CULTURE WARS: The White Australia Policy is over, deal with it

Sadly, ignorance of non-Anglo cultures is the name of the game in both mainstream media and politics in Australia.

I’ve been writing commentary and pious punditry since 2005. Before then, I was a helpless consumer of news. When caught in Sydney traffic driving to work in the morning in the early 2000s, I’d tune into 2UE for the last half hour of Steve Price’s morning show. The last 10 minutes of Pricey’s show also featured John Laws.

One morning there was some controversy about ethnic profiling of criminal suspects, especially those of Middle Eastern/Lebanese backgrounds. Pricey made some comment about how it was easy to identify a Lebanese person as they looked totally different to Anglo-Australians. I couldn’t help myself; I rang the studio and was put on air.

Pricey, there are plenty of Lebanese with light brown or blond or red hair and green eyes.

Pricey dismissed my comment as codswallop, as did Laws. Then, just before the show was about to end, Pricey was handed a note from the state MP for Bankstown. Pricey was being invited to breakfast with the MP and 500 of his Lebanese constituents, all of whom had red hair and green eyes.

Ignorance of non-Anglo cultures is the name of the game in both mainstream media and politics in Australia. Until recently, allegedly respectable newspapers would regularly mistranslate jihad as “holy war” and fatwa as “death sentence”. Last night’s episode of The Drum showed Caroline Overington claiming that Lebanese people in France lived in slums on the outskirts of Paris. She might wish to confirm that with a French-Lebanese person, say writer Amin Maalouf.

On the same show, Josh Manuatu, a staffer for Eric Abetz who identified as part-Tongan, suggested we didn’t want migrants such as Lebanese who came from countries where women who wished to be educated were stoned. Really? Because the last time I checked the website of the American University of Beirut, which this year celebrates its 150th anniversary, I noticed pictures of female students, some wearing headscarves and some not.

It was truly sad to see Abetz’s staffer make ignorant aspersions about Lebanese migrants gravitating to bikie gangs and terror cells. But you know what they say — for every finger you point at others, three point straight back at you. If we are to believe that authority on ethnic crime former Fairfax columnist Paul Sheehan, in April 2008:

... a group of violent racists acted out their YouTube fantasies and stormed into Merrylands High School at 8.50am, armed with machetes and baseball bats. They then started to beat the crap out of people.

And who were these nasty violent radicalised kids terrorising people? Sheehan continues:

A week after this rampage, any member of the public interested in this crime could have deduced the alleged perpetrators were Tongan morons. Or perhaps morons who are, regrettably, Australian citizens but portray themselves as ‘nigga gangstas’.

Gosh, what kind of dangerous ethnicities does Abetz employ? According to The Daily Telegraph, Tongans and bikie gangs have excellent relations in NSW prisons. Still, how unfair it would be to characterise Tongan-Australians as good for nothing except as prisoners or violent gangsters or as comic pawns in a Chris Lilley show.

Which brings me to Noel Pearson’s curious complaint against the ABC. Pearson claims the ABC has a habit of always portraying indigenous people as victims and/or criminals and/or people who are always down and out. Much of this is caused by structural and cultural factors, he says, given the ABC is staffed by people

... willing the wretched to fail.

If anything, Pearson should have directed his criticisms to all Australian news media. And not just news media. How many indigenous and other minority faces do we see in TV and billboard advertising? Are all shoppers and checkout chicks at Woolies and Coles really white? Are all babies who poo in nappies or people driving cars on our roads really white?

Hasn’t the White Australia Policy ended?

First published in Crikey on 23 November 2016.