Do you view Australia as a racist country?

[Sebro]

Wasn't too sure where to put this thread so I put it here. If you have a better suggestion, please let me know.

I've noticed Australia seems to have a bit of a reputation as a racist, particularly against Asians, country. I'm not passing judgement here, I just want to know what people think and gain a better understanding of how Australia is percieved.

Feel free to say whatever you like, I'm not here to pick a fight, I just want to know what you think.

[hooligan]

Well, considering this is a mostly Asian American oriented site, many of us don't know waht's going down there. But, I have heard their policies against Vietnamese immigrants are blatantly racist. Although, I hardly consider all of Australia, racist.

[kimpossible]

That's fine. Pretty straightforward question anyhow.

I think the answer for me comes in two parts. One is of course the indigenous people, but you're asking mainly about Asians so I'll answer based on that. You had it squared up rather well in another post. Basically takes form in xenophobic 'my god they're taking over the country' that I would also say is not too unlike the perception of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the US.

My main stay in Australia was through a Taiwanese tour company. The stories I heard from the guides ranged from the anger that was directed towards them [Asian immigrants] for keeping later trading hours than was previously socially acceptable to fears that too many Asians are in the country and entrance for Asian naitonals should be more restricted.

I didn't personally witness anything flagrant. Most people were friendly. Our biggest issue was our status as Americans (meaning my husband and myself) and that probably has to do more with Bush's policies and war than much else. The only thing that tweaked me was one of the tour bus drivers who thought no one on the bus understood enough English to know he was mocking the guide.

Keep in mind I was only there as a tourist and I'm not very racially Asian.

[yoMAMA]

australia used to have the infamous "white australia" policy.

however i think it has progressed in terms of racial issues now.

[thaite]

I dunno how to answer, really, but I have seen Romper Stomper. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105275/)

[nonamerasian]

I've stereotyped Australia as racist, but I'm not sure how racist or how widespread is the racism.

I base my perception as her being racist on her history rather than on personal experience.

But the history isn't so hot. It was almost the 1970s when indigenous Australians were moved out of the flora and fauna category! While I'm sure the country has progressed, I'm sure there is still a lot of racism.

[kimpossible]

But the history isn't so hot. It was almost the 1970s when indigenous Australians were moved out of the flora and fauna category!

Did you watch that Globetrekker? :smile:

[Sebro]

Thanks to all those of you for taking time to answer my poll and write something. Our immigration policy towards the Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnam War wasn't too bad but it's been pretty ordinary in all other cases.

I think Romper Stomper is a pretty good movie and accurately portrays the sources of Australian racism, particularly towards Asians.

Thanks again

[yoMAMA]

Thanks to all those of you for taking time to answer my poll and write something. Our immigration policy towards the Vietnamese at the end of the Vietnam War wasn't too bad but it's been pretty ordinary in all other cases.

I think Romper Stomper is a pretty good movie and accurately portrays the sources of Australian racism, particularly towards Asians.

Thanks again

you live in OZ?

[hooligan]

How about, "Rabbit Proof Fence"

[Sebro]

That's fine. Pretty straightforward question anyhow.

I think the answer for me comes in two parts. One is of course the indigenous people, but you're asking mainly about Asians so I'll answer based on that. You had it squared up rather well in another post. Basically takes form in xenophobic 'my god they're taking over the country' that I would also say is not too unlike the perception of Mexican nationals and Mexican Americans in the US.

My main stay in Australia was through a Taiwanese tour company. The stories I heard from the guides ranged from the anger that was directed towards them [Asian immigrants] for keeping later trading hours than was previously socially acceptable to fears that too many Asians are in the country and entrance for Asian naitonals should be more restricted.

I didn't personally witness anything flagrant. Most people were friendly. Our biggest issue was our status as Americans (meaning my husband and myself) and that probably has to do more with Bush's policies and war than much else. The only thing that tweaked me was one of the tour bus drivers who thought no one on the bus understood enough English to know he was mocking the guide.

Keep in mind I was only there as a tourist and I'm not very racially Asian.


Interesting read. I'd agree with you there, I reckon you're more likely to get 'in your face' attitude from people for being American than for being Asian.

[returntosender]

Well yeah, I'm hearing a lot of stories out of Australia which one might construe as 'racist'. Seriously though, the 'White Astralia' policy wasn't abolished until recently, and I think there were talks of bringing it back, so I don't expect people to change their attitudes that quickly. What I have heard is though, that there seems to be a lot of interracial mixing down there...some have hazard a guessed to say that Australia might be the first true 'Eurasian nation'. I don't know, I still hear Asians being antagonized down there...but it's not like it's unique to Australia.

[Sebro]

you live in OZ?

yes. In Melbourne

Keep the comments coming, I'm finding this really intersting. Got to go meet my sister now.

[hkRT]

Racism surely is not just present in Australia. But I find Australia to be a generally very racist country, especially towards Asians. This is just from my personal first hand experiences as well as from the many stories of other people who have experienced it. My white Canadian friends all told me what a beautiful country it was and the Australians were so nice when they visited. Well, nice to them but not so to certain other people. There was just too much prejudice, bigotry, racist slurs and gestures over there. The major urban centres such as Sydney and Melbourne are ok, but any place else outside of those centres is dreadful and intensely racist. It's just sad. It's nice to see a few open-minded non-racist people over there. I'm sure there are some Australians that are very nice, but there are way more that are not. Totally did not feel welcomed there as a tourist.

[returntosender]

hkRT-Well, I think if Asians want to tour the country and experience something new, Australia is well suited for that. It's very beautiful and very much a part a world class tourist locale.As far as having certain expectations, it's inevitable that some will be unmet. Even in Canada, when I go to a restaurant or order a cup of coffee at Starbucks I can't help but feel like the service is a bit lacking compared to the guy ahead of me.

It's so often when I order coffee that the person ahead of me will get a nice 'thank you and see you again' while I get that 'what do you want' vibe. Maybe it's me.

[nonamerasian]

Did you watch that Globetrekker? :smile:

Yes. :biggrin:

[hkRT]

Even in Canada, when I go to a restaurant or order a cup of coffee at Starbucks I can't help but feel like the service is a bit lacking compared to the guy ahead of me.

It's so often when I order coffee that the person ahead of me will get a nice 'thank you and see you again' while I get that 'what do you want' vibe. Maybe it's me.

I understand what you are saying. But that is nothing compared to the kind of racism--the prevalence, intensity and frequency in Australia. It's like I didn't feel safe walking down the street in a non-urban area in Australia when I was just touring. It was that bad.

[Sebro]

I understand what you are saying. But that is nothing compared to the kind of racism--the prevalence, intensity and frequency in Australia. It's like I didn't feel safe walking down the street in a non-urban area in Australia when I was just touring. It was that bad.

Interesting. Where did you go? I understand what you're saying and I could imagine some places, especially up north in places like Queensland, would be a bit on the racist side. You didn't feel safe? I think there is a fair bit of racism to a certain to degree but racial violence is pretty rare from what I understand. Sorry you had such a bad experience.

[asvenus]

i must admit i am not fond of white aussies and this is largely based on my preconceptions of them being aborigne hating lager swilling violently racist rednecks...and in reality, unfortunately alot of those preconceptions have been ratified...although i have come across (very) few white australlians that i adore, Germaine Greer is one example, but she now resides in the UK so i dont know if she counts...
many of my white friends view Oz as some kind of Mecca, beautiful, good quality of life etc, but i just feel that i couldnt be happy in that country...i would love to go but i am very wary...knowing my luck i would be bundled off to some aboriginal reserve or arrested for not being in one...
also they have do very harsh anti-immigration policies, particularly towards asians, so the whole 'viewing of Oz as being racist or certainly prejudiced against asians' is not unfounded or arbitary...

[thaite]

ain't nuthin wrong with swilling lager.

[kimpossible]

Whoah. You guys have some serious detention centers for illegal immigration. Just caught it today on the news.

[AliBabaIncorporated]

I found the reaction to the Corby trial fairly amusing. Especially the theory about how the cocaine smuggling ring must have planted the marijuana. And the Australian government's demand for de facto extraterritoriality.

As it is, she's lucky not to have got the death penalty, which is what is prescribed by law.

[nola]

I think the poor girl is innocent! But that's just based on my lame viewing of movies where the same thing happens to Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale (Brokedown Palace) and Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones)! Drug mules seem to be a common thing.

[CEBA]

The poor girl (Corby) is a perfect illustration of australian racism.
The same month that she got arrested, another australian was sentenced to death by hanging in Singapore. But that guy's name is Nguyen Tuong Van.
Are australians getting angry and boycotting Singapore?

The basic feelings among australians protesting Corby conviction is
"How dare those underdeveloped savages convict beautiful white girl!"

[nola]

Nguyen Tuong Van could have been a drug mule too. Drug mules may be a common thing. In her "trial" they ignored all the witnesses even an Australian criminal who said he planted the weed. The authorities also did not bother to research the source of the marijuana.

My uncles, Sebro, studied in Sydney in the 60s and can't even talk about it it was so racist. But my cousin Sydney was named after his stay.

[Craig]

I think the poor girl is innocent! But that's just based on my lame viewing of movies where the same thing happens to Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale (Brokedown Palace) and Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones)! Drug mules seem to be a common thing.
Using Hollywood as a source for your view on reality ? Hasn't Hollywood (and the US media) lost too much credibility for you to put your trust into it (them) ?

[nola]

Are drug mules a common thing?

[kimpossible]

I think the poor girl is innocent! But that's just based on my lame viewing of movies where the same thing happens to Claire Danes, Kate Beckinsale (Brokedown Palace) and Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones)! Drug mules seem to be a common thing.

I think she knew exactly what she was doing and was betting a white Australian former beauty queen could use that to leverage getting the drugs through. Most likely for those very reasons she got a prison sentence and not the death sentence. Though the prosecution may pursue the option of appealing the case to get the death penalty at a later time, if I heard the BBC report correctly.

Why do you think she isn't capable of committing the crime she was convicted of? Just curious, and yes I'm serious about the question, interested in what you think. :smile:

[nola]

I watched that mess on TV. The level of indignation and disbelief of her family, her Asian lawyers, her entire country indicated to me that she must have been wronged and completely innocent.

90% of Australians think she is innocent. Can that 90% be based on racism?

They didn't do any investigation of the source of the marijuana, that is, if they can trace it to smugglers or to near where she lived, that would seem to be important. There was a prisoner who came to testify that he put the weed in her bag. The judges ignored her other witnesses too. The decision was made before the week or two week long trial.

