Criminals and criminals

Issue 

Criminals and criminals

"He was a genius at extracting money out of people. He would understand the psychology of people — bankers, brokers, analysts — and give them exactly what they wanted to hear ... Skase's trappings oozed opulence ... yet beneath his exterior [Christopher] Skase was a plain-living man", writes Trevor Sykes in his soon to be released book, The Bold Riders: Behind Australia's Corporate Raiders.

Wanted on charges of misappropriating funds — he owed banks at least $170 million — Skase, nevertheless, has been able to bask in the limelight of the "corporate hero", while maintaining his innocence from Majorca. The publicity surrounding Skase's "rags to riches to rags" story has abounded with all the superlatives of human endeavour imaginable.

Compare the treatment of "white collar crimes" that some of the "entrepreneurs" of the '80s have been convicted of with the lurid and racist tone of many of the stories following the murder of NSW MLA John Newman in the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta.

The establishment media have whipped up a racist campaign about "Asian gangs". They range in their crudeness from the Bulletin's David McNicoll ("Cabramatta is one of the heartlands of the Asian takeover of Australia") to the Sun Herald's Eamonn Fitzpatrick ("Vietnamese refugees with criminal records were allowed into Australia up until several years ago"), but they all point in the same direction.

"Society likes to create 'folk devils', which can then be blamed for its ills", warned criminologist David Indermaur of the Crime Research Department of the University of Western Australia. He's right. Indeed, the gruesome accounts (and pictures) of Newman's murder, and the lurid stories on, for instance, how to identify a gang member from a tattoo, have heightened the hype surrounding Newman's death.

Calls for a review of immigration quotas, for more Asian police to "infiltrate" the gangs, and increased funding for the law are coming thick and fast from those with a narrow and bigoted approach to solving what are essentially crimes that stem from poverty, unemployment and alienation.

It should hardly be news to anyone that criminals and criminal gangs (which are not exclusive to Sydney's western suburbs) operate in Australia. They are not all Asian. More "law and order" measures will not overcome the problem. Indeed, legislation, such as that which criminalises drug use, creates many of the opportunities for criminal gangs to profit.

Sydney's western suburbs have an unemployment rate in some areas which community workers estimate to be as high as 70% for youth and an infrastructure in an appalling state due to state and federal government funding cuts. These depressed areas, home to many migrants, will remain impoverished and crime-ridden while governments either run down public services or sell off those which are profitable.

We should not be fooled by the present anti-Asian campaign. Its purpose is to divert attention from governments' failed economic policies and to find someone else to blame. And its tries to conceal the fact that there are those who become criminals by choice, and those who are forced into crime to survive in an unequal and unjust society.

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