Australia and immigrants

I refer to a letter entitled On Insight Program by Irene Fraser in The Jakarta Post on Nov. 10. It was correct of Fraser to point out that Arthur Calwell, the Australian former minister of immigration, made the comment "Two Wongs don't make a white" in the 1940s. Like many other Australians, however, Fraser is in denial of the fact that certain racist attitudes still remain in Australia -- despite how the nation has become more multi-racial, thanks to immigrants from Asia and other parts of the world. Just because Australia has now become a multi-racial, or multi-cultural, society, that does not make it a tolerant place where immigrants or Australian citizens of non-white origins are treated with fairness, equality, or for that matter, dignity.

The reason, Professor Geoffrey Blainey points out, is that "The more emphasis that is placed on the rights of minorities and the need for affirmative action to enhance those rights, the more is the concept of democracy -- and the rights of the majority-- in danger of being weakened. But most importantly, however, Fraser was so wrong when she declared that, like Calwell, the White Australia Policy is dead.

Let me remind her of (or give her, rather) a brief history of Australia's racism. We needn't go as far back as the 1970s, when the White Australia policy officially ended, or even to the 1960s, when the masthead of the Bulletin, Australia's leading magazine, carried the slogan "Australia for the White Man"; we certainly need not go as far back as The Magic Pudding, thefamous Australian children's book, that includes insults such as "you unmitigated Jew!" Let's just take a trip to the period between the 1980s and the 1990s, when Arthur Tunstall, Australia's infamous senior sports official, made racist jokes and comments about disabled athletes; it was the same decade that saw a string of aboriginal deaths in police custody (not many white ones); and the same decade saw the rise of the One-Nation party led by Pauline Hanson, who all but called for those of Asian descent to be ejected from the country, displaying her profound international knowledge by sayingthe 2.5 billion Asians to the north "have their own language and culture." Whatever motivated Fraser to write her letter in response to my comments on the Insight program, she needs to know better about her own people's history and realize the reality that Australia is not a racism-free society.THANG D. NGUYENJakarta