Australians are
slowly edging toward facing the reality of what the boatpeople saga is really
all about.
The catch-cry of
the right-wing Australian commentariat and politicians has been ‘Stop the
Boats’. They have claimed in their rhetoric that by stopping the boats the
drownings will stop. They have said
that, in order to deter others from making the perilous journey across the sea
in leaky boats, those that do safely make it to Australia’s shores must be
treated harshly by being told they will never be able to settle in Australia
and that they’ll be placed in camps in places that are alien and inhospitable
to them and where they may face an unknown future which may remain unknown for
a very long time. All this, so we are told, is necessary ‘to stop the
drownings’.
Accompanying the
rhetoric of ‘Stop the Boats’, there has been a relentless tirade of commentary
from both commentators and politicians demonising boatpeople by accusing them
of being ‘queue jumpers’, ‘economic refugees’, ‘country shoppers’, and even
‘terrorists’. From Australia’s right-wing government the rhetoric has been no
less relentless. Policies have been wrapped in nationalistic slogans and titles
such as ‘Border Protection’ and ‘Operation Sovereign Borders’ as though
Australia was being invaded by some kind of sneaky guerrilla force attempting
to stealthily infiltrate Australia rather than desperate people merely seeking
asylum.
Along with the
‘Stop the Boats’ and the ‘Stop the Drownings’ rhetoric, a new catch-cry was
heard: ‘Stop the People Smugglers’ and ‘Put the People Smugglers out of
business’, both slogans clearly designed to shift attention away from the actual refugees.
Both the Abbott
Coalition government and the former Labor government of Rudd and Gillard have
fallen over themselves to placate a now negative Australian public opinion
about boatpeople.
But all of these
slogans and excuses avoid saying what this is really all about.
For some reason,
the non right-wing mainstream media to a very large extent have also avoided
mentioning it while the right-wing media have gone to great lengths to deny
that which the Left in the blogosphere and social media have been saying all
along; that Australia’s policies are not about ‘Stopping the Boats’ or
‘Stopping the Drownings’ or ‘Border Protection’ or ‘Stopping the People
Smugglers’ or ‘Stopping Queue Jumpers’ or ‘Stopping Economic Refugees’, they’re
about stopping non-European, non-white, Muslims from coming to Australia and
threatening the very core of what can only be called ‘Australianism’. In other
words it’s about racism – pure and simple.
The cheerleaders for
this racism – and the main source of the swing in public opinion away from the
‘fair go’ attitude of the post-White Australian era of the 70s and 80s – has
been the emergence of extreme right-wing columnists in the mainstream media
dominated by the Murdoch-owned newspapers.
Ironically, one of
the reasons Australians are now edging toward facing the reality of the
boatpeople saga really being about racism is because of the current debate over
the change to Australia’s laws about racial discrimination and vilification.
Much of the debate
about changes to the racial discrimination and vilification laws has be been
brought about by the judgement of a Victorian court against one of the most
vocal of the mainstream media’s anti-boatpeople protagonists, Andrew Bolt of the
Herald-Sun newspaper. The judgement
was not related to boatpeople but to one of Bolt’s other hobby horses, the
demonisation of light coloured Indigenous persons who choose to identify as
Aboriginal for cultural purposes, though Bolt actually accuses them of choosing
to identify as Aboriginal in order to obtain some kind of pecuniary advantage.
Bolt denies being
a racist; indeed, he declares that he is anti-racist. He even goes so far as to
say that those who say that he is a racist are, in fact, racist themselves because
they are preventing Australia becoming a nation where all Australians,
regardless of skin colour or ethnicity, should be treated equally as
‘Australians’. He argues that recognising ‘race’ differences – and that
includes recognition of different cultures, heritage and religions as well as
actual race – is dividing Australians and, therefore, is racist. He calls it
the ‘New Racism’, a term purloined from Bolt’s arch-nemesis, the historian
Robert Manne. Manne, who first coined the term ‘New Racism’ in an article
written in 2002 entitled ‘Beware the New Racism’ in which he argues
that racism is no longer restricted to just blood and biology but also to
culture and religion. Bolt, who has had a long-standing argument with Manne
about the ‘Stolen Generations’, has seen fit to usurp Manne’s tag for use in
describing his own version of ‘New Racism’.
What Bolt refuses
to accept is that recognising and acknowledging the culture and heritage of
people from different ethnicities and racial backgrounds has absolutely nothing
to do with being ‘racist’ from his peculiar viewpoint but has everything to do
with the sharing of heritage and the tolerance and respect of Australians’ differences
regardless of whether it’s blood and biology or culture and religion. It’s not
about ‘racism’, it’s about embracing and recognising diversity within a nation’s
peoples.
Bolt and his
fellow right-wing commentators by virtue of having access to one of Australia’s
largest media organisations have over nearly two decades managed to manipulate
public opinion to such an extent that Australians have been turned from being a
nation keen to give people a ‘fair go’ to being a nation of intolerant bigots.
The problem for Australia now is how to turn Australia’s world-wide reputation
of being racists and bigots around and that can only be done by recognising
that Australia has, indeed, become racist, and that in turn can only be done by
education.
The current debate
about bigotry in Australia can provide an opportunity to turn things around.
Hopefully, that process of education, a process which rebuts the notion of
Bolt’s so-called ‘New Racism’ and rejects the creeping new trend of ‘democracy
by public opinion’ which gives power to those that have the wherewithal to
manipulate public opinion, has now begun.
The debates are
not about Left and Right politics; it’s about the morality of right and wrong
and the elimination of poll-driven politics.
It’s time for
Australia to put this glitch in our reputation as an easy going fair-minded
multicultural society behind us and rebuild a more tolerant Australia free of
racial bigotry.
