’s also, unfortunately, been a lot of abuse and too much sneering of the ‘If you want the refugees to come here, let them live in your home’ or ‘If you want to criticise Australia, go live in Afghanistan and see if you like it’ variety.
Christopher Hitchins calls this the ‘We have free speech here, so SHUT UP!’ argument. It’s intellectually dishonest. But then, intellect – as opposed to mere opinion and emotion – is one thing that’s been lacking from much of the entire affair.
This, really, has been the saddest part of the Tampa fallout: the way public debate has quickly turned into ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, nyah nyah nyah!’ ‘No, I’M right, you’re wrong!’ ‘No, YOU are!’ ‘No, YOU are!’ etc etc etc.
This tactic, which has been standard right-wing issue since the middle 1980s (witness Ackerman, Pearson, Warby et al), has now infected almost the entire population.
We all deserve better than this.
Jack Nalbandian
Ruminations on a nation. Thoughts occurring to me while filling holes in soil with seedlings on the process line. Trying to find a space in my mind around counting eight per punnet, I start thinking about some of what I’ve been reading in Webdiary and it strikes me as perversely amusing to read how threatened the affluent xenophobe feels, and how they talk of being marginalised and unrepresented.
I’m pissing myself now, and then I feel compassion because it must be hard to be in those shoes seeing as how the prime minister is a lesbian, parliament is full of Aborigines, Asians and women. Ha, ha.
We desperately need healthy dissent, debate, argument whatever you want to call it. At present I feel Australia has become some sort of psychological totalitarian state; a toxic fog has descended over our collective consciousness and we’ve become blind to our peoples’ and country’s unique potentials.
It seems to me that we all have to understand our own limitations and at least try to cross the mental boundaries we create in our thinking to attempt to see anothers point of veiw, and maybe even take enough real interest to ask the question why?
Sadly we live in reactionary times, on all levels, even the most mundane. Foresight and planning have been replaced with making the figures look good today. So don’t worry that the cheap crap you bought today to save some precious coin will stuff up the machine tommyrot, we’ll just have to feed it manually but be expected to meet the same production quotas with same amount of staff working longer hours.
Pondering aloud. What do the business leaders think about the Tampa situation.
Consider. I have a business and I export materials to the Scandinavian countries, Europe and Asia, Indonesia, China and other places . My product says it has been made in Australia. Should I now change the labels so as not to identify the country of production and not suffer the international backlash against it.
Remember how we monsterised the French Perfumes?
Some readers and talk back radios callers (they must be bored with their life) were saying shoot them and throw them in the water. Now since some of these educated Aussies have irrevocable proof that there is a certain ethnicity related to crime, I wonder if they have some of this particular ethnic genes in themselves from their great grandpa which is allowing them to talk such criminal nonsense.
What a big superpower we must be that we are afraid of 433 people with nothing on them other than their clothes. A flood of refugees will follow!!
So? That means that we are a third world country with an arrogant grandeur of being the best and the most righteous. 200 years only passed and the world has just found out that we are still a baby in the international forum.
Peter Kelly
Pastor Martin Niemoller, writing in Germany before his arrest in the 1930s: “The Nazis came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and
I didn’t speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant, so I didn’t speak up….by that time there was nobody left to speak up for anyone.”
It seems many, perhaps most, migrants support the tough policy stand of Howard in denying entry to the Tampa in particular and to refugees in general. But I am reminded of what Pastor Martin Niemoller said. The racial dog that Howard has baited can turn around and go for any identifiable group, even the one holding the leash.
The issue of refugees is important to us even if we are not refugees because we can all be identified as members of some group. It does not ultimately come down to refugees but to fear and insecurity and anyone of us can, inadvertently, inspire fear and insecurity in others.
I fear Australia is becoming very ugly and membership of an ethnic group that supports a tough line on refugees today may not make it immune from persecution tomorrow. But the refugees being persecuted today and the middle eastern communities being kicked by talk back radio shock jocks and politicians today will not be around to speak up for these other communities.
Paul Wright in Summer Hill, Sydney
An interesting aside before the meat of the question. Some correspondents are calling this an “unbiased soapbox”. A quick glance through the last few day’s Webdiary entries show several interjections and corrections by Margo – almost if not all on letters she disagrees with.
Censorship takes many forms, not least of which is the excessively personal and hateful language used against the Prime Minister.
This is not a moral problem, this is a problem of numbers and timing. If you accept that we cannot have unlimited immigration and refugee acceptance, then you accept that sometime your limit will be reached. And when that limit is reached, will you have the courage to stand by your own convictions. Or will you say “just one more”, and “they are really pathetic looking, we should let them in”.
When your limit is reached, will you feel like a racist, a redneck, no compassion?