I think the fact she is a beauty therapist got the attention of the world but the level of indignation and rage is what convinced me she may be completely innocent.

Also Australia is doing an investigation of Qantas and smugglers and they were very relieved this was being done. So I give her the benefit of the doubt.

[Sebro]

Whoah. You guys have some serious detention centers for illegal immigration. Just caught it today on the news.

Please don't judge us all by that. I personally think we're all going to look back on the whole mandatory detention thing in 50 years time and hang our heads in shame. Much like the stolen generation. Most people I know think it's abhorrent, but hey, I live in the small l liberel south. That's what happens in Australian when red-neck conservatives are in power.

About Corby. I was embarrased by how some people reacted, once again re-inforcing the view of Australia as a racist country. I agree with the fact that she happened to be a white, realitively attractive young female had a lot to do with public reaction. I think also the source of doubt wheter the drugs were planted on her or not added to the whole thing. I personally don't know if she is guility or not, but I tend to think she is. If it was someone named Habib locked up in Guantanino (sp?) no one would really care.

I think the fact it was weed, not heroin, has earned her a lot of sympathy. The Vietnamese guy got busted in Singapore with heroin and pleaded guility so that really made sure no-one cared. There are 9 other, predominately white, Australians being charged with drug smuggling in Bali. They were busted with the heroin strapped to them and the public out-cry has been, well, there hasn't been one.

I found the reaction to the Corby trial fairly amusing. Especially the theory about how the cocaine smuggling ring must have planted the marijuana. And the Australian government's demand for de facto extraterritoriality.

As it is, she's lucky not to have got the death penalty, which is what is prescribed by law.

I don't know where you heard about 'de-facto' extraterritoriality,that's news to me and I study International Relations. I must admit the Howard govt., as much as I dislike it, has done the right thing in respecting Indonesia's sovereignty. We are discussing a prisoner exchange program with the Indonesians at the moment, which I think is fair.

[kimpossible]

Okay, okay. We will hold you personally responsible for Paul Hogan, however.

I really don't have a negative opinion on modern day Australia overall. We've considered moving to Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide in the future. No better or worse than most other countries or commonwealths from British colonial efforts. I was born and live in one.

[Sebro]

Okay, okay. We will hold you personally responsible for Paul Hogan, however.

I really don't have a negative opinion on modern day Australia overall. We've considered moving to Melbourne, Sydney or Adelaide in the future. No better or worse than most other countries or commonwealths from British colonial efforts. I was born and live in one.

Okay, Hogan the Bogan I take full personal responsibilty for but not Steve Irwin. Don't worry, I wasn't getting upset. Don't move to Adelaide, it is the most boring city on earth. I personally think Melbourne is much better than Sydney. Where do you live?

[AliBabaIncorporated]

I don't know where you heard about 'de-facto' extraterritoriality,that's news to me and I study International Relations. I must admit the Howard govt., as much as I dislike it, has done the right thing in respecting Indonesia's sovereignty.
My mistake ... a newspaper report I read here implied that "Australia" (which I thought meant the government) had asked Indonesia to permit Corby to serve the remainder of her sentence in Australia. Apparently there were just newspaper editorials and the like, not real government action.

Still, people shouldn't ask for this kind of thing, being allowed to serve out your sentence back home. You do a crime in a foreign country, you go to jail there. And this isn't the first time you see Australians acting as though their citizens overseas don't have to answer to local laws and should be immune from courts in neighbouring Asian countries ... for example, from just last year, Carl Voigt and David Hendy.

Personally, though, I can't fault Australia for their harsh stance on illegal immigration. Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, all have very similar policies and detention systems for border jumpers as Australia has. It's a lot harsher than what happens in the US, but that's what you do when your country happens to be near Indonesia, China, Bangladesh, etc. Malaysia especially takes a very amusing stance on Indonesian and Filipino illegal immigrants ... the ruling party sure as hell don't want them, except as warm bodies to vote UMNO and overwhelm the non-Muslim locals in Sabah and Sarawak. Then they throw them out of the country, let them back in again, throw them back out, let them back in again. Why? Cuz the Chinese and urban Malays can't live without their Indonesian maids. After all, who else is gonna be able to understand them when they're yelling Malay curse words and beating them with a live clothes iron?

[Sebro]

[QUOTE=AliBabaIncorporated]My mistake ... a newspaper report I read here implied that "Australia" (which I thought meant the government) had asked Indonesia to permit Corby to serve the remainder of her sentence in Australia. Apparently there were just newspaper editorials and the like, not real government action.

Still, people shouldn't ask for this kind of thing, being allowed to serve out your sentence back home. You do a crime in a foreign country, you go to jail there. And this isn't the first time you see Australians acting as though their citizens overseas don't have to answer to local laws and should be immune from courts in neighbouring Asian countries ... for example, from just last year, Carl Voigt and David Hendy.

I agree that when you are in another country you are accountable to their laws and should be treated accordingly. Prisoner exchange agreements don't change the length of the sentence but I think someone should be able to serve out their time in their home country, jail would be bad enough. I also don't like the idea of the death penalty and I think the Australian govt. (be it Labour or Liberal) should do all it can to stop its nationals from being executed. My opinion is based more on humanitarian reasons more than nationalist reason, I don't think anyone should be executed regardless of nationallity but state soveriegnty must be respected.

[Craig]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15552269%255E1702,00.html

Student tells of 'racist' Crowe

June 08, 2005
AUSTRALIAN actor Russell Crowe allegedly hurled racist abuse at a Thai student after being upset about a pie he was served at a landmark Sydney eatery.

The female student, 24, said the incident took place while she was working at Harry's Cafe de Wheels last October.

Crowe didn't like the beef pie he had ordered and became abusive, she said.

"(He was) very abusive, aggressive," the student told Channel 7.

When Crowe was asked to leave, he allegedly told the student: "Do you know who I am?

"You should know this is not your country."

When asked what point Crowe was trying to make, the student said: "To go home."

The Oscar-winning actor was arrested in New York on Monday, and was charged with assault after allegedly hurling a telephone at a hotel employee.

He was charged with assault in the second degree and criminal possession of a weapon in the fourth degree, and faces up to seven years in jail.

[robotic]

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/common/story_page/0,5744,15552269%255E1702,00.html

Student tells of 'racist' Crowe


russell crowe is consistently being charged for violence.
i think a day ago, i read an article about how he was arrested for throwing a phone at a hotel employee.

what's up with this :confused:

he has an explosive anger management problem, woah.

[grimfan]

This is why it pisses me off so much when some people proclaim Country X as such a great place to live. Yeah, great if you're white... Guess that's the only demographic that really matters.

[s1eve]

The stories I heard from the guides ranged from the anger that was directed towards them [Asian immigrants] for keeping later trading hours than was previously socially acceptable...

You know what, this is the same thing that is happening in Madrid and also in Barcelona where the long trading hours are affecting local businesses because the Asians do not partake in a siesta.

------

From my own experience coming from New Zealand, I tend to find Australians more friendly and open. This is just from my experiences in Sydney and Melbourne, and also in London having met so many lovely Australian girls. :biggrin: Hmm, maybe perhaps its because I'm a Chinese New Zealander rather then an immigrant with a funny accent, so maybe I don't get hassled as much as a result.

[Sebro]

This is why it pisses me off so much when some people proclaim Country X as such a great place to live. Yeah, great if you're white... Guess that's the only demographic that really matters.

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

[CEBA]

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?
MONEY$
they earn more there than in there own countries.

[tapestrybabe]

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

i know a few koreans...
who've ended up living in austrailia...
cuz they were adopted by austrailians...
to begin with...

[robotic]

MONEY$
they earn more there than in there own countries.

there are a lot of other factors involved, buddy. :D

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

i think grimfan was referring to a general notion towards a (any) certain country, a generalization - without taking all of the possibilities in mind i.e. the presence of minority groups and how they are treated, economic disparities between immigrants/natives etc. etc.

your race, even in places where that certain race is of a large minority, can affect your life to a certain degree (http://forums.yellowworld.org/showthread.php?t=22901). i believe wherever you go as a minority, this problem will prevail. and this is the perspective from which people at YW speak.

asians immigrate (for similar reasons as other people, whether minority/majority, immigrate): opportunities. opportunies can be interpreted in a number of ways, and not just financial-wise as ceba suggested :p
yet in respective immigration countries, differences still do remain, and these can affect their lives (differing from person to person) from marginally to immensely.
as immigrants/residents of the country, i think their right to criticise remains with the intention to resolve an issue. it's not possible for every race/country to be perfect in terms of minority issues, so i think this resolve can be encouraged if it means making lives better and easier. criticism should really be taken into ones stride, ;-; and should be encouraged as tools of progress - in countries where there is less criticism (or less tolerance for criticism) are hindered from this progress.

many a time many asian immigrants simply moved because they also found faults in their native countries (i.e. less political freedom, less tolerance in terms of religion/ethnic group etc.) so it's often not a one-on-one issue. but i guess no one suggested it as an extremely bad place (but because all spheres of australian life haven't been analysed and only this aspect of whether it is racist/not or about how minorities are treated - we can only gain a mixture of postive/negative opinions depending on personal experiences), because australia offers people opportunities, which is why people migrate there. i'm sure a lot of people, when comparing posts, said that it is worth living in.
;) and i'm also sure that nobody means to offend you at heart, sebro. they speak from (above mentioned)^ perspective.

[kimpossible]

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

Quality of life. It doesn't diminish the effect(s) of racism.

[hkRT]

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

Similar reasons (e.g. existing or projected political instability, economic hardships, persecution, hope for freedom and better quality of life) why Europeans migrated from their old country in Europe to Australia, North America, Asia, Africa and other places. Except for colonialism which was also one of the reasons for early European migration but not for Asian migration.

The matter of fact is there is a lot of racism in Australia, even though you might not experience it first-hand. When you ask this question, people can only give their own experiences to answer it. The answer can't be all rosy because that's just reality. My encounters with racism in Australia may seem like unfortunate or perhaps insignificant mishaps to some people. But I do not think racism in Australia is as sporadic and random as we want to believe. Australia has its natural beauty like beautiful beaches and scenery and of course in every place there are nice people and bad people. But the question here in this thread is asking if it is a racist country.

