BY SARAH STEPHEN
In the two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, University of NSW academic Kevin Dunn compiled a study on racism in Australia. More than half of the 5000 people surveyed said that they would be concerned about a relative marrying a Muslim, compared with a quarter of respondents who would be concerned about a relative marrying someone from an Asian or Indigenous background.
Muslims have become the new scapegoats in the post-9/11 world, subjected to a barrage of racist hostility and discrimination.
The ease with which the federal Coalition government has been able to encourage identification of Muslims as the new "enemy", without even having to say as much, is a testament to the groundwork PM John Howard has laid over the past seven years to reassert a culture of racist stereotyping.
As a result of a concerted ideological campaign following 9/11, most people now see the world around them with a much more deeply ingrained eye for "race". Racial categorisation is alive and well in Australia today. It polarises people into separate racial groups and profoundly influences the ways people perceive and relate to each other.
Government and media manipulation of the terrorist attacks have meant that the populations in wealthy countries like the US, Australia, France and Britain mutely accepted the passage of profoundly undemocratic "anti-terrorist" legislation on the basis that new laws were needed to protect "us" against "them".
In a 2001 report documenting the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission's (HREOC) national consultation on racism, race discrimination commissioner William Jonas recounted one story indicative of the sort of racist assumptions many non-Anglo Australians encounter daily: "A Palestinian man recounted how he entered a shop and was having a conversation with the shopkeeper. The shopkeeper asked him where he was from and when he replied he was Palestinian, the shopkeeper's attitude changed immediately to one of discomfort. For the Palestinian man the changed attitude of the shopkeeper resulted from the populist image portrayed of a so-called 'Arab or Palestinian mentality' of terrorism and fanaticism."
It is this more firmly implanted racist prejudice which has allowed the Howard government, since it came into office at the end of 1996, to get away with one after another racist attack on different sections of the population without any sustained opposition.
Scapegoating
Why has racism been so central to Howard's agenda? The Coalition government has presided over a wide range of savage attacks on the rights and living standards of ordinary Australians. Racist scapegoating has been a central weapon in deflecting public attention from the government's attacks.
If you are going to put the squeeze on the majority, drive wages down, increase unemployment, introduce a GST, and further penalise and humiliate welfare recipients, then you've got to find scapegoats who you can point to as responsible for people's suffering.
The attitude that there are fundamental cultural and social differences between people of different racial groups, and that people of the white racial group are superior to all other racial groups, has helped to reinforce an identification by white workers with their white Australian bosses against the "yellow hordes" from countries to the north, an attitude that became enshrined in the White Australia policy.
Racist attitudes were used to justify the exclusion of Aboriginal Australians from census data until the 1960s.
To be saleable today, however, racism must be repackaged to fit current social and political reality. That reality is shaped by the absorption into Australia of many people from many nations, racial and ethnic backgrounds over the past 50 years, and the gains in public policy and mass consciousness made by the anti-racism movements of the 1960s and '70s.
The old bogey of invasion by "yellow hordes" is far less palatable to an Australian population that has Asian-origin neighbours, workmates and friends.
Racism has been used by the federal Coalition government to substantially reshape Australia's immigration program, to further marginalise Indigenous people and to create new scapegoats among refugees and Muslim Australians.
In his first term of government, Howard presided over a brutal series of attacks on Indigenous people. The limited native title rights won through the High Court's 1992 Mabo decision were wound back by the Wik decision four years later, which found that native title could coexist with pastoral leases. But even this didn't go far enough for the Coalition, which wanted to give "certainty" to the mining and pastoral industry bosses.
The Native Title Act was amended with a "10-point plan", legislation which, according to former Coalition Aboriginal affairs minister Ian Viner, was racist to the core because it had "the single purpose of reducing the legal rights of a specific race of people".
The Howard government challenged the authenticity of the HREOC's 1997 report on the stolen generations of Indigenous children. Howard's refusal to issue a formal apology to them was based not so much out of concern about liability for financial compensation, but fear that it would undermine the government's deliberate encouragement of racist sentiment.
