Sarah Stephen
Over the last 10 years, racism has been on the rise in Australian society. A report by the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released last month illustrates how Arab and Muslim Australians have become the most recent victims of discrimination and abuse.
Muslim and Arab Australians have been fired from their jobs or refused employment or promotion because of their race or religion. Children have been bullied in school yards. Women are verbally abused and physically assaulted in shopping centres.
A renewed wave of racism reared its head in Australia in 1998 with the rise of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party, targeting Aboriginal people, Asian immigrants and refugees. This coincided with an assault on Aboriginal land rights by the Prime Minister John Howard's Coalition government.
The second phase of this wave of racism began in August 2001 with the Coalition government's decision to stop the Norwegian freighter Tampa from offloading at Christmas Island a boatload of 400, mostly Afghan, asylum seekers the Tampa had rescued. The Coalition government used the Tampa incident to whip up a xenophobic nationalist hysteria about Third World asylum seekers "flooding" Australia's shores.
Now we have phase three: In tandem with other First World governments around the world, Canberra has used the post-9/11 "war on terror" as a pretext to paint Muslim Australians as potential terrorists. It is this most recent campaign that has been more successful in sowing fear and hostility than any of the previous racist attacks in the past decade.
The current wave of nationalist xenophobia combines Islamophobia with racism. People who are deemed to be of "Middle Eastern appearance" have become the target, regardless of whether or not they are Muslims. As a consequence, many Arab Australians who are not Muslims have been caught up in the racist barrage of attacks.
This resurgence of racism is not unique to Australia. It is not a peculiar policy of the Howard government. It is a trend mirrored in nearly every wealthy country around the world, from Britain and Canada to New Zealand and France. First World governments are using racism and Islamaphobia to win support for attacks on working people's civil liberties and for boosting police powers of surveillance and detention.
A future federal Labor government in Australia will have a similar approach to the present Coalition government, given Labor's uncritical support for the "war on terror" and its eagerness to adopt the language of "border protection".
Racism can cripple the lives of those it affects — the Muslim woman who is sacked for wearing the hijab, the Aboriginal child who dies of gastroenteritis because of atrocious health services in remote Aboriginal communities, the immigrant who is forced to work as a taxi driver because his qualifications as an engineer are considered worthless in Australia.
Racism turns working people against each other, makes them suspicious of and hostile to one another, with workers identifying their interests with capitalists of their own race, ethnicity or religion rather than seeing, and acting on the basis of, the common interests they have with members of their own class, regardless of race, religion and national origin. This weakens the struggles of working-class people to improve their living and working conditions.
In a society where all social progress is won through struggle, where improvements in workers' wages, working conditions and civil liberties are won through uniting in struggle, where working people have to organise collectively to save parkland or stop freeways being built, racism makes us less willing and confident to rely on each other, less willing to engage in a united struggle for our common interests.
The racist path that both the Coalition and Labor are taking Australia down, with increasing discrimination against and abuse of Arab and Muslim Australians, isn't inevitable. It is possible to win people away from racist attitudes and to combat racist discrimination. Mass-based protest movements can significantly influence the attitudes of large numbers of people and force changes in laws and government policy.
A broad anti-racist movement developed in opposition to Pauline Hanson's vilification of Asian immigrants and Indigenous people. It mobilised tens of thousands of people in defence of migrants and Indigenous people. It spawned the movement for Aboriginal reconciliation.
Similarly, in response to the government's post-Tampa attacks on asylum seekers, a protest movement of remarkable breadth and diversity developed, which sought to debunk the myths and lies that the government relied upon to win public support for its anti-refugee policies.
Now, three years later, the government is quietly emptying detention centres, including on Nauru and Manus Island, and granting "illegal" asylum seekers refugee status. It is granting temporary protection visas to large numbers of asylum seekers, trying to resolve as many cases as it can before the next federal election. It has released all but one child from immigration detention centres on the Australian mainland (though 19 children are still being detained on Nauru).
These are all signs of a government that recognises it can no longer use the refugee issue to whip up racist bigotry and nationalism.
The challenge for us today is to begin to build a movement in solidarity with Arab and Muslim Australians. This involves convincing people that the "war on terror" is a hoax being used by the Howard government as a pretext for undermining our civil liberties and whipping up a racist scare campaign aimed at dividing us.
Australia is a country with a deeply racist history, going back to British settlers' drive to dispossess and exterminate the Aborigines, followed by the "White Australia" policy. Combating racism in this country is not an easy task, but it is possible.
The best example is from three decades ago. Elected in the wake of a powerful protest movement in the 1960s and 1970s, the Whitlam Labor government was pressured to implement a sweeping range of reforms that began to redress some of the institutionalised racist discrimination against migrants and Indigenous Australians.
Overwhelming popular pressure and sustained protest movements forced those changes. There was a strong and organised Aboriginal land rights movement, for example, which had been influenced by the US civil rights movement, the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa and the anti-colonial revolutions in the Third World.
From Green Left Weekly, July 14, 2004.
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