Scott Poynting
PM John Howard has always hated multiculturalism — a bipartisan policy on ethnic relations that has been in place for around a quarter of a century. Since the mid-‘90s, he has collaborated in right-wing attacks on multiculturalism as so-called political correctness, and has overseen the white-anting of the policy.
He has had some electoral successes in this, especially in coming to office in 1996 and retaining government in 2001 after manipulating popular fear over Middle Eastern “boat people” and playing on insecurities about the threat of terrorism. His ministers have followed suit.
The so-called “war on terror” has allowed for the Middle Eastern “other” to morph into the Muslim “other” as the folk demon in this populist xenophobia. If you can’t adapt to our culture, said then education minister Brendan Nelson, then “clear off!”.
The racially violent mob at Cronulla last December shouted for “Lebs”, “wogs” and Muslims to “piss off”. You can see where they got their inspiration from. Before Hansonism was welcomed by Howard’s government into the mainstream, few people would have felt entitled to behave like that.
Some right-wingers, and even ex-lefties, have said that the Cronulla riots show the failure of multiculturalism. Nothing could be further from the truth.
For the 30-odd years that we had multiculturalism in place, we did not see racist mobs attacking minorities. Multiculturalism in fact worked to prevent such racialist conflict.
After the Cronulla disgrace, Howard and his ministers were at it again. The PM said it simply wasn’t true that there was underling racism in Australia, though he’d encouraged and exploited it. He could understand the feelings of people demonstrating against bad behaviour on the beach by certain elements, and we all know who they are. Attorney-General Philip Ruddock reminded Muslims they must abide by Australian laws, as if Australian Muslims were saying otherwise.
State politicians were equally responsible for inducing the xenophobia seen at Cronulla, and equally irresponsible in their reaction to it. In all the vilifying bluster about “grubs” and “thugs” from NSW Liberal leader Peter Debnam and NSW Premier Morris Iemma competing to be tougher on law and order, it was clear they meant “Lebs”.
Debnam, some dancing bear journalists and some hired-gun academics became obsessed with the retaliatory violence from among groups who’d been targeted at the beach, and conveniently forgot the despicable pogrom that provoked these reprisals. “Why were so few thugs and grubs of Middle Eastern appearance arrested?”, they parroted.
Leaving aside questions of evidence, there were a couple of hundred involved in the revenge attacks and 5000 involved in the racist riot. Why would the numbers be equal? We can’t have white people treated like these uncivilised, misogynistic and above all ungrateful outsiders.
On June 1, a man accused of intending retaliatory violence was released after six months in jail on remand. The court finally found he had no case to answer. Would this citizen, presumed innocent, have spent half a year in prison if he didn’t have a Muslim name?
An earlier example: a Lebanese-Australian young man was sentenced to three months in prison for burning the Australian flag, admittedly one he’d pinched. The symbolism of this meant that the “emotional injury” was “amplified”, according to the sentencing magistrate. Meanwhile, a young white man, arrested with a drum of petrol, riot helmets, a two-way radio and a knife in a car, and in his bedroom an unlicenced pistol, smoke grenades, capsicum spray, mace and a computer with links to a white supremacist website, was granted bail, despite the Iemma government’s reversing the presumption of bail in riot cases.
Yes, institutional racism pervades our criminal justice system, as well as our policing, our press, our politics.
If we have learned anything from the most catastrophic mobilisations of racism in the last century, it is that ordinary people, perhaps even otherwise good people, are capable of atrocity under circumstances of intensive, institutionalised, routinised racism. The Abu Ghraibs, Guantanamos and Hadithas of this new century should be warnings to us.
All of us who came in boats, or descended from those who did, all who flew here and who grew here, together with those who were here from the beginning, are here now and are going to have to get along. The alternative which, let’s face it, is extermination, is unbearable. Multiculturalism is a set of rules, of good manners and considerateness, that has helped us get along. We still need it.
[Abridged from a speech to the March for Multiculturalism held in Auburn, Sydney, on June 3. Scott Poynting is co-author of Bin Laden in the Suburbs: Criminalising the Arab Other.]
From Green Left Weekly, June 28, 2006.
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