During my visit to Australia, I indeed experienced racism over there frequently. It does not take a fob accent to become a target of racism. It takes only a "yellow" face. My parents and I were touring in a suburb area about an hour drive from Sydney (it's not Queensland), and some white Aussies drove by and hurled racist slurs at us at a distance. We were at that time taking photos in front of a hotel. Another time, it took place on a train that we were boarding. I have talked about this before in an older thread. My parents were speaking to each other, commenting about the scenery in Australia. They were not talking loudly nor making a lot of noises. A white Aussie sitting from behind yelled at us, "Shut the fuck up". My mom walked up to him and tried to reason with him that everyone has the freedom to speak. The guy threatened to throw my parents off the train. He was getting violent. At that time, all the passengers (happened to be all white too) in the compartment did not seem to care a darn thing at all. One white family was sitting not too far from us. The white woman (probably the mother in that family) looked even amused, as though it was something to laugh about. The physical threat was no joke. Good thing the train just arrived at the next station and that guy got off. We also went to the next compartment instead. Other people have even worse first-hand experiences with racism. So it is not hard to understand why it is frustrating when some people say what a nice, wonderful place it is and how nice the Aussies are while omitting or brushing off another side of the place.

[nola]

Condolences on these very traumatic experiences, hkRT. It's too bad if NZ is like this too because alot of Asians are moving there. I didn't know NZ was similar.

[Martino]

Still, people shouldn't ask for this kind of thing, being allowed to serve out your sentence back home. You do a crime in a foreign country, you go to jail there.

Or worse, commit a crime abroad, get back to your own country, and become a celebrity on the strength of that crime. Names like Nick Leeson and Issei Sagawa spring to mind.

[grimfan]

If it's such a bad place why do so many people, including Asians, migrate here?

That's exactly my point. While Country X (in this case, Australia) is touted by Eurocentric authorities as an ideal place to live, they don't take into account possible hardships for minorities. It's like saying Australia is great because it's great for white people, end of story.

[bulldog]

No countries will tell the world that they have racism but there is always racism, only by how many people. As long as you can make $1, even if some people don't like you, you still soldier on because what else to do ? You might even be living in denial.

[nola]

Damn I always wanted to see NZ too.

[Napoleon Chynamite]

I visited relatives in Melbourne for a month and a half or so with my family when I was young. I don't remember encountering any bad experiences. In fact I've encountered more racism in urban settings in Canada like Vancouver and Toronto than anywhere in the states.

All in all and regardless, this thread could just as easily apply to the U.S. or Canada.

[BeTheReds]

I don't know if this even helps the discussion or not, but I don't think you can really call an entire nation of people racist. If you're talking about the policies of its government only, then I suppose you can.

[kimpossible]

Damn I always wanted to see NZ too.

You'd probably be fine. Like many places, it depends on where you go, who you meet and if you live there versus just a tourist. As Gumby said, many of the observations we've made about Australia you could just as easily apply them to Canada or the US and the societies/governments formed from British colonial efforts. It's still groups of immigrants relating to one another on colonized land with one group (descendants of the original colonizing force and people that look like them that assimilate) holding more political and social power in the hierarchy.

[DaMuo]

Damn I always wanted to see NZ too.

Nola. Go to NZ. Go to AUS. You will want to go again and again!

I had a lot of fun there... and the people were extremely friendly to me. The difference, as always, is to be respectful of the locals and how you interact. In many respects, I think being "American" is probably a bigger faux pas than anything else.

I would say that NZ and AUS is as racist as we are in the US. Which means, there is a small population that may harbor racism, but it's not the norm of the entire country.

What I think you are seeing is reaction to is the wave of immigrants coming from China and elsewhere that is a huge drain on local social system resources. Not that they should not offer asylum for those that need it, but many of the immigrants are coming in to compete/undercut for a lot of entry level jobs. These countries actively welcome professionals of any ethnicity... Look at the same sentiments we have here in the US for migrant workers from Mexico.

[Sebro]

Thanks for the replies to my question. I just re-read what I wrote and I realised it may have been taken the wrong way, I was seriously asking a question not making a rhetorical smart-arse reply with a "like it or get out" attitude.

Similar reasons (e.g. existing or projected political instability, economic hardships, persecution, hope for freedom and better quality of life) why Europeans migrated from their old country in Europe to Australia, North America, Asia, Africa and other places. Except for colonialism which was also one of the reasons for early European migration but not for Asian migration.

The matter of fact is there is a lot of racism in Australia, even though you might not experience it first-hand. When you ask this question, people can only give their own experiences to answer it. The answer can't be all rosy because that's just reality. My encounters with racism in Australia may seem like unfortunate or perhaps insignificant mishaps to some people. But I do not think racism in Australia is as sporadic and random as we want to believe. Australia has its natural beauty like beautiful beaches and scenery and of course in every place there are nice people and bad people. But the question here in this thread is asking if it is a racist country.

During my visit to Australia, I indeed experienced racism over there frequently. It does not take a fob accent to become a target of racism. It takes only a "yellow" face. My parents and I were touring in a suburb area about an hour drive from Sydney (it's not Queensland), and some white Aussies drove by and hurled racist slurs at us at a distance. We were at that time taking photos in front of a hotel. Another time, it took place on a train that we were boarding. I have talked about this before in an older thread. My parents were speaking to each other, commenting about the scenery in Australia. They were not talking loudly nor making a lot of noises. A white Aussie sitting from behind yelled at us, "Shut the fuck up". My mom walked up to him and tried to reason with him that everyone has the freedom to speak. The guy threatened to throw my parents off the train. He was getting violent. At that time, all the passengers (happened to be all white too) in the compartment did not seem to care a darn thing at all. One white family was sitting not too far from us. The white woman (probably the mother in that family) looked even amused, as though it was something to laugh about. The physical threat was no joke. Good thing the train just arrived at the next station and that guy got off. We also went to the next compartment instead. Other people have even worse first-hand experiences with racism. So it is not hard to understand why it is frustrating when some people say what a nice, wonderful place it is and how nice the Aussies are while omitting or brushing off another side of the place.


That sounds terrible. I have actually encounted racism here before, though it was not really directed at me. I was once with an ex-girlfriend of mine who happened to be Indian and we were walking down the street at around 10pm in Geelong (a hole of a town I grew up in, don't bother with it if you are a tourist) and bunch of young blokes around my age as they walked past me and her say something like "She needs a bloody wash" or words to that effect. Though they didn't yell it at her or show any signs of violence they just said it to themselves as they walked past, it still made me feel terrible for all sorts of reasons that I wont go into now.

Got another experience too, this one was abit scarier. When I was with another girl (not trying to brag here) who was Chinese-Malay but grew up in Australia there was a bunch of drunk skin-head punks behind us and they started signing one of the songs off Romper Stomper (I can tell you the words if you like, but I wont detail them here) which I recognised straight away because I actually like the movie but it took her awhile to cotton to what they were singing. Anyway, we came a spot where there was more of a crowd and people started looking at the skin-heads so they shut up. Still, it was a bad experience for all sorts of reasons. I personally think they were just trying to start a fight with me by insulting the girl I was with.

Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that I can understand what kind of situations you may have found yourself in. Were you in the Western Suburbs of Sydney? They can be a bit scetchy, even for a whitey. I've never seen anything like that on the train and I'm surprised no-one said anything.

Thanks for your contribution

[hkRT]

Welcome back, Sebro. You survived Part 1 of 5 of the hazing ritual on YW. (joking)

I thought I would never come back to YW forums after reading some posts in some other threads.

Thanks everyone for your different perspectives.

[TongStar]

Hey gang, virgin poster here, but what a great topic to get started. I've been living in Sydney for over 20 years now and have experienced my share of racism.

Today's racism in urban centres like Sydney seems much more subtle but probably just as disparaging in its intention. For me personally, it would make it easier to react if the racism was actually more confrontational. But often times the venom of the slights lie in the mocking undertone to which they are delivered. It is the sarcastic tone to which the waiter speaks to your relative who has just come to visit, it is the double-standards in service that you receive from a so called 'upmarket' retailer, it is the dismissive or scoffing manner which you receive when issues of racism are raised (like the example a member posted earlier about a woman snickering at the racism that was occuring on the train).
I think it comes down to superiority complexes and delusional ideas of ownership. Many I've encountered here in Australia are of the belief that non-assimilation is not to be tolerated because this is "our (whites') country". But this is a convict colony of a mere 200 odd years, obtained by force. At least migrants didn't commit genocide to get here.
I feel that this is not the most hospitable of places. I don't believe that differences need to be "tolerated"; what makes one so superior that they feel they need to "tolerate" another's mere existence?
Sometimes I feel like anglo-aussie culture does not know its place in the world. Australia has a small population and its economy is largely migrant driven. Due respect needs to be given.

[Sebro]

Hey gang, virgin poster here, but what a great topic to get started. I've been living in Sydney for over 20 years now and have experienced my share of racism.

Today's racism in urban centres like Sydney seems much more subtle but probably just as disparaging in its intention. For me personally, it would make it easier to react if the racism was actually more confrontational. But often times the venom of the slights lie in the mocking undertone to which they are delivered. It is the sarcastic tone to which the waiter speaks to your relative who has just come to visit, it is the double-standards in service that you receive from a so called 'upmarket' retailer, it is the dismissive or scoffing manner which you receive when issues of racism are raised (like the example a member posted earlier about a woman snickering at the racism that was occuring on the train).
I think it comes down to superiority complexes and delusional ideas of ownership. Many I've encountered here in Australia are of the belief that non-assimilation is not to be tolerated because this is "our (whites') country". But this is a convict colony of a mere 200 odd years, obtained by force. At least migrants didn't commit genocide to get here.
I feel that this is not the most hospitable of places. I don't believe that differences need to be "tolerated"; what makes one so superior that they feel they need to "tolerate" another's mere existence?
Sometimes I feel like anglo-aussie culture does not know its place in the world. Australia has a small population and its economy is largely migrant driven. Due respect needs to be given.

Thanks for your post, it's good get an Australian-Asian perspective on the issue.

I'll just re-iterate why I started this thread (not that I thought it was getting off topic, just want to make sure people understand what I'm about) - I started it because I'm interested in peoples perceptions of Australia, wheter it be based on experience or just from what you've seen in the media. I'm not trying to defend Australian actions or attitudes, though I have taken the liberty to clarify a few things. So please feel free to just write down what you think, it doesn't have to stand up in a court of law. I'm not here to change your mind.

Once again, thanks to everyone for contributing, I feel that this discussion has gone really well.

[returntosender]

Thanks TongStar, that wasn an insightful post.

[grimfan]

Sometimes I feel like anglo-aussie culture does not know its place in the world.

Any arrogant attitudes will persist, even grow, as long as people keep calling Australia the "best place on Earth". There should be a disclaimer: "If you're white, or a really westernized foreigner (maybe not even then)".

