BY TAMARA PEARSON
Anger is building in Sydney, after Premier Bob Carr blamed Middle Eastern gangs for a succession of sexual assaults in the city's south-west. On one side, led by Carr and the Daily Telegraph, is the beginnings of a lynch mob; on the other are the ethnic communities of Sydney, who are calling the campaign racist.
On August 23, three adolescents were convicted in the Sydney District Court for involvement in the rape of two young women. Two of the three were found guily of aggravated sexual assault and were sentenced to jail terms of five years and seven months and six years, while the third was found guilty of detaining with intent to hold for advantage and sentenced to 18 months' jail.
The Daily Telegraph labelled the rapes "racially based", even though the judge's sentence specifically said that race played no role in the assaults. On the day after the verdict, the paper ran a banner headline "You deserve it because you're an Australian", a quote attributed to one of the young men convicted.
Playing to the mob, Carr has since called for a review of sentencing laws, claiming the sentences handed down were too light and that he was "bitterly and angrily disappointed". Police commissioner Peter Ryan has concurred.
Various right wing politicians have used the opportunity to have their say. Right-wing Western Australian former MP Graeme Campbell, now in One Nation, concluded that multiculturalism has damaged Australia, and led to "Arabic gangs in Sydney abducting and gang-raping Australian girls" and "Vietnamese and Lebanese gangs waging war in city malls".
Pauline Hanson blamed the problem on a lack of respect for Australian culture. "A lot of these people are Muslims, they have no respect for the Christian way of life that this country's based on", she said.
Their comments are only an extra step from what has come from Carr and the Telegraph.
In response to such overt racism, representatives of migrant communities held a forum on August 23. The use of ethnic terms to describe alleged offenders, a practice endorsed by Carr, was strongly criticised.
Participants said ethnic labels, such as "Middle Eastern" or "Asian appearance", were vague, used only for certain ethnic groups and shifted "the criminality of individuals to the criminality of a culture".
They argued against state government proposals to have police gather crime data by racial group, saying that it could lead to "racial profiling", the singling out by police of members of particular ethnic communities.
In the US, data showing that blacks are more likely to commit offences was used as grounds for police to target them. A catch-22 evolved, wherein blacks were more likely to be convicted and, as a result, are always statistically more likely to commit a crime.
The Daily Telegraph's David Penberthy accused the organiser of the forum, Unity Party upper house MP Peter Wong, of steadfastly "refus[ing] to acknowledge the truth about the source of some of [Sydney's] worst crimes".
But Salvatore Scevola, chairperson of the NSW Ethnic Communities Council, said programs dealing with social and economic problems were the best way to prevent crime, rather than a focus on ethnicity.
"The sensationalist, unethical and racist portrayals of particular groups in society operates to mask the incompetency of the Carr government in responding to the needs of disenfranchised groups in the community, the high level of unemployment amongst young people, the amount of drugs ... and the systemic racism and harassment", said April Pham from the Immigrant Women's Speakout Association.
A few weeks ago, Carr and Ryan were under the tabloid media spotlight over the supposed failure of policing in Cabramatta. The court cases have given them the opportunity to get back on the "tough on crime" bandwagon.
"Now after all this gang stuff", Penberthy editorialised, "Mr Carr is winning praise for having identified the link between gang activity and immigration profiles."
As election time approaches, both major parties seem to be resorting to the age-old trick of focusing on crime so they can make it seem like they are doing something useful.
Carr's technique of ethnic labelling will hardly solve or prevent crime, or the spate of sexual assaults, and merely serves as a scapegoating technique. For Sydney's Middle Eastern community, it has done nothing more than intensify racist harassment.