On the beach: selling Australia as a land or as a people

Let’s compare that with the Opposition. There are many messages issuing forth from the Liberal National coalition - from Cory Bernadi’s paranoia about burqas to Judith Troeth and Petro Georgiou’s anxious humanitarianism and anger at the government’s racist freezing of Afghan and Sri Lankan asylum seekers and their own leader’s proposal to reintroduce temporary visas and island internment.

The current Opposition leader Tony Abbott has form in this regard, but not perhaps as simply as might be expected. In 2006 at the time Peter Costello was sledging “mushy multiculturalism” Abbott came out in a Quadrant article to argue a conservative case in favour of multiculturalism. Everyone he argued should feel they have a stake in an Australia they recognise, one that respects them. He even managed to say a good word for Sharia law - or at least the sense in having a reasoned debate about what role it could ever play in Australian jurisprudence.

In addition Abbott has been working the Asian communities hard, trying to win back to the Liberals all the Chinese and other groups that quit the party in disgust during the Howard/Hanson two-step. These were some of the people who fought so hard to win Bennelong for Maxine McKew from Howard in 2007, and who are now so disappointed with the ALP that they are ripe for the picking and a win of Bennelong back to the conservatives. But as Georgiou has said, Abbott and Rudd are equally cynical in their manipulation of the asylum seeker issue, and have no discernible moral backbone in this regard.

Earlier in the year a national anti-racism forum in Perth called for a country-wide program to build a real human rights based cultural diversity policy for Australia. Since then the Human Rights Commission has fore-grounded the rapidly increasing problems of cyber-racism, while the Australian Federal Police has argued that because there is no criminal racial vilification law, the AFP can do little unless violence is advocated. The government’s fudging of the Human Rights Act, to the delight of opponents such as Bob Carr, has meant that the most vulnerable groups are left without protection, dependent on the civil initiatives of a few NGOs with skills and resources (for example, the long Jewish Board of Deputies’ battle to close down the Adelaide Institute Holocaust-denial website). The Budget allocation to human rights education may help a little in this regard.

Over the next few months it is possible that a national coalition might emerge with the goal of placing anti-racism and cultural diversity goals on the national election agenda. While neither the ALP nor the Coalition show much stomach for doing anything but beating up on cultural minority groups, the rapid increase in support for the Greens (where many younger ethnic political activists now find their home) could open up a new space for a national debate about what an egalitarian, respectful and socially just social program should contain. This debate will need to encompass at least the national curriculum in education, the health reform agenda, aged care, the arena of mental health, youth programs, media and the arts, and dare I say, how we sell Australia to potential tourists.

Wouldn’t it be cool if our people were presented as an attractive a reason to come to Australia as our beaches? And what if we were welcoming enough to make the hard sell a realistic reflection of how we really are?