Profiting from racism

Both the establishment media and the major party bosses have attempted to characterise the racist pre-election statements of National Party candidates Bob Katter and Bob Burgess, disendorsed Liberal Party candidate Pauline Hanson and former ALP member Graham Campbell, as somehow "exceptional". According to the March 5 Financial Review editorial, for example, the high votes for these candidates — Campbell scored 62% of the two-party preferred vote, there was a 22% swing to Katter and Hanson almost obtained an outright majority — "certainly doesn't mean Australia's drive to build a tolerant, multicultural society has failed". After all, it asserts, "these victories were confined to rural or semi-rural Queensland and Western Australia". Unfortunately, this is not true. The wider acceptability of racist ideas, and not only within the National Party which refused to disendorse Katter and Burgess, was partly revealed in the vote for Australians Against Further Immigration on March 2. Where the AAFI contested seats they had previously stood for their vote increased in every case. This trend was particularly strong in NSW where between them, the AAFI and the new right-wing breakaway from AAFI, Reclaim Australia, scored an average of almost 5% across 26 lower house seats. While the still small vote for these new racist outfits indicates that their rabid anti-Asian views are unable to mobilise significant electoral support, deep seated racism is still entrenched in the major parties. The media spotlight on the so-called maverick racists has almost totally obscured the fact that the Liberal Party contested these elections on a policy of instituting a two year waiting period before new migrants can obtain social assistance. Liberal leader, now Prime Minister-elect, John Howard's comments since the elections that people should be more "cautious" about what they call racism, and the Coalition's relegation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs, Immigration and Multicultural Affairs to the outer ministry, give further insight into the new government's reactionary stance on this question. While the ALP has been forced by its traditional base in migrant communities to be less overt in its racist agenda, it has a lot to answer for in the escalating backlash against people of colour. After 13 years of federal Labor rule, despite the introduction of Native Title legislation, Aboriginal people are still the most incarcerated, homeless, sick, poor, murdered and discriminated against in Australia. Neither did the ALP government's decade of rhetoric about multiculturalism, or last year's public relations exercise around racial vilification, do anything to improve the actual quality of life or extend the rights of non-English speaking migrants in this country. On the contrary, the ALP's cooption and weakening of the trade unions and other progressive social movements has left the targets of racism largely disorganised and disarmed. Because the major political parties serve the interests of the big capitalists in this society, and capitalism profits from racism, they will themselves inevitably be racist. But endemic racism is not confined to the capitalist political parties. The list of racist decision-makers and opinion-shapers in this country is much longer: they sit on the boards of the Australian multinationals that devastate the lands of indigenous peoples in Australia and overseas; they run the police force and prison system in which Aboriginal people are dying at an increasing rate; and they have their own newspaper columns, TV shows and radio programs. Racism is not an anomaly in Australian society. While to some extent it has been held in check by the anti-racist social justice movements of the 1970s, the recent pre-election campaigning and election results have begun to carve out more space for racism to grow again. The fight against racism has still to be won. It is a fight that requires more than appeals for tolerance. It requires an explanation of who profits from racism — the capitalist class — and who stands to lose from it — not only Aboriginal people and migrants, but all working class people. And it is a fight that requires concrete measures to end the systemic inequality of the indigenous people through preferential treatment to compensate for past and present discrimination.