Asian Angle | Is Australia really that racist?

Is Australia really that racist? Yes, it is ­– and it’s important to get that out of the way first. When it comes to discussions of Australia’s chronic inadequacy in dealing with matters of race and immigration, there is a tendency to drift toward the sort of avuncular exasperation best deployed at rain-haunted barbecues and crotchety grandparents. It’s somewhere between flat-out denial and a much-needed coping mechanism for weeks such as this one, when the Australian Senate actually voted on a motion condemning “anti-white racism”, which included the phrase “it is okay to be white”.

The motion was the brainchild of One Nation senator Pauline Hanson, who rose to political prominence in the 1990s on the back of a campaign railing against immigration from Asia. Equally adept with dog-whistle and megaphone, she’s since erased mention of Asia from her rhetoric and neatly replaced it with all things Muslim, riding a wave of Islamophobia all the way back to the senate in 2016.

Australia’s ruling Liberal-National Coalition initially backed Hanson’s motion, only to claim this was the result of an “administrative error” and perform a whiplash-inducing reversal when faced with a bewildered, upset response from the public. It didn’t pass, but this is where we are now – listening to the clarion call of the privileged, who don’t seem to realise their privilege is embodied by the very fact they possess a clarion in the first place.

Apart from the well-documented racist origins of “it is okay to be white” – a slogan bandied about by white supremacists for decades – there’s nothing terribly controversial about it, really. It is, in fact, a masterpiece of understatement. It has certainly been very good to be white in Australia, a colonial outpost upon which white settlers arrived in 1788 armed with the concept of terra nullius, or “nobody’s land” – which remains a source of great pain and confusion for the country’s Aboriginal population, which has been there for more than 50,000 years. There is still no treaty between Aboriginal people and the Australian government, no nod in the direction of reparations for centuries of theft and abuse.

It was only in 1973 that Australia removed the last vestiges of its White Australia policy, which is exactly what it sounds like: a barbaric bouquet of legislation designed to prevent those of a certain hue from ever reaching its shores. Australia takes many of its geopolitical cues from the United States, and it would appear some social ones as well – it is the enduring tragedy of immigrant nations to perpetuate cycles of violence and intolerance upon each fresh wave of immigration.