'Liberal' Herald backs Labor's attacks on migrants
By Sue Boland
The Sydney Morning Herald prides itself on being the capitalist media's "liberal" voice; in 1998 its editorials denounced the crude racism of One Nation and called on Australians to show tolerance.
But on December 29 the SMH exposed just how shallow its "liberalness" is. It printed an editorial in support of the NSW Labor government's attempt to abandon its use of the term "ethnic affairs" when referring to policies affecting migrants.
After the 1999 NSW election, Premier Bob Carr announced that the government would change the name of its ethnic affairs ministry to the citizenship ministry and abolish the state government-run Ethnic Affairs Commission (EAC), replacing it with the Community Relations Commission.
Since the election, the abolition of the EAC has been blocked by the NSW upper house because of successful lobbying by the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW (ECC). This has resulted in a conflict between the EAC and the ECC.
The conflict came to a head in December when the commission refused to release the ECC's annual grant of $267,000. The commission claimed that it couldn't release the grant unless the ECC agreed to an onerous level of financial accountability, including monthly financial audits, something which is not required of companies that are recipients of government grants.
Underlying the funding issue and the government's attempt to change the commission's name is a sharp change of policy direction on migrant issues.
When announcing the name change in April, Carr was quoted in the SMH (April 4) as saying, "The Community Relations Commission will build on the successful record of the Ethnic Affairs Commission against discrimination, intolerance and ignorance". If this is the only role that Carr sees for the commission, then he is rejecting the idea that migrants should be entitled to free language classes, easy access to interpreters and specialist migrant services.
Access to such services, as well as equality of access to welfare, is essential to begin to break down the structural inequalities that confront migrants when they seek jobs and housing.
The NSW government's policy is identical to the federal Coalition government's and One Nation's policy of "mainstreaming" government services. It is based on the idea that there are not specially disadvantaged groups in Australian society. Under the guise of seeking "equal treatment for all Australians", the federal government and One Nation have vociferously argued that specialist health and welfare services for Aborigines, migrants and women are unnecessary and should be abolished.
The SMH's December editorial leaps to Carr's defence, saying, " ... the Ethnic Communities Council of NSW is a fierce opponent of Mr Carr's policy changes to the ideology and practice of ethnic affairs. But it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Premier is right and the council is wrong ... The council seems to be insisting on a 1970s model of multiculturalism that focuses on the preservation of the ethnicity of migrants and their children. The ethnic-dominated response is not as valid, if it is valid at all, two decades later."
The "anti-racist" multiculturalism of the SMH and the NSW Labor government are simply window-dressing to cover for a policy which denies that migrants continue to suffer structural inequalities.
The government's attempt to change the name of the EAC is not a trivial issue of semantics. It is an attempt to soften us up for the gradual abolition of migrant services by getting us used to the idea that migrant issues are simply about "community relations" rather than the right to specialist services.