Corby highlights our lingering 'White Australia' sentiment

As an Asian immigrant of 43 years’ standing, this is what I see as the underbelly of our culture. That scar of our racist past, a heritage largely born out of the fear of a white outpost being overrun by the “yellow peril” -  perhaps first triggered by the rapid disappearance of the subjugated Aboriginal peoples -  can still be fomented to incite hatred of “the other” whenever a political or social situation beckons.

Australia has given me a good life. It is the homeland of my children. Unlike Robert Menzies, who in 1966 intimated over a nightcap that he hoped we would never change the White Australia policy, I hope fervently that we will be a great nation one day.

The Corby case lights up the remains of our 19th century orientalist outlook. But the reflection on our soul is lost in the glare of our searchlights still focused on finding the “yellow peril”, the “red menace”: the terrorist-laden boat people with menacing beliefs and pathogens; the recalcitrant Indonesians refusing to do the right thing by us. Meanwhile China seems to have become the new land of opportunity, a model of economic growth and prosperity! The Chinese have money to buy all our things.

In a case that is unfolding it would appear that in the early 1990s our courts sent five Japanese tourists to jail here for having heroin hidden in false compartments in their suitcases. Our prosecutor insisted that they should have noticed the change in weight when the new suitcases were handed over to them in Kuala Lumpur by Charlie - their tour guide in that city - to replace their damaged suitcases en route from Japan.

The evidence that Charlie, later jailed in Malaysia for other offences, admitted that he slashed their suit-cases deliberately and gave them the replacement ones, was never presented in the court hearings in Australia. The taped interrogation by the Victorian police also revealed a police interpreter saying that he had no idea what the Japanese tourist was talking about!

And there was just one interpreter for the five tourists. Professor Paul Wilson, criminologist at Bond University, is working to clear the name of Miko, one of the five tourists, now back in Japan, after early release and deportation while on parole. She was 19 when she got her 15-year sentence. Corby by contrast is 27, and no one could find any evidence that her bag had been tampered with.

I don’t remember any sympathy for those young and vulnerable Japanese tourists who would have worked long hours all year before their short annual holidays. It is also curious that this has only come to light now, and not when the “hate-the-Indonesian” crusade was in progress during the Corby case.

Maybe it is just that our collective memory is sloppy, and our judicial system far from perfect. But I doubt it.

Deep down in our national psyche, we are still the superior white, and they, the Asiatics, are still inferior and to be exploited. Yes, they are also exotic, eager to please, and can be corrupted - the remains of our 19th century Orientalist outlook.

Remember the case, a couple of years ago when a consular official counselled an Australian pedophile awaiting sentence to escape that Asian country? She issued a new passport to him to replace his confiscated one in order to effect his escape.

Yep, Asians are all right, provided that they do not do the wrong thing by us. How dare they!