Peter Boyle
Delmae Barton, 62, an Aboriginal elder-in-residence at Brisbane's Griffith University, was on her way to work when she suffered a suspected stroke or diabetes attack next to a bus stop. For five and a half hours she was left lying in a pool of her own vomit while dozens of commuters ignored her. Eventually, two passing Japanese men came to her aid.
"The other people were treating me like a freak. Not the Japanese, the Japanese boys were very good. I feel if it weren't for them, I wouldn't be alive today", Barton told an ABC Radio reporter from her hospital ward the next day.
"One fella was that close that he had his briefcase on the side I was vomiting, face down, and all he did was remove his briefcase. And there were girls and young men who sat on their seat next to me and other seats around and they never come forward to help."
It's Australia 2006 and the whole world is watching as the Commonwealth "Stolenwealth" Games begin in Melbourne. According to a Newspoll released on March 6, two-thirds of Australians believe there is underlying racism in the country and four in 10 people believe Australia can be described as a racist nation and we don't like it that way.
Less than three months ago, in beach-side Cronulla in Sydney's south, white mobs chased and beat up youth because of their Middle Eastern appearance. The racist riot was openly built by Alan Jones, a powerful radio shock-jock who is a good friend of Prime Minister John Howard.
"I'm the person that's led this charge here. Nobody wanted to know about north Cronulla, now it's gathered to this", Jones boasted on his program on Radio 2GB.
Jones had been campaigning for weeks for a "community show of force" against Middle-Eastern youths who had allegedly assaulted a white surf lifesaver.
He read out a text message that had been flying from mobile phone to mobile phone: "Come to Cronulla this weekend to take revenge. This Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to support the Leb and wog bashing day ..."
Any "wog" was a potential target. Jones made it plain that he "understood" this incitement to racist violence.
"Kristallnacht" by the beach? How stereotypically Australian. But it is not funny. The Cronulla riot left massive fear and anger in its wake in Australia's Muslim communities. Last weekend, Ali (54) who runs a small grocery shop around the corner from where I write this article, took his family to the beach for the first time since the December 11 Cronulla riots.
"We didn't dare go to a city beach. We went to Bulli, two hours drive out of Sydney", he said.
Joking about his fear of racist violence, he added: "While I was standing on the rocks a big wave pushed me over and I cut myself. It frightened my wife when I came back to the beach covered in blood. I told her that I didn't know if it was a Christian wave or a Muslim wave that hit me."
Is Australia becoming more racist? Is this the same country where hundreds of thousands of people marched across the Sydney Harbour Bridge in a powerful statement of solidarity with Aboriginal Australians less than six years ago?
Racist attitudes were being rolled back over the last three-and-a-half decades, but recently there seems to be a turn in the opposite direction. Politicians, Coalition and Labor, have been quick to start playing the race card again.
Old racist prejudices are being revived with theories of cultural superiority. Treasurer Peter Costello's call for migrants to accept "Australian values" was supported by 79% of people in the Newspoll. But few could agree on what these values were!
The arguments for racial superiority have always been superficial. Tomes of "scientific" studies were published in the early 1800s to justify the racial oppression of slaves captured in Africa and taken to the United States in large numbers by the capitalist plantation owners. All of it was nonsense, as are the theories of cultural superiority used to justify racism today.
But the ideology of racism has gone on to legitimise oppression and exploitation ever since. It has justified the dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples and numerous colonial wars and occupations.
Its persistence in a country like Australia rests on more than racist propaganda by politicians and ideologists. It rests on an apparent white Australian "superiority" that is proved by gross inequalities in the Third World within and outside Australia.
The gross divide between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is summed up in these shocking statistics:
- Life expectancy: 20 years shorter than for non-Indigenous Australians and the gap is widening.
- Infant mortality: Three times higher than for non-Indigenous Australians.
- Health spending: Commonwealth spending 26% less per capita for Indigenous Australians.
- Unemployment: 23% in 2002 (compared with an official rate of 6% for non-Indigenous Australians — the lowest since the 1960s).
- Education: Fewer than 36% of Indigenous youth completed all secondary schooling compared with 73% of all Australian youth in 1998.
- Housing: Only 30% of Indigenous families are buying their home compared to 70% of non-Indigenous families.
- Imprisonment: Nationally, the Indigenous rate of imprisonment is approximately 15 times that of the non-Indigenous population.
This parallels the sustained relative privilege of Australians compared to the much poorer majority of the world's population. Today, Australia has the seventh highest average income in the world. Australians are part of the one-fifth of the world's population that gets 70% of world income.
Until these inequalities and the systematic exploitation that maintain them are eradicated, predominantly white Australia will be plagued by the underlying racism that many are so deeply ashamed of today. We don't need to swim in guilt but we need to fight injustice.
From Green Left Weekly, March 15, 2006.
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