[Sebro]

Any arrogant attitudes will persist, even grow, as long as people keep calling Australia the "best place on Earth". There should be a disclaimer: "If you're white, or a really westernized foreigner (maybe not even then)".

I don't mind critisism of my culture, race or country, that's what keeps people in touch with reallity and stops them from becoming filled with stupid ideas about themselves. I would like to state my opinion on Anglo - Aussie culture though.

I personally think it's not too bad a 'culture' from an 'insider' perspective. It is, more than some other cultures, based on the working class and I think that's been benefical for the country as a whole and why we have a decent minimal wage in this country (among other reasons). I don't really think its an 'arrogant' culture given its working class roots. Having grown up in it I learned to apperciate many things, such as having a few beers with mates when the suns going down, that making money isn't everything and a mans worth isn't measured by the contents of his wallet and social position doesn't make anyone automatically better. I could go on about the positives of the culture but I think those are the main things I've gotten out of it.

Don't mean to sound all 'romantic' and fuzzy about my own culture and that I like all aspects of it, I don't, such as its unhealthy emphasis on sport, even though I really did enjoy surfing when I was younger. What I'm trying to say is that it's not all bad. If you take any culture you can find something you don't like about it and find arrogant, I didn't really enjoy the Chinese notion of 'age is right' in that someone older was automatically right and their veiw was better/more important. I know that's abit simplistic and I'm not saying I don't like Chinese culture, I'm just using that as an example.

[HeyaB!]

As a local, I think there is definitely racism in Australia, but it's not as if it's rampant or open except in certain situations or areas, and most Asian Australians I know who live and work here in Melbourne don't see it as a part of their daily lives.

I have noticed that some Asian friends who have visited do feel a racist attitude based on incidents they encountered (ie friend got carded at a club and they refused to accept her HK black and white id as valid proof). And I definitely think the more visibly fob or tourist you appear the more you would encounter a negative attitude or jackass behaviour. Or maybe us local Asian have just learned to manage the racism by avoiding certain areas/people/behaviours like many of you in the States would have.

On the flip side, I have white work friends who have felt uncomfortable hanging out in places I frequent which have a very high Asian headcount and thought they were being stared at in a racist way, so maybe xenophobia is xenophobia whoever you are.

My father tells tales of the early 70's when he first migrated which make me wonder how the hell he managed to put up with it all, but things are not like that now. I have also noticed some of my friends siblings are alot more racially inclusive and less race concious (theirs or others) than my generation, so maybe they are the first age bracket to grow up in truly multi ethnic environment, rather than one of novelty or PC tolerance.

All that being said though, we do have huge neanderthal d***heads around here, and like neandertahl d***heads the world over (male or female, old or young), they will act up if they think they can get away with it (ie. won't get arrested/bashed/publicly humilited/dumped by their liberal minded partner).

[mrcfo]

As a local, I think there is definitely racism in Australia, but it's not as if it's rampant or open except in certain situations or areas, and most Asian Australians I know who live and work here in Melbourne don't see it as a part of their daily lives.

I have noticed that some Asian friends who have visited do feel a racist attitude based on incidents they encountered (ie friend got carded at a club and they refused to accept her HK black and white id as valid proof). And I definitely think the more visibly fob or tourist you appear the more you would encounter a negative attitude or jackass behaviour. Or maybe us local Asian have just learned to manage the racism by avoiding certain areas/people/behaviours like many of you in the States would have.

On the flip side, I have white work friends who have felt uncomfortable hanging out in places I frequent which have a very high Asian headcount and thought they were being stared at in a racist way, so maybe xenophobia is xenophobia whoever you are.

My father tells tales of the early 70's when he first migrated which make me wonder how the hell he managed to put up with it all, but things are not like that now. I have also noticed some of my friends siblings are alot more racially inclusive and less race concious (theirs or others) than my generation, so maybe they are the first age bracket to grow up in truly multi ethnic environment, rather than one of novelty or PC tolerance.

All that being said though, we do have huge neanderthal d***heads around here, and like neandertahl d***heads the world over (male or female, old or young), they will act up if they think they can get away with it (ie. won't get arrested/bashed/publicly humilited/dumped by their liberal minded partner).

I'm also Asian-Australian and to be honest, I just think racism is everywhere and I suppose we aren't as bad as say Ireland, England or even the USA. Face it, it's human nature to be racist it's a natural trait and well, there isnt much we can do really.

Wasn't too sure where to put this thread so I put it here. If you have a better suggestion, please let me know.

I've noticed Australia seems to have a bit of a reputation as a racist, particularly against Asians, country. I'm not passing judgement here, I just want to know what people think and gain a better understanding of how Australia is percieved.

Feel free to say whatever you like, I'm not here to pick a fight, I just want to know what you think.

To be honest, having travelled a fair bit through Europe and other prodominantly Anglo-Saxon based countries throughout the world, Australia isn't too bad...Racism is at least rather restricted to certain remote areas, I've lived for 21 years or so in Melbourne and I've only encountered a few occasions of racism, some involving some violence (see my other thread of experiences of racism).

To be fair, I can't say us Asians have been model citizens either. Sure, we have produced many great academics and own wealth through business but there are also the drug addicts, peddlers and other scums.

The only real gripe I have about Aussie (anglo) is that they get jealous and hence upset and then in some cases violent or racist towards out drive to become successful and work long working hours and eventually as this pays off, we are targeted.

[asvenus]

sadly non of these posts have altered my view that while OZ/NZ are indeed absolutely beautiful places to go..i probably will not be visiting them..

i dont know there is just something about being in a country where the indigenous people are treated like shit and not even recognised as valid citizens that i cant deal with..on top of that all this crap about racism is everywhere, Oz isnt the only place blah blah is not even bordering on being a real excuse for it..at least in the UK when im told to fuck off 'back' to 'my own' country its coming from people that 'racially' (if not ethnically) have some grounds to make these ridculous and repugnant statements..white people who live in OZ/NZ/Sth Africa to me are reaping al lthe benefits of being white from the moment they are born with no real understanding or acknowledgment of what this means for the people that dont benefit from those priveleges..we live under a mantle of white supremacy (no, not the KKK..think of it in broader terms) everywhere and everyday so im not surprised those countries are the way they are but i cant really reconcile myself to pretending it doesnt exist just because some people havent really experienced racism or others may be fucking around with women 'of colour'..not convincing enough

[mrcfo]

Interesting. Where did you go? I understand what you're saying and I could imagine some places, especially up north in places like Queensland, would be a bit on the racist side. You didn't feel safe? I think there is a fair bit of racism to a certain to degree but racial violence is pretty rare from what I understand. Sorry you had such a bad experience.

Racism is less pronounced in urban areas because there is a large concentration of Asians which is natural. What you find that remote areas where racist activity is rife is that these are the areas where few people are in contact with Asians, they tend to lump Asians as "one entire ethnicity", had very little education beyond say year 9 and perhaps have lived there for generations.

Make no mistake, remote areas like Qld, Perth and maybe areas in South Australia are racist as hell. So bad to the extent an Asian friend of mine who has a White bf were taunted (both of them) during a stay in Qld.

To conclude though, can one honestly say the Southern States of USA, Ireland, England, Scotland, remote parts of Canada are any better than Australia's less developed regions??

[pikachupacabra]

The question MrCFO though, was "Do you view Australia as a racist country?" It wasn't asking if it was more or less racist than some other areas.

[mrcfo]

The question MrCFO though, was "Do you view Australia as a racist country?" It wasn't asking if it was more or less racist than some other areas.

Err Australia like any country is racist, that is why I simply answered it that way. As I said, racism in Asutralia and I experienced it first hand is nothing different from the racism in all European/Anglo Saxon based countries.

I could easily ask is Canada/USA/England a racist country, I mean what kinda freggin q's is that, all countries are racist, the whole point is to what extent. All these countries are heavily influenced and ruled by the same ancestors do you seriously think it would be any different?????

[cheapfujianese]

I think that Australia, like all Anglo Saxon countries, is very racist. However, like other Anglo Saxon countries, it is institutionalized and not on the surface. Australia is probably more racist than the US, since there is a wider diversity in the US.

I think the most recent case with the Australian woman jailed in Indonesia for carrying drugs is another example of how racist the Australians are.

In my opinion, I wish Australia was a Chinese province. We could probably fit 200 million of our compatriots there, and develop it better than those lazy rednecks too.

[ahsingjai]

Is there oil in Australia?

[Martino]

In my opinion, I wish Australia was a Chinese province. We could probably fit 200 million of our compatriots there, and develop it better than those lazy rednecks too.

Yes, invasion will sort out those damn racists!

[pikachupacabra]

Yes, invasion will sort out those damn racists!


Yes! It worked for the US! Go go colonization and imperialism! Go Go go! Wonder twins combine!

[TongStar]

To be fair, I can't say us Asians have been model citizens either. Sure, we have produced many great academics and own wealth through business but there are also the drug addicts, peddlers and other scums.

mrcfo, firstly, much of the racism that exists against Asians in Australia today isn't even "rationalised" as you may allude to. In other words, there are many instances where Anglos despise us not necessarily because they think there's a high concentration of our community involved with the 'bad elements', but rather, they just simply can't stomach the fact that we're different and we live amongst them.

You also speak of "model citizens"- I personally don't feel the need to justify my existence to anyone, especially if the means of justification is to prove that by way of race, I am somehow worthy. Racism occurs when people judge others by what they perceive to be the person's racial tendencies, rather than their individual character. I don't want to be either accepted or rejected based on what someone thinks of my race (especially if their preconceptions are largely false). Who is anyone to judge my race in the first place?

I feel that as Asians, we need to find our own yardstick. Let's not benchmark ourselves against what others may think of us but rather, what we think of ourselves and what we aspire to be. But I digress, that's probably best for another thread...

[asvenus]

yes tongstar...that is exactly why adopting the mantle of 'model minority' and all that shit is so counterprogressive...

[koongchiulo]

I remember flying into Sydney once and at the airport, and I was going through customs.... some dam gwai-lo customs biarch gave me a grillin and asking me "wtf (in a very low tone of voice so no onelse can hear but him and me)I was doing in his country". And I could see his mates behind him giggling like a bunch of trailer park yobbos on crack.

Brisbane I find particulary racist. Or maybe it's because of one of my friend's dad who happens to be a "glorified" redneck lives there... first time I met him, first thing he said to me... "do you eat dogs?", ffs... from a complete stranger(as I've never met her dad until the week before her wedding). The irony of it all is that his daughter is married to an eurasian... but boy did the husband to be get a lot of flak during their courtship... he got called every racist thing under the sun.

