Lisa Macdonald, Sydney
The ugly face of white supremacism was bared on national television on July 18 when Channel Nine's Current Affair host Ray Martin interviewed Macquarie University associate professor of law Drew Fraser.
The interview followed Green Left Weekly's nationwide coverage two weeks ago of Fraser's letter to the local Parramatta Sun newspaper in which he had claimed that "an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems". Fraser was referring specifically to the Sudanese refugees settling in Sydney's western suburbs.
In his interview with Martin, Fraser claimed that it had been a mistake to abolish the "White Australia policy". He asserted that "Sub-Saharan Africans have an average IQ of 70 to 75", and pointed to the underdevelopment of Africa as proof of the "difference in cognitive ability of blacks and whites". An outraged Martin replied: "That is Adolf Hitler stuff! It's just rubbish."
Unfortunately, the response by Fraser's employer was not quite so clear. Macquarie University acting vice-chancellor John Loxton issued a statement on July 15 that distanced the university from racism but also claimed that there are "bodies of research to support all sides of the argument".
Loxton's statement generated immediate protests from Macquarie University staff. Speaking in a personal capacity, philosophy lecturer Dr Alex Miller said: 'While I can't claim to have any expertise in Andrew Fraser's research area, his comments strike me as ill-informed, offensive, and bigoted. I'm dismayed that a colleague of mine could have views worthy of Joseph Goebbels."
Robert Norton, a senior research fellow in the anthropology department, replied in a letter to Loxton: "That a senior Australian academic in this day and age holds and seeks to disseminate such ignorant views on race is astonishing and disturbing. Astonishment and disgust are turned to anger by the fact that Fraser is asserting his opinions in his identity as a Macquarie scholar...
"[This] surely calls for a strong rebuke from university management, for the comments are not merely ill-informed but amount to deeply offensive allegations against ethnic sections of our society — allegations that would be repudiated by Macquarie's academic experts on the matters he speaks about."
NSW Greens Senator Kerry Nettle also wrote to the university requesting an urgent review of Fraser's work. "The university has an obligation to ensure that these views are not affecting his teaching or assessment of students", she said in a July 20 media release.
According to the July 20 Parramatta Sun, emails from Fraser that were forwarded to overseas educational institutions said: "In my law school classes, Anglo-Australian men in particular, have been reduced to a small and steadily shrinking minority... Already the legal order is radically skewed against the interests of white men; that tendency will grow more pronounced as the managerial-professional elite becomes more heavily Asian."
The leaking of these emails, the extensive publicity that Fraser was receiving and the public outrage his comments generated, prompted Loxton to issue another statement on July 21. It contained a stronger condemnation of racism, but also reflected the university administrator's worries about the impact of Fraser's comments on the university's ability to attract full-fee paying students from overseas.
Ray Martin's off-the-cuff equating of Fraser's ideas with Nazism now appears to be more accurate than he realised. Mathew Henderson-Hau, who runs the trans-Tasman anti-racist, anti-fascist website fightdemback.org, has been compiling evidence of Fraser's connections to the Patriotic Youth League.
The PYL is openly associated with neo-Nazi Jim Saleam who was jailed in 1991 for organising the shotgun attack on the home of the African National Congress's representative in Australia.
In an interview with the July 20 Australian newspaper, Fraser denied any association with the PYL. According to Henderson-Hau, however, Fraser has been listed as a PYL member since last September and provides the organisation with legal advice.
Fraser's links to the organised extreme-right may explain the result of the phone poll conducted by A Current Affair after Martin's interview. Around 85% of people who phoned in voted in favour of a ban on non-white immigration. The next day, the white-supremacist website Stormfront.org carried postings from individuals boasting about the numerous times they had voted in the poll.
Osama Yousef, a Socialist Alliance member and Sudanese-Australian civil rights activist in western Sydney, told GLW: "Regardless of the extent to which the Channel Nine poll result reflects an organised extremist response, rather than broader public opinion, there is no doubt that far-right individuals and groups in Australia are being emboldened by the government's so-called anti-terror campaign. This campaign is trying to define all non-white, non-Christian, people as 'potential terrorists' to be feared and loathed by white Australians. It is a campaign we must all resist or we will all lose, very rapidly, many of our basic human rights."
From Green Left Weekly, July 27, 2005.
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