*****
I was listening to a radio programme today while I was out restocking on everything I'm using for the residue of the flu, and the guest commented about how the actions of the evil John Howard against the refugees on the MV Tampa, which was acting in accordance with the SOLAS convention, had led to more racism in Australia.
I agree that the actions of John Howard, a person whose homophobic legislation led me to write "The debate and ranting in reaction to this legislation have, however, hardened the once shallow fault lines that Howard identified and then incised deeply into the bedrock of Australian society", were evil, and did, in fact, lead to more racism.
However, Australia has been a deeply racist society for much of its history after 1788 (I've written about this previously - see, in particular, here).
We denied the existence of indigenous people and tried to kill them (or wipe them out by assimilation) from 1788, and the next hate after that was against the Catholic Irish, and then the Chinese became a target of all sides on the minefields of the gold rush, after which we got even worse and formalised things into the White Australia policy - something which contributed later to South Africa's apartheid horror, a fact that always makes me hang my head in shame.
Racism was used to justify Australia becoming a (49% free) sovereign nation in 1901, and was a powerful (abhorrent) factor in decisions made by Australia during the second world war one Minister, in response to a proposal to allow non-white refugees into Australia (I think - may have been about non-white soldiers) said "well, what's the point?", implying there was no point fighting the war if Australia was no longer almost exclusively white.
That blatant and widespread racism started to get broken down after World War Two, beginning -at an official level - with immigration from areas of Europe other than the UK. The multi-national aspects of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-electric Scheme often held up as a success, but Italians and Greeks experienced considerable racist hostility in everyday life. The official acts against racism continued, with an act banning racism in 1975. passed by the Whitlam government, which also had the flashy Minister for Immigration, Al Grassby, start getting the term "multiculturalism" into social consciousness.
That didn't mean we stopped being racist. I was at high school in Queensland at that time, and kids were racist and hateful in many ways - against descendants of Pacific Islanders who were enslaved, the Maltese who developed the sugar industry around Mackay (Dad, as bank manager, approved a fair few loans for Maltese weddings, so we got to go to quite a few large, exuberant, non-Anglo weddings), there were fights between gangs of various ethnicities, etc.
The arrival of Vietnamese refugees was a big deal at the time, as was anger - in Queensland - at the sale of land to Japanese business people.
In my opinion, a dichotomy developed in the nation, with multiculturalism stronger in the south (where I went as soon as I was able), and xenophobic hate and fear stronger in the north - ironically, exceptions are made for pizza and the generalised, blander Westernised version of "Chinese food". (These are trends: there are multiculturalists in the north and racists in the south, but most are as I indicated.) Thus, it was no surprise to me that Queensland elected a notorious racist, someone the evil John Howard was able to use as an excuse to move Australia back towards the White Australia mentality of 1950s white picket fence that he is generally considered to adore.
This dichotomy was fully active in the era that the radio guest was talking of, and I consider she was either showing the effects of a limited social bubble (the same limitations that left so many blindsided by the recent Commonwealth election result), or was adopting a foolish political tactic.
We need to admit the problem so we can fix it, and admit the causes of it - which are not only hate. Fear around jobs is also part of this, and has always been part of it, and isn't managed by uni graduates being dismissive and trite of the concerns of blue collar workers (an ex- of mine used to sort recycling [before she had to stop work for health reasons, and obviously before it was sent overseas] because she hadn't finished high school, as some people don't).
Yes, John Howard is evil and did evil - but he was able to because he reached voters more effectively than progressives.
It's a problem we're still struggling with: getting the advantages of the progressive message out to the people who are going to be helped by it, the people who have been cowed, duped and rendered fearful by neoliberals.
How do we stop preaching to the choir?
(I don't know, which is why I'm asking the question.)