Oops did I get carried away... mmm dam ADD

I do like Melbourne though... very relaxed and I didn't get half as much flak as I did while in Sydney or Brisbane.

New Zealand is a different story though.... read this crap from a bunch of facist pigs
"http://www.nationalfront.org.nz/index.php?page=policy#arts" and scroll down to #4 on their immigration policy.

I've had my fair share of flak here In NZ too. Can't drive without getting some gwai-lo giving me the evil eye, drive to slow and they call you bloody typical asian driver.... drive too fast and they call you bloody typical asian boy racer driver... no pleasing some people!

I used to bike to school in the early eighties... I can remember getting abuse from people driving past like there's no tomorrow.

Oops got carried away again... and BTW world... it's all about ME...!

[Sebro]

I think that Australia, like all Anglo Saxon countries, is very racist. However, like other Anglo Saxon countries, it is institutionalized and not on the surface. Australia is probably more racist than the US, since there is a wider diversity in the US.

I think the most recent case with the Australian woman jailed in Indonesia for carrying drugs is another example of how racist the Australians are.

In my opinion, I wish Australia was a Chinese province. We could probably fit 200 million of our compatriots there, and develop it better than those lazy rednecks too.

We are entitled to your opinin and its not really my 'job' to change it but I doubt you could fit 200 million people in Australia, regardless of their ethinicity or how "hard working" (as opposed to us 'lazy rednecks) they are, the simple fact is that the Australian land mass couldn't support that many people. It may look big but most of it is uninhabitable desert and unarable. Trust me, I've driven from Melbourne to Perth. Development is an entirely different issues that if you wish discuss please send me a personal message.

Once again, your entitled to think what you like, but I do think you've made some sweeping negitive generalisations with that post.

Is there oil in Australia?

No, but we have plenty of uranium!

[koongchiulo]

cmon all

enough bickering

lets all have a group hug! :eek:

I don't think Australia is racist as such... can't let a handful of people ruin what is a wonderful country. And you can't judge an entire country on a handful of bad seeds.

[hkRT]

In light of mrcfo's recent posts, I started to have a renewed interest in finding out more about the government policies in Australia, its education system and media, how Australians in general identify "Australian", their views on what's racist and what's not... etc.

Found 3 articles that give some insight into Australian culture and policies:

(The 3rd article was very long, but it's very well written.)


From: http://www.monash.edu.au/news/opinion/2005/racism.html

Is Australia racist?
11 July 2005

What do the future influencers of Malaysian public opinion think of Australia? Not much, if a recent workshop for young Malaysian journalists conducted in the sleepy town of Port Dickson 60 km south of Kuala Lumpur is anything to go by.

The speaker, a Malaysian harm reduction consultant, had been trying to press home how progressive the health system was in Australia, and, to prove his point, asked the workshop participants what came to mind when thinking of Australia.

Instead of the positive response he'd hoped for, the instant reply of one participant threw the whole discussion off-tangent. "Racism. Australia is a racist country," said the 23-year-old broadcaster.

Although the issue wasn't dwelt on for long, at the end of it, the room was in unanimous agreement: Australia was a racist country. Even the Australian woman who sat next to me, silent at first, later agreed she could understand how they, the country's future editors, commentators and spokespersons, could come to see it as such.

I certainly could: these journalists had been kids at the time of Barlow and Chambers, and heard the then Prime Minister Bob Hawke refer to Malaysians as "barbarians". A few years later they were to read about negative Australian media coverage of their country following the diplomatic crisis over the Gillespie children; hear another Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating, describe their leader as "recalcitrant"; and later, in their university years, read about Pauline Hanson and Australia rejecting refugees.

The last two decades has seen more and more Malaysian youth come to think of Australia as a breeding ground for arrogant white men, bent on keeping out anything Asian (or at least wielding a huge degree of control over it) and all out to impose their moral hegemony over the rest of the region. As they've grown up, this view of Australia has strengthened: it's now a prejudice, and as demonstrated earlier, being enunciated openly, even by members of the media.

The recent events of the Schapelle Corby saga have only served to further fuel animosity. About a month ago, after reading about calls for an Australian boycott of all things Indonesian following the verdict, I listened to a teenage friend bemoan the Australian reaction.

"Australians think they can impose their values on the rest of the world," she hissed angrily. "Just because they like to smoke pot, they think they can do it anywhere they want, even where it's illegal...and when one of them gets arrested for it, it's the Asian judiciary's fault."

This attitude is sure to worsen with the ongoing War on Terror, in which Australia has allied itself with the United States. As the image of the US continues to take a rough beating, so too does Australia's.

Who will be the loser if more and more young Malaysian influencers choose to shun Australia and pass on their thinking to other countries in the region? It's unlikely to be Malaysia.

Australia cannot hope to improve its regional influence or benefit from a partnership with Malaysia if neither peoples trust each other.

Dialogue is needed on both sides, and urgently. Otherwise, the damage done will extend over generations.

Dahlia Martin
Monash University Malaysia




From: http://www.monash.edu.au/news/opinion/2005/response-racism.html

'Is Australia racist'?
7 September 2005

Note - this piece is in response to 'Is Australia racist' by Dahlia Martin of the Monash University Malaysia campus in July 2005.

I think that it is very dangerous to conceive of Australia as 'racist'. It completely ignores the intricacies that make up Australia. It is a country of great contrasts -- from openness and selflessness to the basest of racism and hatred. But Australia, like all nations, needs to be seen in this light. And I find it extremely irresponsible that journalists and media representatives, with the power to shape perception in Malaysia, are willing to accept and disseminate such views. This is part of the problem. This is intellectually very irresponsible -- as these journalists and media representatives will only see one side of the story.

No one country has a clean slate historically. You name the country; it has skeletons in the closet. Australia -- Aboriginals, asylum seekers, White Australia Policy, mining in Papua New Guinea, to name a few. Malaysia -- dictatorship, anti-Semitism, to name a few. I, as an Australian, am prepared to accept the shortcomings of my nation, but I am not prepared to stand by whilst irresponsibly journalists, deride my nation as racist. This comment completely ignores Australia's great immigration boom, where now not only one in three Australians speak a language other than English at home but that literally every nationality on Earth has a presence in Australia. It has so contributed to the flourishing of Australian identity as a great mixed bag of cultural vibrancy and social and linguistic diversity. Entire streets in major cities are devoted to a particular nationality. Altona is renowned as the home of the Maltese community in Australia. Streets in Melbourne's northern suburbs are sometimes solely made up of the one village in southern Italy when they moved to Australia.

Australia and Australians have no intention of imposing any sort of hegemony, let alone moral. What Australia really wants is to be recognised as different in cultural terms to the rest of South East Asia, but closely aligned also. What Australia wants is to develop and expand its economy so it can further provide for its twenty million citizens. Australia wants closer ties with South East Asia; to distance ourselves in anyway is counterproductive to our self-sustainment as part of the region.

In regards to Schapelle Corby, there have been idiots who have overacted to the verdict passed down by the court. To myself, and many other Australians, what we saw in this case was concern at a judicial and legal system known for its corruption and nepotism and with few checks on its powers, and a circumstance where a young woman receives twenty years in prison for importing marijuana (a substantial amount) despite widespread fears of police mishandling of evidence in Bali, and where the known plotter and instigator of the Bali bombings, where 202 persons died, receives 22 months in prison on parole. With the amnesty recently declared in Indonesia and apparent 'good behaviour' in prison, Bashir will probably be out soon.

What is a greater evil in Indonesian/Asian eyes - importation of marijuana or the deliberate planning and initiation of the deaths of hundreds of innocent foreign tourists?

Ramsay Wright
Arts, 3rd Year




http://members.optusnet.com.au/~griff52/immigration1988.htm

Immigration, racism and Australian capitalism
By Phil Griffiths, Canberra, Australia. Back to my home page: Australian history: Towards a Marxist analysis

This article was an attempt to sum up a socialist analysis of immigration and racism in Australian history; and to explain the various responses to the anti-Asian mobilisation which began with Geoffrey Blainey in 1984. In particular, it was an attempt to confront the problems of mainstream left nationalism in Australia when dealing with issues such as racism, which is why it was written as a review of and response to Jock Collins' book: Migrant Hands in a Distant Land (Pluto Press). It was published in The Socialist, August/September 1988.
There is, however, an ungenerosity and polemical stridency to this review, a feature of all my writing at the time, and for which I apologise. It tends to hide and diminish the enormous value of Jock Collins' book to people interested in the long sweep of immigration and racism in Australia. I believe the article still has merit despite this.

•••••

JOHN HOWARD'S campaign to cut Asian immigration is just the latest in a long tradition of anti-Asian racism in Australia.

Barely four years ago [ie in 1984], Professor Geoffrey Blainey launched a campaign against the Vietnamese boat people who were settling here, claiming that Australia was being "overrun" by Asians, that our "heritage" was under threat, that "social cohesion" was in danger, and the government, far from "defending" us, was allowing this to happen.

The immediate result was a wave of activity by the fascist thugs of National Action and a sharp rise in physical violence against Asian people.

But all that Blainey really did (which Howard is attempting to emulate) was to tap into an extraordinarily deep well of racial hostility that runs right through Australian society. Indeed, Australian nationalism has, for most of this century, been expicitly based on racism.

Billy Hughes who later became a Labor Prime Minister proudly proclaimed in 1901 that:

Our chief plank, is, of course, a White Australia. There is no compromise about that! The industrious coloured brother has to go — and remain away.

This White Australia Policy, which excluded non-European people from Australia, was one of the founding principles when the six states federated in 1901. It illustrates how closely the questions of immigration and racism have been linked in Australian history.

But whilst the campaigns by Howard and Blainey may have their roots in White Australia, the White Australia policy itself has been formally buried since 1972. Australia today has upwards of 100,000 Vietnamese refugees living here.

The second target of Howard's (and Blainey's) campaign is multiculturalism. Again we can see that these racist campaigns have deep roots in traditional Australian nationalism, which was fanatical about our "British roots". Yet the ideology they're fighting, multiculturalism, the idea that Australia is composed of people from a variety of backgrounds, is itself an indication of how the prevailing ideas have changed since the war.

This is not to downplay the importance of what Howard is now doing. We have now had five years in which Labor has cut our living standards, and a large number of ordinary workers are very angry about things. They are looking for people to blame. In the absence of a struggle against the real problem — Australian capitalism and its administrators in the Labor government — workers and unemployed people can lash out in any direction, especially in the direction of even more powerless scapegoats.

