Australian society
Ideas Australia needs now
As Covid-19 recedes from our concerns we risk returning to the mediocrity of pre-pandemic Australia.
In a paper published on Wednesday – Five ideas Australia needs now – Anglicare sees the pandemic as an opportunity to reset some of the basic conditions of Australia society.
Our response to the pandemic has demonstrated that we can come together to protect and advance the public interest. In the paper Anglicare puts forward their ideas on “how to change Australia for the better, and tackle some of the problems we are facing for good”.
Although some may see it as radical, in the best of Anglican tradition it is a conservative document. It calls for a basic income, a jobs guarantee, and a home for every Australian. These are essentially a re-statement of the Australian settlement that brought us shared prosperity until the creed of neoliberalism took over our public ideas. It calls for a community climate fund that allows communities to adapt and respond to climate-change impacts. In view of the maladministration following the 2019 bushfires and now in the wake of the floods, that should be considered as a no-brainer. Its most basic recommendation is its final one “Governing for all: a people’s inquiry”, which calls for reforms in our governance, accountability and decision-making arrangements, drawing on the lessons we can learn from our experiences over the last two years.
The history we’d often prefer not to be written
On 17 March 1852, precisely 170 years ago as I write, between 15 and 60 Aboriginal people were murdered by colonisers in the Brachina Gorge in the Flinders Ranges. Many people know Brachina Gorge as a popular site for tourists and geologists.
This is just one of 397 massacres of Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander people by colonists recorded by Lyndall Ryan and her colleagues at the University of Newcastle, in their work Colonial frontier massacres in Australia, 1788-1930. In those massacres – some unprovoked, some reprisals for killing of colonists – at least 11 000 original owners of the land were murdered. The reprisal massacres almost always involved massively asymmetric numbers of deaths: the Brachina massacre referred to above was in reprisal for the murder of just one colonist.
You can go straight to the map of sites where violence occurred on the Australian frontier. Chances are that one or more will be within a few kilometres of where you live. (I noted the Brachina massacre because I grew up on a farm just 17 km from the site.) But before you do so you are well-advised to read the introduction to the researchers’ work, where they lay out their conservative methodology – for example that they count an attack as a “massacre” only if 6 or more people were killed.
Massacres were rarely spontaneous events; they were usually planned. The attackers and victims often knew each other. And there was usually secrecy around the massacres, at least among the colonists – which is why the researchers’ work has probably missed many instances of lethal violence. A few, however, were not so secret: these were organized campaigns of mass killings which the researchers classify as “genocidal massacres”.
We have come to understand the obscenity in terms such as the “final solution”. But we carry our own shameful baggage. The authors record euphemisms that were in common use in Australia – “dispersal”, “clear the area”, “pacify”, “teach them a lesson”, and so on.
Remembering Christchurch
On 15 March 2019 an Australian terrorist killed 51 Muslims at prayer in two mosques in Christchurch. This week, on Wednesday 15 March, the Charles Sturt University’s Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA) published its third Islamophobia Report, covering the period 2018-2019.
It’s a long and largely unstructured document about 247 verified incidents of “Islamophobia”, a broad term the authors define as “a form of racism that includes various forms of violence, violations, discrimination and subordination that occur across multiple sites in response to the problematisation of Muslim identity“.
Most incidents were in public spaces – parks, shopping centres, public transport – while many others were online on social media. A frequently-observed pattern in public spaces involved men abusing women wearing a hijab. The online abuse generally comprised strong and threatening language, and statements associating Muslims with terrorism.
It’s a descriptive rather than an analytical document: 247 incidents would be only the tip of a very large iceberg. But it does have some general observations around the time of the Christchurch terrorism. The attacks came during a period when far-right groups were becoming more assertive, and after the attacks there was a surge in cases of Islamophobia.
Its chapter “Pre and post Christchurch comparison” is rich in observations about the culture in which anti-Muslim hatred resides, a culture reinforced by conspiracy theories and moral panic, aided by certain elected politicians on the far right. Perhaps its most challenging finding is that “normalised Islamophobia has led to the minimisation of extreme-right conspiracy theories as mere expressions of fringe political discourse”.
It’s poorly summarized, but The Guardian’s Stephanie Convery picks up its main points on an article: Muslims in Australia experienced surge of hate after Christchurch massacre, report reveals.