Critics on the wrong track over racism

It′s not John Howard′s fault. And Geoffrey Blainey does not have the solution. Since the civil disorder on Sydney′s southern beaches over the past couple of weeks, there has been a tendency in some sections of the community to blame the Prime Minister for Sydney′s discontents.

This view has found expression among some left-wing activists along with some letter writers, commentators, journalists and cartoonists. On occasions, the critique has had a bipartisan angle, with the Opposition Leader, Kim Beazley, and former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr copping some of the blame. The suggestion is that Australia′s political leaders have either ignited latent racism or allowed a racist climate to endure.

It is true Howard made insensitive remarks in August 1988 when he said "there may be a case for slowing down a little the rate of immigration from Asia". However, it is also true that in September 1989 he regretted what he termed his "loose language" and in January 1995 said his comments had been "wrong". In August 2004 Howard praised the "unique cultural, economic and social mark" made by Vietnamese refugees in Australia and said this indicated "the success of Australia′s multicultural policy". He also declared that Asian immigration has added to Australia′s "entrepreneurial culture".

A plausible case can be made that Howard should have publicly opposed more strongly Pauline Hanson′s intolerance around the time of the formation of the One Nation party. But that is almost a decade ago and the Hanson phenomenon was effectively defeated at the 1998 federal election.

Last week Alan Moir in the Herald and Bill Leak in The Australian linked Howard to the attacks by Anglo-Celtic Australians on Australians of Muslim Lebanese background at Cronulla. Both cartoonists used their artistic licence to rework the statement made by Howard at the Liberal Party′s election launch in October 2001: "We decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come."

Howard did express this sentiment. However, he was not the first to do so in an election campaign. In November 1977, when campaigning in Darwin in support of the ALP, Bob Hawke, then secretary of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, declared: "Any sovereign country has the right to determine how it will exercise its compassion and how it will increase its population." At the time Hawke and the then Labor leader Gough Whitlam were busy scoring points against Malcolm Fraser′s Coalition government about Vietnamese boat people, who had arrived unlawfully in the Northern Territory. In 1975, when prime minister, Whitlam tried to prevent Vietnamese refugees from settling in Australia.

Despite immigration and related issues spilling into the political debate on occasions, Australia has remained a tolerant and accepting society, compared with other nations. The recent events in Sydney are contemptible but, so far at least, they remain peculiar to Sydney. They turn on the criminality of a minority of young Australians of Muslim Lebanese background and the criminality of Australians of predominantly Anglo-Celtic background who attacked those whom they refer to as "Lebs" at Cronulla last Sunday week.

The problems among the Lebanese were identified by Nadia Jamal in the Herald last Tuesday when she said that "some men of Australian Lebanese Muslim background seem to be so aggressive and violent … This has everything to do with culture and patriarchal attitude, and nothing to do with religion."

 

This is very much a Sydney issue and does not affect Australia as a whole. This has not prevented such expatriate Australians as Germaine Greer and Phillip Knightley banging on about (alleged) Australian "racism" in The Guardian and The Independent respectively. Greer referred to those whom she mockingly labelled as "′patriotic′ troops massing on the Gold Coast and in the suburbs of Perth" and went on to predict "a bloody summer in Australia". We shall see.

 

In The Age last Wednesday, Paul Austin said Carr "was on occasion accused of playing the race card" and reported that "some Labor figures in Victoria accuse him of having ′demonised′ some minority groups". He compared Carr unfavourably with the Victorian Premier, Steve Bracks. This overlooks the fact that Bracks has not had to contend with a significant number of Lebanese Muslim Australian men living in a couple of Melbourne suburbs who are in conflict with those they refer to as "Aussies" or "Skips". Nor has Bracks had to manage large numbers of drink-filled Anglo-Celtic Australians seeking to engage in violent acts against those they regard as their enemies.

Neither Howard nor Carr is the problem. Nor is Blainey the answer. In The Australian last Thursday, the conservative commentator Peter Ryan said the disorder in Sydney confirmed Blainey′s warnings two decades ago. Ryan referred to what is described as Blainey′s predictions about the consequences of Australia′s "almost indiscriminate immigration and the accompanying madness of multiculturalism". Immigration to Australia has never been indiscriminate and, mostly, multiculturalism has worked well. And this is not what Blainey said then.

In his 1984 book All For Australia, Blainey disapproved of "the pace of Asian immigration" in general and of "Indo-Chinese" in particular. Yet, as Howard says, they have been successful migrants, as have Muslims from such places as Turkey, Bosnia and Asia.It is unwise to draw Australia-wide conclusions from the social disorder in parts of Sydney. What is at issue here is criminality - not the existence of widescale racism or the failure of multiculturalism.