Hansonism Revisited In Wake Of Riots

by Mike Steketee - The Australian

John Howard has shown a remarkable reluctance to use the "r" word in his comments about Sydney's r--- riots and the events surrounding them.

Remarkable because he did confront head-on what happened. "Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians," he said. If this is not racist behaviour, what is? Just as men of Lebanese origin harassing Caucasian women on the beach or attacking lifesavers was racist. As was white supremacists whipping up the Cronulla crowds and the retaliatory violence by Lebanese-Australians.

But don't worry, be happy, because the Prime Minister says that "I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country".

Never has been, of course. The White Australia policy was purely a form of labour market regulation. The Tampa would have been turned back even if it had been full of white Zimbabweans. And Santa is coming down the chimney in 10 days.

Perhaps on reflection, Howard's avoidance of the racism tag was not so remarkable, given he is a politician. Kim Beazley kept the peg on his nose as well. "It's just criminal behaviour, that's what this is," he said, missing yet another opportunity to be a leader of the Opposition.

No doubt, the people who go to Cronulla beach and who on Sunday were waving Australian flags and shouting "Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, oi, oi, oi" think of themselves as quintessential Australians, not racists. It is just that their anger against Lebanese-Australian thugs spilled over towards anyone of vaguely Middle Eastern appearance and dress.

It would have been better for Howard and Beazley to call a spade a spade, as NSW Premier Morris Iemma did in denouncing "the ugly face of racism". The nuances in public debate often are lost by the time they are filtered through the media and people's short attention spans. There should be no room for misunderstanding about the attitude of political leaders towards racism.

We have been here before, when Howard defended Pauline Hanson's right to spout anti-Aboriginal and anti-Asian rhetoric in her first speech in parliament in 1996. He reaped the political rewards, picking up most of the former Hanson vote in the 2001 election and keeping it ever since.

But there were costs and not only to Australia's reputation abroad. Hanson unleashed, dare we say it, underlying racism. There were many incidents such as that involving Tracey Lowe, a blonde Caucasian married to a fourth-generation Australian Chinese, who had comments directed at her about her young children.

One woman she came across in a Brisbane suburban shopping centre told her: "My husband fought in the war to keep people like that out of Australia." Lowe's father-in-law happened to be a decorated member of the Australian Z Force commando division during World War II.

Stereotypes quickly develop in the present climate. Clearly, there is a problem in Sydney with some youths of Lebanese Muslim origin who harbour resentment against Australia and its way of life and take it out in violent and criminal behaviour, including against women. But this is a small group in a much larger community. The 2001 census recorded 71,310 people in Australia who were born in Lebanon and there are many more who trace their origin to Lebanese migrants, many of them Christian, who have been coming here for more than 150 years.

Lebanese have one of the highest rates of Australian citizenship: 97 per cent of those eligible, according to government figures. That must say something about their acceptance of Australian values. Prominent Lebanese Australians include Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, NSW Governor Marie Bashir and federal Labor MP Daryl Melham.

It remains the case that most children of immigrants are as Australian in their attitudes as any other person who lives here. Hanson was wrong in her fears about Australia being swamped by Asians living in ghettos. So were those whose fears about earlier waves of immigrants, starting with the Irish and progressing to Italians and Greeks (who attracted the same epithets of "wogs" now directed at the Lebanese), which all proved to be unfounded. Tolerance has always won out over racism in Australia and long may it do so.

Howard's wariness of the racism label brings to mind his refusal early in his period as Prime Minister to use the "m" word. One of his first acts on being elected in 1996 was to disband the Office of Multicultural Affairs and the Bureau of Immigration, Multiculturalism and Population Research. He commissioned an inquiry that debated long and hard about dropping the word altogether before settling on the term "Australian multiculturalism".

Howard is an instinctive assimilationist but the pragmatist in him accepted, as he put it, that multiculturalism had "acquired a certain meaning and place in our society". That is why we have a Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs, John Cobb, although millions would not know it.

Howard presumably still is no great fan of multiculturalism, but this week he gave a near-perfect exposition of what it is, or should be, though without using the word: "Put simply, most Australians want a nation where, irrespective of our background and always accepting the right of people to retain affection for their own culture and to honour it as well as their own religion and to honour that, we should encourage to the maximum extent possible everybody to become part of the integrated Australian community."

What the riots prove is not that multiculturalism has failed, but that there has not been enough emphasis on it. Its whole purpose is to avoid just these sort of situations by developing greater understanding and tolerance. That should include exploring and addressing the alienation of young Lebanese men.

Those who know them say that many Lebanese Muslim families have low expectations stemming from their place in society in Lebanon and they often fail to emphasise the importance of education to their children. Unemployment rates are high, as is the consequent resort to crime.

Few young Lebanese are motivated by fundamentalist Islam. But the demonisation of Muslims in the age of terror adds one more ingredient to a volatile mix.

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