Racism in AUstralia
Racism and its manifestations
Racism is still infecting Australian society, but it is not as “in your face” as it once was.
It would be comforting to believe that racism in Australia, although not eliminated, is on the way out. We got rid of that ghastly White Australia policy fifty years ago, didn’t we? If we venture into bars or barracks we no longer hear the blatantly racist jokes that would have been commonplace in earlier times. We have an established Racial Discrimination Act making it unlawful to discriminate against people “based on race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin”.
All is not well however. Race Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman reminds us in his Press Club address There is nothing casual about racism in Australia. The most vile and explicit forms of racism have migrated to social media, where it shows no sign of abatement, and just three days after his address a noisy gathering of masked and black-clad Nazis marched through Melbourne’s CBD, ahead of a gathering of the National Socialist Network.
Nazis are the ugliest manifestation of the white supremacy movement, which gives itself a veneer of respectability by calling for a cut to immigration. An outfit calling itself March for Australia is organizing rallies in all capital cities on August 31, but these aren’t about housing prices, congested roads or other problems attributed to immigration. They’re about our ethnic composition. To quote from the organization’s website:
Australia is changing in ways most of us never agreed to. People are waking up to a country they barely recognise.
Frank Chung, writing in news.com, describes March for Australia and its links to other far-right movements, such as Sovereign Citizens.
Natives of an old Australia
That’s the most visible manifestation of racism. The main theme of Sivaraman’s address is about systemic, institutional and structural racism. These are forms of discrimination with no basis in malice or a notion of one group’s racial superiority, but which have the same effect of exclusion as explicit forms of racial discrimination.
On the morning before his address Sivaraman gave an interview on Radio National (7 minutes), but that doesn’t do justice to his call for governments to take a stronger role in eliminating structural racism. If you have 35 minutes to spare it’s worth listening to (or reading the transcript of) his Press Club address to gain a full appreciation of his concerns. He wants to see the same commitment to eliminating racism as has been put into sex discrimination for example. To this end the Race Discrimination Commission has an Anti-Racism Framework with 63 recommendations for reform in the legal, justice, health, education, media and arts sectors.
It’s difficult territory, because “race” is a social construct rather than something defined and observable. But as the Commission points out, a flimsy definition does not eliminate it:
The concept of race emerged relatively recently in history, during the 16th and 17th centuries in Europe. It is built on the disproved idea that humans could be categorised into distinct biological races based on physical and social characteristics. Although race has no biological or scientific basis, thinking about race and its impacts remains essential, as many of our laws, cultures, and societies continue to be built on ideas of race and racism. This has contributed to laws, cultures, and systems privileging groups who are racialised as white, creating systemic inequalities that continue today.
As an example of the political use of the idea of “race” we might recall that Peter Dutton in his opposition to the Voice referred to aboriginal people as a “race”.
Such constructs come not only from the right. In the US there is often reference to “people of color” in the context of “critical race theory”, leading to the notion that a West Virginian “white” coal miner, with only basic school education and in precarious employment, has been dealt a better hand than a second-generation Indian investment banker with an MBA working in New York. Sivaraman, in his description of structural race discrimination, steers clear of the idiocy of critical race theory.
Sivaraman illustrates systemic racism with a story of “Fatima”, a composite character. Fatima is a talented architect who has migrated from Syria. She is not subject to any direct, malicious racism; rather there is a condescending politeness in the way her colleagues relate to her as someone from the outside. Everything from her difficulty in having her qualifications recognized, through to the general workplace culture (a monoculture in some aspects), puts barriers in her way. Eventually she quits, and takes up work in a basic unskilled job.
Fatima’s story is not only one about injustice. It’s also about lost economic opportunity – for Fatima and the nation. That’s particularly relevant at a time when the government is focussing on productivity. It’s also a reminder that DEI policies are not some “left” or “woke” construct: properly implemented they are hard-nosed approaches to boosting productivity.
Although Sivaraman mentions specific patterns of racism – against indigenous Australians around the time of the Voice debate, against Chinese Australians around the time of Covid, and more recently against Jewish and Muslim Australians – he is wary about initiatives that single out specific groups, lest they have the unintended consequence of pitching communities against one another.
In this regard he does not explicitly criticize the work of Jillian Segal, the government’s Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, but he touches on some of the problems Robert Manne describes more explicitly in his Inside Story article The wrong way to respond to antisemitism.
Former Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth makes a similar criticism of Segal’s work, particularly in relation to her chosen definition of antisemitism, which allows criticism of Israel’s policies to be classified as antisemitic.
Essential has polled Australians on their support for policies to address antisemitism. There is little support for policies specifically directed at antisemitism. A majority of respondents, 62 percent, believe we should “treat antisemitism the same way as other anti-discrimination laws”. There is far less support (< 50 percent), for “Give the antisemitism envoy the power to monitor the coverage of all public broadcasters (ABC, SBS, Triple J)”, “Expand definition of antisemitism to include some criticisms of the State of Israel”, and “Give the antisemitism envoy the power to cut funding to universities and cultural institutions that fail to comply”. Segal’s recommendations have not gone down well in the Australian community.
Unsurprisingly Sivaraman is critical of assimilationist attitudes and policies. But do we have to make a binary choice between assimilation and multiculturalism? Few liberals would dispute the idea that immigrants should pay taxes, obey the road rules, respect the country’s original owners, not engage in racist behaviour, and so on, although these could all bear the tag “assimilationist”. Sivaraman puts his case against racism in terms of what many hope to be traditional Australian values – justice and the fair go. That’s surely an aspect of assimilationism to which few Australians, recently arrived or nth generation, would object.
We may need to do some work on articulating the ground rules of a multicultural Australia.