When Howard went against the (slim) majority of people who wanted a republic, he was “the man who broke Australia’s heart”. Now he’s with 70% and he’s populist, and even racist. You can’t be both populist and racist, because each requires unswerving behaviour regardless of beliefs. Remember, if you dislike populism, then you should have been prepared to condemn Howard for letting them in, had the polls gone that way.
Seriously, to the anti-Howard crew, do you really think he would have acted differently if an election wasn’t coming? If you’re in the “populist” camp, where did he get the poll data instantly? And where’s the electoral advantage when the Opposition is in furious agreement?
Why is it so hard to acknowledge other people’s right to hold an opinion contrary to yours. I hear little hint of pluralism, or tolerance, from those that disagree with me. Can you call your fellow Australians racist bully-boys, and intolerant scumbags, while preaching tolerance and acceptance?
Charles Richards
I think this Tampa thing has become a biiger issue on whether Australians should let in more immigrants or end immigration full stop. The comments on the newsgroup aus.politics has gotten very nasty lately over the Tampa issue. Here is one such comment:
“Losers enjoy company, Guess that is why there are a few who want to open the floodgates of immigration so they won’t feel like they are the only ones accused of being bludgers because they are dependent on social welfare.”
Susan Jenner
Fear of difference.
One thing that has really struck me about the race debate is the extreme fear or dislike some have of people who are different.
Viewpoints I have heard over and over are that the boat people, immigrants, or Muslims in general are “not like us”, “have values different to us”, “won’t assimilate”, are “violent”, or “have no respect for our laws”.
There is a tendency in many people to look at someone that is different and regard them with fear or even hate. I believe this is because there is such a strong belief instilled in us from early childhood that things are either ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.
So if you are confronted with someone who has different views, or looks different, or is from a different culture there is an internal process, which is probably unconscious, that says:
“He/she is different so either they are wrong or I am, and I do not want to think that I am wrong, so they must be.”
I think xenophobic reactions partly come from a deep fear that it is really the self that is ‘wrong’, not the one who is different. Therefore the difference must be suppressed or others may believe that the different one is ‘right’. So there are attempts to dehumanise or vilify people of other races, or those who have different beliefs. Or to condemn a whole group of people by the actions of an unfortunate few, such as in the gang rape cases. All to prove that these people cannot possibly be ‘right’.
But different does not mean right or wrong, superior or inferior, it is just different!
A taoist saying really sums this up: “Different means different, not better or worse. Different means different, it isn’t a curse.”
Hardy Martin
I am deeply upset about the Tampa issue being reduced to a race debate, as though it makes any difference what country they came from. They tried to enter the country illegally and that is that!
It is assumed that because they are from another country that it is a racial thing. Of course they’re from another country – they are asylum seekers – so playing the race card is simply stupid.
I have read many contributions, and especially noted Susan Jenner’s contribution in Why we are racist, that have tried to analyse the “Australian Psyche” and tried (to no avail) to find some answers.
They are not there and the notion of a democratic country having a psyche upsets me even more than the issue at hand. These readers have wasted everyone’s time. Placing our own “guilt” on the list of reasons for turning them away – how about the real reasons?
They do not care for our laws and the countries they travel through to get here do not care either, so long as they don’t stop until they get to Australia. Maybe there was a statement to be made that rises above the typical “Oh my god, they’re boat people, we must accept them or people will think we’re racist” chant which is so easy to say when you need to wash your hands of racism, (Beazley) after all, its only another 460.
Nobody seems too keen to solve the problems, just to pass the buck. Johnny made the right decision this time.
But I’m still not voting for him, or Beazley, who should have grown some chest hair and supported the move.
Beazley’s “vision” speech is very nice, but it’s useless. He calls for co-operation and that’s exactly what he won’t get from the other key nations who have nothing to gain from doing the right thing.
And as for other countries pointing the finger at our “disgusting” behaviour – get real. Let those without sin cast the first stone.
So many issues have been raised and none have been settled. Why? Because we have raised too many issues for a democratic country to debate all at once.
I am a realist and I believe that by everyone kicking and screaming about 460 people on a boat, nothing has been accomplished. AS PER USUAL. Why? Because the general populace is not intelligent enough to see through all the supplementary issues raised by the media and everyone else who wants some free publicity, who just love to play the race card which always results in the same “Oh my god they’re boat people……..”
Congratulations, you have all just totally missed the point!
Michelle Stein-Evers in Double Bay, Sydney
What has happened to and because of the Tampa, the arrogant misbehaving in the face of (and the name of ) the rule of law, is something that, when the chips are down, could happen to every one of us here.
As the laws and conventions stand, when any Australian government feels threatened it feels that it has the right to push through any law (such as that declaring the actions of the Tampa’s skipper illegal retrospectively), conscionable or no.
