Editorial: A dishonest response
A dishonest response
@box text intro = Prime Minister John Howard, speaking on Thursday Island on July 9, responded to criticism of his government's record on race issues by thumping the nationalist tub. "... we are a tolerant, open and harmonious society", he declaimed. "We can look the rest of the world in the eye and be very proud of our record, and we should bend the knee to no country overseas when it comes to the record of racial tolerance."
The rhetoric was typically pompous and the content typically dishonest. No-one has suggested that "Australia" should bend a knee to anyone. Howard deliberately bends the truth here to distract attention from what is being said about his government — by two former prime ministers, Malcolm Fraser and Gough Whitlam, among others.
Like most countries, Australian society includes elements of both tolerance and intolerance. Its history includes events that are honourable and events that are shameful. What is going on at the moment is not a debate about whether Australia is more or less tolerant, open and harmonious than some other country. What is going on is a political struggle between those who want to improve the situation as regards racial relations and those bent on increasing intolerance and hatred.
Pauline Hanson and her One Nation party are the most visible members of the latter camp at the moment. But Hanson's semi-incoherent bigotry can flourish largely because of the space created for it by the less blatant but no less real racism of far more powerful people.
John Howard, for example, publicly raised the idea of racial criteria for immigration in the 1980s, long before Pauline Hanson achieved notoriety with the same demand.
It was John Howard who cleared a space for Hanson by denouncing criticism of racism or sexism as "political correctness", and by pretending that Hanson's positions are not racist.
It is John Howard who refuses to issue an apology on behalf of a government that allowed thousands of children to be torn from their families with the explicit aim of ending the existence of Aborigines as a people.
It is John Howard who pretends that empty rhetoric about tolerance and harmony will cover his plan to wipe out their property rights to land of people selected solely on the basis of their race.
That is not the record of Australia as a whole, but of John Howard, his government and the interests he represents. They are the biggest threat to tolerance, openness and harmony.