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If you're white, you're right

By Stephen Hagan - posted Thursday, 25 May 2006


Also, I noted that Chris Watson, the leader of the Labor Party (and our third Prime Minister) stated, "The objection I have to the mixing of these coloured people with the white people of Australia - although I admit it is to a large extent tinged with considerations of an industrial nature - lies ... in the possibility and probability of racial contamination".

So, in effect, the White Australia Policy was a formal strategy that was aimed directly at excluding non-white people from immigrating to Australia.

One hundred and five years later, I am still not convinced that a lot has changed in the mindset of the average Australian when it comes to race relations. Certainly, there are many non-Indigenous people in our camp who are mortified by the very notion but they are still a slowly growing group. We all remember the disturbing reference in the media last year by Macquarie University Associate Professor, Andrew Fraser, who claimed that "experience practically everywhere in the world tells us that an expanding black population is a sure-fire recipe for increases in crime, violence and a wide range of other social problems”.

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Fraser believes that, on average, black people have lower IQs than white people.

With that history of intolerable bigotry, it did not come as a major surprise to me when I read of the latest “anti-black” immigration propaganda being peddled by a representative of the Howard ministry. Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Andrew Robb, pathetically nominated the first Tuesday in November as one of the Australian cultural values of which aspiring migrants might have to be aware to become citizens.

Patricia Karvelas, writing for The Weekend Australian (April 29-30 2006), quoted Robb, defending his proposal for a compulsory citizenship test:

It’s having a sort of general knowledge which enables people to move comfortably in the community - so an introduction about key customs, which might be that Australia closes down for a horse race each year, that might be a key custom ... there’s already a great attraction for a lot of people coming from other countries to this sense of a fair go.

“A fair go?” - What a load of rubbish!

I can cite two recent incidents involving non-Indigenous people in my own community that would discredit this “quintessentially Australian” fair go mantra. I make mention of these particular incidents as they reflect the approach adopted by most Australians to race issues broadly and to Indigenous people specifically.

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On 28 April 2006, The Courier-Mail  ran a prominent story under the bold caption of “Refugees firebombed” accompanied by a striking photograph of a Sudanese mother and her seven children aged three to sixteen.

It would appear some racist hoons, under the cover of darkness, threw petrol bombs at the house of recently settled immigrants. Khamisa Abui and her children were sleeping at their rented house in Toowoomba when they heard thumping on the front door. A neighbour across the road saw the flames just after midnight.

“The flames were a metre high on the steps and the front porch and the door mat was alight at the front door,” he said.

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Article edited by Natalie Rose.
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About the Author

Stephen Hagan is Editor of the National Indigenous Times, award winning author, film maker and 2006 NAIDOC Person of the Year.

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