The potential for a massive increase in violent racism is very real. And if such a movement does develop, it will not only have horrific consequences for the victims, it will also let the ruling class off the hook, allowing them to impose austerity, unemployment and speedups on the mass of the working class.

To fight such a development, we have to understand it. And that means understanding firstly the roots of racism in Australia, how they are connected with the question of immigration, and why it is that major changes have taken place.

With that in mind, a major new book on Australia's post-war immigration by a left-wing academic ought to be something to welcome. Unfortunately, Migrant Hands in a Distant Land, by Jock Collins is a failure.

Not that it doesn't have much valuable material within it, especially on the discrimination faced by immigrants and the different experiences of the various national groupings to come here. But the book fails politically. Thoroughly permeated by left nationalism, it fails to outline how the interests of the working class (and the immigrants generally) can be defended against the racists.

Australia: A colonial settler state

WHY is it then, that the question of immigration has so consistently aroused extreme racism in Australian history?

The answer lies in Australia's origins as a white, colonial, settler state in Asia. Initially, the white settlement of Australia 200 years ago was undertaken to expand the British empire, to extend Britain's military power and keep the rival French out.

This imperialism needed a set of ideas to justify and even ennoble its outrages against the indigenous peoples it conquered. This was white racism, the idea that the conquered were sub-human, and later, that the British were bringing civilisation to the heathen savages of Asia and Africa, that it was all for their own good.

This racism, strong as it was in Britain itself, became even more virulent the closer you got to the front line of the race war. And so in South Africa, Zimbabwe, India and Australia, this racism was at its most extreme. In more recent times, we can see much the same phenonemon at work in the zionist invasion of Palestine. Building an exclusive settler community by forcing out the original inhabitants forced zionism to take up an extreme form of anti-Arab racism.

Today in Australia, it is the towns in the NSW, Queensland and Western Australian countryside that see the most violent racism against Aboriginal people.

But racism in Australia was never just directed at the Aboriginal people. Australia was Britain's white beachhead in South-East Asia and the Pacific, and a vast, wealthy, underpopulated continent in a region reduced to extreme poverty by imperialist conquest.

As the Australian economy developed and the local ruling class became the junior partner of British imperialism in the region, so being white and British became the central element in Australian nationalism and "fear of Asia" the central element in Australian racism.

Securing the continent for British imperialism could never just be a question of sending a few soldiers (and convicts) to Port Jackson. It had to involve populating the continent and building up agriculture and industry. When a specifically Australian capitalism began to rapidly develop in the 1830s with the explosion of the wool industry, the Australian bosses themselves wanted more immigration and set up the first assisted passage schemes.

One motive of the squatters was the desire for cheap, obedient labour to do the uncomfortable, dangerous and lonely work of minding their sheep. And certainly, prolonged periods of labour shortages have, over the past 150 years, encouraged the bosses to finance large-scale immigration. Indeed, of the seven million people who migrated to live in Australia over the past 200 years, over half, approximately 3.7 million, came on assisted passages paid for by various governments.

But easing labour shortages (and undermining the bargaining power of workers) was only ever part of the reason for large-scale immigration. Indeed, the bosses have been prepared to continue it in periods when unemployment was high enough to guarantee sufficient labour, at times when government financed immigration would have seemed to be a poor investment, periods like the 1920s, when despite unemployment averaging about 8%, over 200,000 immigrants (out of a total of 300,000) were paid for by various governments, many of them put on farms given to them by governments.

In his book, Jock Collins presents Australia's immigration as essentially similar to that of Europe at the height of the post-war boom, when millions of immigrants and "guestworkers" were sucked into Europe from Turkey, Algeria, Morrocco, Pakistan, Jamaica and so on.

From this he draws the conclusion that the populations of the under-developed countries essentially fitted Marx's category of "reserve armies" of labour, to be drawn into production during economic expansion, and then discarded afterwards. This analysis does generally apply to Europe, but the Australian experience was quite different.

The immigrants drawn to Australia were not simply brought here to work while they were useful and then "go home" in times of recession. The government brought them here to be permanent settlers. Of course, workers from non-English speaking backgrounds were often the first to be laid off during major recessions, but they were not then sent home. Nor, apart from a tiny fringe, was there any pressure for this. Indeed, there was continuing immigration throughout the post-war recessions, even if the numbers were cut.

The reason for this lies in the long-term needs of Australian capitalism. A significantly larger population would mean a much larger home market, the ability of local capitalists to create much larger businesses selling to much larger markets. You only have to think of the size and power of Australian capitalism today compared with before the Second World War.

The large-scale post-war immigration provided both the labour and the demand to build a significant manufacturing industry. Had this not happened, Australian industry would have remained far more backward than it is. You only have to look at the power of the United States and the Soviet Union today, at least part of which comes from their large populations compared with the rest of the industrialised world.

The military impulse to growth

Then, finally, there are military considerations, always an important factor for a ruling class seeing itself as an outpost of western imperialism in the East.

It is no accident that the cry "Populate or Perish" was raised most vigorously after the two world wars. In May, 1944, well before the end of the war, but after the decisive defeat of Japan's Pacific thrust, the Deputy Prime Minister, Frank Forde, drew the following lesson:

The war has taught us that the financial and man-power obligations and other difficulties associated with the defence of Australia must be spread over a very much bigger population than our 7,000,000. History will one day reveal how closely Australia escaped being over-run by a ruthless enemy. Providence gave us another chance. The responsibility is ours to see that we shall never again be unprepared.

In reality, history (in the form of captured war documents) has proven that the Japanese military had neither the desire nor the resources to "over-run" Australia. It would have required a million soldiers and a fleet vastly bigger than the one they had. But for the ruling class that was not the point. They were scared that another power might be able to assert itself in their back yard. After all, the Japanese did conquer half of Nuigini, and that was very much an Australian possession.

As well as spurring the ruling class into large-scale immigration schemes, the two world wars also spurred on the development of industry. The First World War led to the rapid completion of the first steelworks at Newcastle; the second to the massive program of industrialisation that saw the growth of steel, cars, whitegoods and so on in the 50s and 60s. After all, industry is just as important to waging a war as population. The soldiers need guns (and submarines and fighter planes) if they are to defend the bosses successfully.

This drive to develop was not purely a question of chasing profits; at times, vast railway, engineering and farming projects were organised seemingly without regard to their potential profitability, and in both the 1890s and 1930s these huge, unprofitable investments added to the problems caused by a general economic crisis.

So the particular form that Australian capitalism took as a white settler state in Asia, led to two parallel phenonema: a virulent racism to promote the interests of the imperialist spearhead, and a continual drive to attact new settlers and to build up the economy.

And the two came together in the White Australia policy, officially introduced in 1901, that excluded non-Europeans (and most non-British Europeans) from settling in Australia for over 60 years. Not only did the racism dictate immigration policy, but massive British immigration was consciously seen as a way of asserting the dominance of the "British" race in the New World.

The labour movement newspaper, The Hummer, put it clearly: "The camels must go; the chows must also leave; and Indian hawkers must hawk their wares in some other country. This country was built expressly for Australians and Australians are going to run the show."

The post-war immigration

THE society we see in Australia today is a long way from the days of the White Australia policy. The massive post-war immigration program has turned Australia from an almost exclusively British enclave into one of the more ethnically diverse countries in the world.

Whereas the ideas of a British White Australia were absolutely hegemonic in 1945, today fully a quarter of the population is of non-English speaking origin. Indeed, a growing number of settlers today come from Asia, the Middle East, South America and Africa, something that would have been unthinkable in 1945.

Of course, the government in 1945 didn't set out to create an ethnically diverse society — far from it. Neither did it set out to create the idea of multiculturalism, the idea that Italian, Greek, Lebanese and other immigrant cultures were welcome here and could be integrated into a new idea of what Australian nationalism was all about.

Indeed, for more than a decade during which large number of non-British immigrants came to settle in Australia, the official government policy was "assimilation"; in other words, they should abandon their old language and culture and become just like "Australians", British Australians, that is.

Behind this major change in Australian society and attitudes lay two immediate factors. Firstly, the willingness of the government from the very beginning to accept, indeed to seek, non-British immigrants if British weren't available. The second was the changing nature of imperialism which opened the way for the rapid integration of the Australian economy with the Japanese.

The proposal to seek large numbers of non-British immigrants from war-ravaged Europe meant the collision of two ideas that had been central to the building of Australia as a colonial settler state tied to British imperialism: the drive to national development, but on a racially, ethnically exclusive basis.

Underlying the mass immigration program was, of course, the ruling class's long-term strategy of building up the population for national development. But the fright they got during the Second World War, and the extreme labour shortages they faced, gave proposals for mass immigration a powerful impetus. It led people like Arthur Calwell, the Labor politician who was the architest of post-war immigration, to begin breaking with some of the ideas of the past. As early as 1942, he was arguing,

When I see the splendid specimens of American manhood walking the streets of Australian cities and recollect that America has been for more than a generation, a melting pot for European nations, I am satisfied with the result of the amalgamation.

We should lose nothing by adopting a similar policy. It would be far better for us to have in Australia 20 million or 30 million people of 100 per cent white extraction than to continue the narrow policy of having a population of 7 million people who are 98 per cent British.

But the break with the past was only partial. White Australia and racist "fear" of the "yellow hordes" was still an important element motivating him — indeed, as Immigration Minister he tried to expel 1000 Asian refugees from Australia at the end of the war. "While we have very few people in this country we shall naturally excite the avarice and covetousness of our coloured neighbours to the north."

Quite apart from the grandiose nation-building ambitions of the government, there was an extreme demand for labour, a demand that could not be satisfied in the short term. In December 1947, there were just 123 people registered as unemployed in Victoria, with just 37 on unemployment or sickness benefits in Melbourne. Meanwhile, there were over 20,000 vacancies, and over 80,000 nationally.

And there was an extreme shortage of shipping available to bring people from Britain, meaning that only 6500 came in 1947. At the same time, in the refugee camps of Europe were millions of people whose lives had been destroyed. The Chifley government saw in these people the chance to carry out its nation-building. Indeed, there was a strong push within the government to bring 50,000 orphaned children to Australia over three years. As Andrew Markus has commented,

Children were ideal immigrants [as they] could be housed in converted military establishments, and because of their youth would be adaptable and have a long working life ahead of them… In the view of the Army representative, Captain Plimsoll, if necessary the children could be taken from defeated countries without consent and given English names.

Although this grotesque scheme never got off the ground, it shows exactly the logic behind the immigration program. It had nothing to do with the needs of the refugees. They were nothing more than human clay to be moulded to the needs of Australian capitalism.