These governments feel also that they can threaten fine folks to keep them in line (as with one of the plaintiffs in one of the Melbourne suits: he has been threatened by the Government that if they feel they have been discomfited, they will sue him for damages or costs and attack his personal assets to punish him for suing on behalf of those on board the Tampa).
These are tactics that would have made Hitler’s Goebbels proud. What is painful to me is to realise that the majority of Australians I’ve met think those sorts of governmental dirty tricks are just fine.
It seems that don’t consider that same arsenal of heavyhandedness is available to be used against them.
Sonia Foley
The issue about illegal immigrants is now the “hot topic” of the moment. Some people who do not understand the situation are shooting off saying that Australia is being “racist”. From what I have observed this is not the case. I spoke with an American friend yesterday and he said that the majority of Americans that he has spoken with support what our government is doing. They recognise that these people are “economic refugees” (those were his words).
This issue has nothing to do with race!!! Personally I would not care what country these people come from. The issue is this “Are these people really refugees or illegal immigrants”.
If they are true refugees then I would have no problem in them coming to Australia. However, it is very suspicious when they “lose” their identification and “do not know where they come from”. When illegal immigrants see a soft stand from the Australian government then they will take advantage of this. Please tell me why, if they are true refugees, they would not let the captain take them to Indonesia as this was his original intention. What they did, in effect, was pirate the ship!!! If they were truly desperate to go anywhere to escape their own country, why would they refuse to go to Indonesia?
I saw “A Current Affair” last night with the interview of the captain of the Tampa. It was interesting how he basically said that his ship was pirated by these people and that he was afraid. I am curious why he did not come right out and say it. However, from his own admission, this is exactly what these people did to his ship. These are not the sort of people who we want in our country. Their actions were criminal and we do not want more criminals in our country. The captain said that they came onto the bridge and were in his face, talking in an agitated manner and were saying that if he did not turn the ship around that they would “go crazy”.
Interestingly enough, when these people do not have any identification there can be no police checks done on their criminal activity and who knows what sort of background they have – after all, the way they are coming in is an illegal activity so who knows what sort of criminal activity they were involved in back in their original country. We have enough problems with criminal activity without letting in more people who can not have a thorough background check.
Also, if they were refugees I think it is interesting that there are so few women and children – so many single men. Where are all the families? If they have families, and their lives are supposedly in danger, why would they leave them behind?
I work and have worked with people from many different countries – Vietnam, Sri Lanka, Fiji, Switzerland, Germany, China, Phillipines… the list goes on. Also, I have many friends from different countries. It may interest you to know that when speaking with my friends from different countries they told me, without provocation on my behalf, that they were not happy with the situation as these boat people are “queue jumpers”. These friends came in the legal way.
The statistics that I would be interested in finding out would be how many of the detainees that are here are deported and how many are kept. Also, how many are kept that we could not find out any background information on. The statistics that I heard were as follows: that 9,000 illegal immigrants were deported last year and that most of the escapees from the detention centres (which happened fairly recently) were due to be deported. Also, that some of the detainees have lodged action against our government about being detained for so long. Which ultimately means that we, the Australian taxpayer, will be footing the bill. I would like to know if this is correct. If anyone can supply correct information on this it would be appreciated.
I think that Australians are sick of the whole situation. We have enough problems without this one. The money that could be spent on hospitals, education and helping our homeless is spent dealing with this situation.
An interesting thought. What does the government to do with “refugees” that have no identification and no possible means of finding out where they come from? Do we put an unknown quantity in the general population? If so, how do we know that they are not criminals?
I do not think that people who encourage and allow these people to come here are “do gooders”. Actually I think they are “do baders” as they are rewarding bad behaviour and not rewarding those genuine, sincere people who do the right thing and apply properly for refugee status (with proper background checking). This means that other desperate people who are doing the right thing are pushed out of their position for people who “queue jump”. Australians are screaming at the moment about the fact that our legal system is not giving tougher punishment for crimes committed and yet they are wanting to reward this example of piracy.
We need to protect our country and reward good behaviour, not bad behaviour. Let in the refugees who come in the legal way!!!!!
Matt Eggers
When injustices were being committed against Aboriginal people in the not too distant past, the community didn’t get up in arms about things. The problem generally wasn’t in their own figurative back yard and they didn’t want it to be so they said nothing and let those perpetrating and advocating the wrongs, to go unchallenged.
Now, it is generally accepted that the actions of the government at that time were wrong. Why hasn’t this taught us anything? Why does the passage of time have to be the proving ground for recognition of social injustice towards those who are different to us?
Let’s hope that the current Government’s difficulty in saying the “s” word doesn’t manifest itself in the need to say it again in a few years’ time over their inability to recognise the right thing to do with refugees.