In 1996, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Commission's budget was cut by $470 million, and ATSIC lost the right to determine its own funding priorities. In 1997, Abstudy suffered a $39 million cut. In 1998, HREOC's budget was reduced by 40%, from $19.3 million to $11.8 million.
Refugee-bashing
The government's escalating obsession with the unauthorised arrival of asylum seekers in Australia in the late 1990s parallels a pattern of refugee-bashing which has been adopted by many wealthy countries over the past decade, but there has been no rapid increase in the global movement of people to explain the adoption of such punitive attacks.
The Howard government has gone to every length to limit contact between asylum seekers in detention and the Australian population. Since the beginning of the mandatory detention policy in 1994, the majority of asylum seekers have been kept in the remotest desert locations, with media denied any access to the detention centres. The government even introduced a law which prevented the ombudsman and HREOC from initiating contact with refugees in detention centres.
As the refugee-rights movement grew, and more people breached the wall of secrecy surrounding the detention centres through protests and visits, as people wrote letters to detainees, as newspapers began to publish statements from inside the razor wire, the 2001 "Pacific solution" gave the government a new avenue for hiding asylum seekers from public view.
Two-hundred asylum seekers remain imprisoned on Nauru, but few people know anything about what is happening to them. The government refuses to allow any visitors.
Aware of the ever-present potential for public sympathy if people found out the truth behind the government's propaganda, Howard and his ministers know that they can only demonise and vilify asylum seekers if they maintain absolute control over information.
The brutal policies towards refugees have not only begun to undermine human solidarity, but they have paved the way for a dramatic change to Australia's immigration policy, particularly over the past seven years.
Australia's migrant profile has changed dramatically in the last decade, driven largely by the policy changes of the Howard government. Former immigration minister Philip Ruddock took every opportunity to argue that the government's immigration policy doesn't discriminate, but this is a lie.
The ability of skilled migrants to enter Australia has become increasingly dependent on their English language skills and whether they fit into a tighter set of occupational categories. This has favoured immigrants from countries like South Africa. In 2001, 6.4% of migrants came from South Africa. Ten years earlier, this was only 1.7%.
Skilled stream visa grants have increased by 62.4% since the Howard government came to office. The immigration intake for 2002-03 allocated 58% of the 100,000 available places to skilled migrants.
Among the top ten nationalities migrating to Australia in 2001-02, 31% were from predominantly white nations — Britain, New Zealand, South Africa and the Balkans.
Some commonly held myths about migrants — which the government actively fuels — are that migrants take jobs, contribute to unemployment and bludge off welfare. These ideas are contradicted by the facts:
- An expanding population increases the demand for goods and services, hence creating more jobs.
- Unemployment rates among immigrants who arrived since 1995 have improved more significantly than the rate for the general population. Immigrants from non-English speaking countries have slightly higher levels of unemployment, but this is significantly affected by employer discrimination.
- Overseas-born Australians have slightly lower welfare-recipient rates than do the Australia-born, according to a 2000 study by Bob Birrell and James Jupp.
The widespread acceptance of these myths set migrants up as convenient scapegoats for unemployment, and allowed the government in 1997 to strip the majority of newly arrived migrants of the right to social security payments for a period of two years. It has also allowed the government to make a massive shift in favour of skilled migration.
The Howard government has adopted almost the entirety of Pauline Hanson's avowedly racist political platform — turning away refugee boats, issuing refugees with temporary visas and deporting them when it is deemed safe for them to go back, gutting Aboriginal organisations. This "mainstreaming" of Hansonism is why Hanson's One Nation has become essentially irrelevant as a political force.
The fact that One Nation received the third largest vote in the 1996 federal election, and the Howard government's success in implementing much of One Nation's racist platform over the past seven years, indicates the depth of racism in Australia which needs to be challenged.
From Green Left Weekly, December 10, 2003.
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