The refugee program brought nearly 200,000 people to Australia in just a few years. Left-wing refugees were systematically weeded out — specifically the large pool of Spanish republicans living in France as a result of Franco's dictatorship — as was anyone "too old", disabled, or in any other way unable to work hard for a new set of masters.

But whatever the government might want, the ideas of White Australia were still dominant, and nowhere more so than amongst union officials. Calwell engaged in a double game. He promised that "for every foreign migrant there would be ten from the United Kingdom". And he did everything possible to maximise the number from Britain.

But at the same time, he set out to soften the extreme racism towards other Europeans, with a range of pamphlets and other propaganda arguing for a liberalisation in people's attitudes. The course towards multiculturalism was gradually being set.

But if entrenched racism in the unions forced a certain amount of diplomacy on Calwell, it did have other advantages. It enabled the government to impose the most appalling conditions on the refugees it brought out. They were brought on two-year indentures which guaranteed that they would do jobs unwanted by anyone else, often in remote regions. They were prohibited from involvement in politics or industrial action. The unions not only accepted this, but insisted on it, so that "their members" were not disadvantaged.

Thus was entrenched the "two-class" immigration program that still exists today, with British and northern European immigrants generally moving into work similar to what they were able to do in their country of origin, and another layer of first, refugees, and then Italian, Greek, Turkish, and Lebanese immigrants who were sent to work in the Snowy Mountains, laying new railroads, into the steel mills, the car plants, the textile factories and onto the roads doing the dirtiest work for the lowest wages.

The left inside the union bureaucracy, thoroughly tainted with racism as it was, went right along with this. Indeed, in the late 1940s, the communist-controlled Ironworkers Union developed a scandalous alliance with BHP to condemn migrants from the Baltic countries to the worst jobs and punitive working conditions in the steel mills because they came from "anti-communist" backgrounds.

The beneficiaries of these divisions were the ruling class. This partial segmentation of the working class meant they got a guaranteed supply of relatively low-cost labour, on the basis of which they were able to massively industrialise the Australian economy.

Immigrants fight back

IMMIGRANT workers didn't take this oppression lying down. It is undoubtedly true that the extreme racism faced, for instance, by Italian immigrants in the early 1950s — a racism more extreme than that faced by the Vietnamese today — often intimidated them from fighting for their rights. But there were some important struggles.

When they came to Australia, migrants were often forced to live in barracks in appalling conditions until work was found for them. One of the most notorious was at Bonegilla, in northern Victoria near Albury. During the recession of 1961, this work dried up and many who had come to Australia on the promise of good jobs found themselves stuck in this isolated, primitive camp with $2 a week to live on.

They began to hold protest marches every week. Eventually, when a cop manhandled a demonstrator, one of the marches became violent. Police were brought in from Melbourne with pistols and clubs and one of the barracks violently cleared.

The car factories have long profited from the sweated labour of the most recent wave of immigrants, and this has led to a number of explosive struggles. In 1964 there was a long strike for a $6 pay rise. The militancy of the workers terrified the conservative bureaucrats of the Vehicle Builders' Union who organised a fraudulent ballot to get the workers back to work.

But perhaps the most important struggle was a long strike at the Ford Broadmeadows plant in 1973. After four weeks, the union officials, led by the Communist Party's Laurie Carmichael, tried to get them back to work by falsely declaring a vote to go back carried. The workers erupted and stormed the stage. Carmichael's coat was torn as he was shepherded to safety. The next day at the plant, 1500 workers staged a mass demonstration, tearing down a 30 metre wall and getting those workers who had gone back out on strike again.

There were many other struggles, some big, many small. The bulk of the membership of the Builders' Labourers' Federation were migrants, expected to work in dirty, dangerous conditions for low pay. A series of militant strikes in the late 60s and early 70s won such things as the right to toilets and showers on building sites, as well as better safety and higher wages.

The growing prominence of migrants in strikes was part of a general process in society. There was a rising level of struggle amongst the whole working class as strike days rose from around a million in 1968 to six million in 1974. This created a climate of confidence and militancy — you could win real gains — and along with the victory against America in Vietnam, helped shift politics sharply to the left.

This upturn in class struggle also inspired many of the oppressed to fight, and so the early seventies saw the rise of the Women's Liberation and Gay movements, putting an end to the sexual ice-age which had begun in the fifties.

Government attitudes to migrants had been racist and contemptuous, hostile to the languages, culture and traditions they brought with them. In the late 1940s, the first secretary of the Department of Immigration blocked moves to print information for migrants in their own languages. He argued:

A knowledge of the English language is the first prerequisite for a European migrant to help his [sic] assimilation into the community. Any obstruction to his learning the language should be strongly resisted. We think that catering for him in his own tongue would constitute such an obstruction.

The government had been forced to back away from some of those attitudes in the mid-1960s, because they found an increasing number of immigrants were returning home — around 15% — a loss that seriously worried the government. Australia wasn't so wonderful after all, and the post-war boom was reaching even the most underdeveloped areas in Europe, transforming the prospects of people who lived there, making the journey to a hostile Australia less attractive than it had been.

The government responded by dropping the official policy of "integration" which demanded that migrants give up their past and become just like "Australians". Money was given to migrant communities for welfare work and some cultural activities, and English language programs for migrant children were finally introduced into the schools.

The Labor Party, under Gough Whitlam, moved even more sharply to respond to migrant anger and frustration, appointing the Italian-born Al Grassby as Minister for Immigration. Grassby presided over the introduction of multiculturalism, which was rapidly accepted by the Liberals as well.

The turn to multiculturalism

The ruling were in a dilemma. The dominant Australian nationalism emphasised Australians as a "British" people, and discrimination against European migrants reinforced the attachment of many middle class people and backward workers to this nationalism. So there were real dangers in making migrants "equal".

But for thirty years they had built up a large European immigrant population, who they systematically exploited and discriminated against, making big profits in the process. Now these people represented a large proportion of the ppopulation, and an even greater proportion of workers in basic industry, where as unionists they had great economic power.

If they kept these people outside the dominant political framework, they could become a major base for radical opposition to the system, less likely to accept "sacrifice" in the "national interest". Bosses, Labor politicians and trade union officials alike had been shaken by the vehemence and militancy with which the Ford strike had been waged, and the inability of even communists to contain it.

They opted very firmly for incorporation. The government set up an array of ethnic affairs commissions, enquiries, radio stations, new welfare programs, anti-discrimination legislation and the like, with the aim of drawing in middle-class immigrant activists.

And the politicians set out to redefine Australian nationalism so that it could no include migrants. This was the central role of multiculturalism. It said that the majority of Australian should accept minority groups, while minority groups must accept primary loyalty to Australia.

This is just what the middle-class business people and professionals wanted to hear. it gave them a role within Australian capitalism: representing "their community". It also encouraged immigrant workers to now identify as "Italian-Australians", "Greek-Australians" and so on, in other words to identify as a product of the nation they had left, as part of identifying with the nation they now lived in.

This is not to discount the importance of the reforms and the positive edge to multiculturalism; the implicit rejection of some of the old ideas of Australian nationalism, and an acceptance of people who had previously been little more than "dagoes" or "wogs". But we should be clear that multiculturalism was always far more aimed at the immigrants — winning a commitment from them to be loyal to "Australia" — than the Anglo-Australians. You only have to compare the coverage of the issue on SBS with any other TV network to see this.

Nevertheless, the economic security engendered by the historic post-war boom, the sheer size of the European immigration, the presence of many immigrants in factories and workplaces working alongside Anglo-Australian workers, the involvement of immigrants in strikes and the gradual shift of attitudes in the unions meant that multiculturalism was generally accepted without hostility and embraced and officially pormoted by Fraser.

But it hasn't changed the real position most people from non-English backgrounds face, and it only ever toned down and adjusted the racism that dominated Australian society.

A changed imperialism

HOWEVER it was not primarily the large-scale post-war immigration that put an end to the White Australia Policy. The central role here was played by Australia's changing relationship to the world system, and specifically to Japan.

For most of this century, Japan has been the focus of racist paranoia towards Asians. From the moment Japan defeated the Russian navy in 1904, news about Japan was guaranteed to arouse the most extreme hysteria. For many Australians, the Second World War was the race war against Japan that had long been inevitable. Even today, people like Bruce Whiteside and his pathetic anti-Japanese movement on the Gold Coast can build on decades of anti-Japanese racism.

But out of the ruins of war, Japanese bosses built a powerful industrial state, one that needed massive imports of coal, iron and other raw materials. In 1958, the Australian government signed its first formal trade agreement with Japan. Soon Japan had displaced Britain as Australia's biggest trading partner.

The world had changed. Australia had long stopped being a colonial settler state. Now it was a junior partner to American imperialism, but American imperialism took a different form to the British imperialism of pre-war days. South-East Asia was no longer a series of colonies ruled from Europe, but now a series of independent nations incorporated into the western camp.

Decolonisation meant that the form of racism that had dominated the west in the past could now be a liability. Countries like Indonesia, Japan, Malaya, Singapore and so on would have to be treated as equals, not as vassals. The breaking down of the old imperialist empires into one big western bloc meant that there were now new investment and trading opportunities.

And in the last decade, japan has become a major source of capital for investment in Australia, and japanese tourism a major element in the spectacular growth of the tourist industry. Anti-Asian racism in Australia can only harm Australian bosses in these areas.

So the changing nature of world capitalism gave rise to the idea that Australia was really an Asian country, and Australian capitalism would have to carve out its future as part of the Asian-Pacific rim. That was one of the motivations for the Colombo Plan, a scheme which saw thousands of young Asians studying at Australian universities.

Now this was only really part of the story. Australia still remained a junior partner of American imperialism in the region, a far more reliable ally than poorer and less stable countries.

American investment in Asia often flowed via Australian subsidiaries.

Australia maintained a major military presence in the region, with heavy involvement in the Korean War, in Malaysia against a guerilla insurgency, and when America invaded Vietnam, it was Australia which pushed up the scale of the war and sent thousands of troops to back the Americans up.

This imperialist presence provided a counter-pressure towards maintaining anti-Asian racism, so the shift away from it was very uneven. Indeed, the need to win support for the Vietnam war meant a whole new lease of life for anti-Asian racism as right-wing politicians drew maps on television of a region threatened with being overrun by the "yellow hordes".

But the defeat in Vietnam and Nixon's recognition of China all forced a reassessment on Australia's political establishment. In addition, thousands of the people radicalised over Vietnam were forced to confront the question of anti-Asian racism, and they represented a significant base of support for moves by the ruling class away from White Australia, though the anti-Asian racism it embodied still remains potent a decade and a half after its formal burial.

