Page 104 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 15 February 2006
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Along with the gradual slide into contempt for politics and politicians, which over the past 15 years has become a feature of Australia’s popular culture, has come a discourse of ideas which leans on that contempt with political correctness and is now becoming a key derogatory term. Connected to that, in the past few years the questions about what is multiculturalism and what our commitment to it is have once again come to the fore. In Australia, Pauline Hanson articulated a reactionary resentment felt by many who saw themselves left behind or excluded from some of the social and economic changes in Australia still playing themselves out in the 1990s. Many of her views and policies have, sadly, now been appropriated by the Australian government and various state governments.
Other aspects of a reinvigorated social conservatism over this time can be seen in different ways—gender relations, indigenous affairs, industrial relations and the rights and obligations of the poor and ill. The notion of a society which values and profits from cultural diversity has also been, and continues to be, challenged by divisions and tensions across the world, most notably the rise of a violent Islamic fundamentalism which is projected as an attack on the US cultural and economic global supremacy.
Closer to home perhaps, the racially inspired riots at Cronulla are evidence of a continuing fracture of the multicultural agreement across Australia, and we should be particularly concerned that so many young people made up that fracas and continuing conflict at Cronulla. Therefore it is something that will remain in the future unless we address it now. It is the view of the Greens that, in this context, the ACT’s mixed and inclusive community is a very precious and fragile thing. There should be no argument, I would have thought, with strengthening our shared commitment to such a community.
The recent comments by National Party MP Danna Vale that Australia could become an Islamic state within 50 years and that Australians are aborting themselves out of existence show that even some of our leaders are ill informed and are spreading the virus of racial stereotyping. On the one hand, Mrs Vale has shown an extraordinary ignorance of the number of Australians who are Muslim, which is 1.5 per cent; of the proportion of our immigrants, a tiny fraction; or of the number of children that they have, which is no more or less than the rest of us.
Of course it is usual to be fearful of things you know nothing about. In this context of heightened community division, Mrs Vale’s ignorant comments are worse than irresponsible. The fundamental problem with Mrs Vale’s perspective, however, is that she has created our Australia as white people having abortions and Australian Muslims as the other. In that way, blindly or carelessly, she is strongly reinforcing the divisions, alienation, prejudice and racism in our community.
Finally, I was very disturbed to read last week of research that shows that more than half of Australia’s schoolchildren view Muslims as terrorists and that two out of five believe that Muslims are unclean. I am not sure how many ACT schoolchildren were included in that study but, in a global world, or at least a national world, let us not be complacent.
Chris Flynn, a community integration lawyer from New South Wales who now practises international law in London, wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 24 December that the perceived crisis in Australian multiculturalism is also an opportunity. He wrote:
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