Today, immigration remains important for expanding the home market. Likewise, racism remains important, to divide the working class and guarantee that there will always be pressure on immigrants to accept the shit jobs at the bottom of the ladder.

But the changing Australian economy, and the change in Australia's relationship to the dominant imperialism have partially disconnected the two. No longer is immigration a way of guaranteeing the triumph of the "British race"; no longer does racism exclude non-British (or non-white) immigrants. Mainstream Australian nationalism now encompasses non-English speaking traditions, and is far more oriented to economically penetrating world markets than keeping out Asians and rival powers.

But that doesn't mean that the ideas of White Australia have disappeared. Ideas live on long after the conditions that give rise to them have evaporated. Racism, especially, is continually regenerated by the insecurity and competition of capitalism, and Australia's position as a junior partner for American imperialism in Asia will always mean the potential for a ruling class sponsored revival of anti-Asian racism.

With all that in mind, it is no accident that the so-called "Blainey debate" took place shortly after the worst recession in 50 years, and no accident that John Howard can get away with going on the offensive after five years of falling living standards have finally started generating real resentment amongst Australian workers.

What the changing conditions do mean is that there is a section of the ruling class that is hostile to Howard's strategy. And it also means that there is a section of the migrant community who see the danger that if anti-Asian racism is stoked up, they can be the next victims.

But because racism is such a fundamental weapon for dividing the working class, there is no way the bosses can seriously fight it. At best, they will put pressure on Howard to tone down or shut up, but they won't fight racism in general — indeed they are responsible for the conditions that nurture it.

Compromising with racism

THE TRAGEDY of the Australian left is that with a few honorable exceptions, it has always succumbed to the dominant racism, and often even promoted it.

Capitulation on the question of racism in turn has always been linked to accepting Australian nationalism. That's easy to see in the days of the White Australian settler state, when racism was fundamental to the Australian nation, but it's just as true today.

If your starting point is nationalism, then the rights of ordinary people in other countries lose any central importance. You accept the division of the world into hostile, competing nations, rather than exposing the really fundamental division in the world between bosses everywhere and the workers they exploit.

You identify with the "economy", or the "social cohesion" of your own country before you identify with the plight of Vietnamese boat people being turned away in their thousands from the refugee camps in Hong Kong. But what is it that differentiates "us" Australians from "them" Vietnamese? Race and nationality.

You cannot consistently fight these divisions on a nationalist basis and tragically, Jock Collins' book is a classic example of that truth. Collins sees himself explicitly as a Marxist and is clearly hostile to racism in general, supports multiculturalism and clearly identifies with the oppressed.

But what does he end up arguing for? A tighter limit on immigration than we have at the moment. "The annual immigration intake must not undermine the growing racial tolerance and the relative absence of racial conflict."

Is this so very different from Howard's argument that, "If it [the level of Asian immigration] is, in the eyes of some in the community too great, it would be in our immediate term interests and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little so that the capacity of the community to absorb were greater."

True, Jock Collins does not single out Asian immigration, but does anyone seriously imagine that British immigrants "undermine the growing racial tolerance" in Australia?

He proposes that immigration be restricted to about 100,000 people a year (compared with around 140,000 at the moment), that beyond this, people should be prevented from settling in Australia in case unemployment starts to provide the racists with mass support.

In other words, he argues for a "soft" racist immigration policy (not to many "foreigners") in the hope that this will keep the Blaineys of the world marginalised. Like Howard, he expects the victims to pay for racial prejudice in society. Rather than confronting racism, rather than rooting it out, he ends up compromising with the racists.

Jock Collins' nationalist framework ends up completely undermining any possibility of his book being a Marxist guide to how to fight racism, because it leads him to abandon any working class perspective. This nationalism is summed up in the title of the final chapter: "Guidelines for an Australian Immigration Policy". What can this possibly be about except advice to the Australian government, on the pretence that there is an Australian national interest?

But the interests of Australian bosses and Australian workers are fundamentally counterposed, with the government ruling in the interests of capitalism. How can an "Australian" immigration policy be anything other than a policy for the bosses and their government?

And that's how it turns out. "Illegal immigration should be policed more closely," "immigration has by and large been seen as a benefit," "The limits on intake are not Australia's ability to recruit migrants, but its ability to ensure successful settlement," and so on. How does any of this benefit the working class in its struggle against capital? Who's going to be doing this "policing", and in whose interests? For whom has immigration been seen as a "benefit"?

When has racist, capitalist Australia ever been able to "ensure successful settlement" for migrants, and anyway, successful in who's eyes? Sure, immigration has been successful for the bosses, but how successful has it been for the immigrants? Collins' own book goes over and over and over the way migrants have suffered to be able to settle in a new country.

At the moment, there is a debate going on in the ruling class about immigration — how many to allow, on what basis and so on — and this is part of a wider debate about the future of Australian capitalism.

The Labor government has sharply increased the number of immigrants allowed in, and there are those like John Elliott and Phil Ruthven of the consultancy firm IBIS who want the level raised to 250,000 a year. They see large-scale immigration as a way of continuing to attract large-scale capital inflow, massively building up the economy and the power of the Australian ruling class in the world.

Others are more concerned. For instance, Blainey and Howard are arguing that multiculturalism threatens to break down the existing British-centred nationalism that has served the bosses so well. And they can see that nationalism, the kind of ideas that have persuaded workers to accept five years of wage cutting in the "national interest", are very important to the ruling class.

Rather than giving a lead to militant or class conscious workers, Collins engages in that debate; about what's best for "Australia". It's a political position no different from that of the ACTU when they promote wage restraint, changed work practices and higher productivity.

Revolutionary socialists have always taken an entirely different standpoint. Whilst immigration has only ever been allowed by the government if it thinks it's in the interests of the bosses, we have always been opposed to immigration controls against ordinary people.

The starting point of our analysis is that racism and nationalism are weapons for the ruling class in its efforts to divide the international working class. So we argue that anyone who wants to come to live in Australia should have the right to do so. Once you start denying people the right to live where they choose, you end up with a racist policy. It's unavoidable.

Why controls are racist

YOU CANNOT devise an immigration policy that doesn't have racial implications, and these implications are inevitably drawn out by the racists in society.

That, after all, is what John Howard is doing: saying that he'll cut the level of Asian immigration by cutting family reunion — because the bulk of family reunions apply to the most recent immigrant communities, such as the Vietnamese.

Labor too is scaling down family reunion, but is much quieter about pointing out the racist implications. That doesn't mean they go unnoticed.

And once migrants arrive, we have to argue for unions to fight for their rights, to fight all attempts to give them the shit jobs, all attempts to divide the Australian-born off. It is so much harder to do this if you allow racism and nationalism any quarter at all.

Migrant Hands in a Distant Land is not a book for fighters against racism, but primarily an exercise in sterile sociology. It has lots and lots of statistics about the discrimination suffered by non English-speaking migrants, and this information is very useful. But this is where the value of the book ends, because it primarily views migrants as victims.

There are, in the entire book, barely a few paragraphs mentioning strikes involving migrants workers. Virtually nothing on how the migrants themselves fought racism, fought their terrible conditions and low wages, fought the intimidation they faced from supervisors and government. And nothing at all on how racism and discrimination were fought by the left.

Yet it is in the workplace that racism can most effectively be fought, in workplaces where immigrant and native-born Australians work side by side and cooperate, where they are forced to unite in union action if they are to defend their wages and conditions.

And it is on the factory floor, in the workplaces where profits are made and where workers, immigrant and otherwise, have the power to change society. It is when they exercise that power, when they develop the confidence that comes with taking on the bosses and winning, that the native-born Australians can start to throw out their racist hostilities and develop a class view of the world.

None of this exists for Jock Collins. Not even the basic class arguments against racism are made. For him, the focus for changing things for immigrants lies with the government: multiculturalism, teaching English, interpretors, welfare provided through community organisations, and so on. These topics get page after repetitive page. And in this way, the idea of migrants as victims who need to be looked after feeds into his nationalist perspective, with change centred on government action.

Social management (in the national interest) rather than self-emancipation is the order of the day.

So Migrant Hands in a Distant Land is a failure. Its analysis of why the ruling class promoted immigration is flawed, it ignores the struggles of both anti-racists and the migrants themselves, making it impossible for any activist to draw any conclusions about how to fight today. And its nationalist framework leads Jock Collins to promote a softer version of the racism he hates, the racism that so dominates Australian society, even today.



I agree with many points presented in the last article above.

[BigLew]

I been to Australia. Racist? Don't know really, but I got alot of fine Australian ass!

[hkRT]

I been to Australia. Racist? Don't know really, but I got alot of fine Australian ass!

I don't even live in Australia. So racism whatever, who cares? If the Australians don't care, if the various minorities and immigrants living there don't care, who cares? What's the point of activism anyway? Even in the U.S. or wherever, racism whatever.. It's a me world. Why bother, as long as you are not affected. Don't look into the government policies. Don't look at history. Don't cry out racism, it doesn't exist. Don't whine. It's getting old. Better yet, don't talk and don't vote unless you are "real" Australians or Americans or whatever..

I'm sorry I am just trying to inject some humor as I haven't done so enough...

Mods, please delete my previously long post and those articles. They are irrelevant and pointless.

[Chu Chi]

Wasn't too sure where to put this thread so I put it here. If you have a better suggestion, please let me know.

I've noticed Australia seems to have a bit of a reputation as a racist, particularly against Asians, country. I'm not passing judgement here, I just want to know what people think and gain a better understanding of how Australia is percieved.

Feel free to say whatever you like, I'm not here to pick a fight, I just want to know what you think.


Sebro, when you speak of Australia being racist, are you refering to the people who live there?

If so do you mean the Asian people and aboriginal people?


CC

[s1eve]

Sebro, when you speak of Australia being racist, are you refering to the people who live there?

If so do you mean the Asian people and aboriginal people?


CC

What do you think Chu Chi? Is he referring to the people who live there?

If so, does he mean the Asian people and the Aborigina people?

Why don't you clarify this for us? :rolleyes:

[shakuhachi]

hkRT, the above articles do not give a good analysis of Australia because the first two rely on the opinions of Malaysians, who have been subjected an anti Australian propaganda campaign in the Malaysian media for many years, and the fact that their opinions are not formed by real life contact with Australians.

The last article describes immigration controls (any amount of controls) as racist. So if a country does not have completely open borders, then it is racist. Policies like 'family reunion' have put an unfair burden on the country. Up until recently people were bringing in