Challenges abound for Asian Australians

By Dewi Anggraeni

MELBOURNE (JP): How does a nation deal with race issues? Keep them under control or bring them out into the open?

Prof. Arief Budiman, new appointee to Melbourne University, believes Australians should give credit to Pauline Hanson for bringing the subject to the surface.

"After all, it is easier to fight a visible frigate than to fight a submarine," said Budiman at the Asian Australian Resource Center National Conference in Melbourne recently.

His views were certainly different from those of the President of Australia's Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission Sir Ronald Wilson. When asked whether there was something beneficial about bringing the issue to the surface, Sir Ronald said: "If we have a beautiful and clean river, why pollute it by dredging the bed just to see what is in it? The pollution will kill the fish and other lives in the river."

It was an apt analogy considering that since Pauline Hanson started the anti-Aborigine and anti-Asian sentiment rolling, minority groups in the community have suffered from instances of ridicule at best and abuse at worst.

In his address, Sir Ronald put the "race debate", which is currently dominating public life in Australia, into perspective. "It has not been a serious debate," he said. "A serious debate happens when two sides sit down and discuss a proposition in a reasonably civilized manner. There are ground rules governing such a debate, including the acceptance of authoritative sources and a loyalty to values such as truth and justice."

The current debate in Australia is mainly between those who want to purify Australia's race -- reverting back to its White Australia policy, and those who want to maintain the pluralist trend in which the nation is now. Truth, along with Australia's Aboriginal and non-Anglo-Saxon community, have been pushed out of the debate. Is this necessarily the fate of minority groups? Is there anything these minority groups can do to overcome the problem?

This phenomenon was brought into focus during the two-day conference. To know what to do, it is necessary to recognize what the challenges are. The conference therefore sought to project as clear a picture as possible, then make recommendations for an appropriate strategy.

One misconception to debunk, according to Prof. Fazal Rizvi of Monash University, is that racially based perceptions and attitudes are going out with the older generation, and that the younger generation are brought up with more pluralist ideas.

Rizvi's research on racism among children in the 1990s, projects a social phenomenon that gives cause for concern. Children have to deal with contradictory images. On the one hand they are encouraged to celebrate multiculturalism, while on the other, they are exposed to images of Aboriginal and other minority communities as aliens, not to be trusted at worst or to be patronized at best.

Children not only develop their ideas of race and ethnicity from what they are taught by their teachers, but also from their experiences in the family and the playground. They also form their attitudes from what they see on television and read in books. What they learn is popular racism, which is equally strong, if not stronger, compared to ideological racism.

In his field studies, Rizvi discovered that children as young as five and six had internalized racist prejudices. At a Grade 1 art class of a school in a dominantly Anglo-Celtic middle-class area, he noticed that half the children depicted robbers and other "baddies" as black or colored (which one child explicitly said was Asian), and policemen and other "goodies" as white.

Curiously, the teacher had not noticed this phenomenon until Rizvi made it clear to her. Very few of these children in fact have any real-life contact with Asians or Aborigines. In a secondary school, this racist sentiment becomes blurred with territorialism.

"Aborigines have the right to be here because they own this country, but Asians come here and take over the country, take away our jobs and they stick together," said one 15-year-old student.

It seems that while the debate is taking place in the community, children struggle to understand the issues. They are not sufficiently equipped to sort out the truth from hearsay. They do not always know that Asians only constitute 4.8 percent of the whole Australian population. They are caught between the goodwill and the suspicion in the community.

During workshop discussions, it transpired that Asians tended to avoid engagement in the public arena. Many of them have left their countries of origins to seek a more comfortable and secure life, so understandably they are very busy working and reluctant to become involved in political activities.

Asians are indeed highly represented in the workforce but rarely in politics. In Federal Parliament, none of the members are of non-English speaking background. Yet without engagement in the political process, they will remain the powerless minorities.

A member of New South Wales State Parliament, Helen Sham-Ho warned that Asian Australians would have to overcome many hurdles to participate actively in politics. The first is the cultural barrier. Most Asians were conditioned to be intelligent but modest, and useful to the community but unassuming. "In politics, being modest and unassuming will get you nowhere," said Sham-Ho.

In her capacity as a member of parliament, Sham-Ho has experienced tacit discrimination to overt racism. She is often regarded as a "token ethnic" by her fellow members and hence shut off from issues other than ethnic affairs.

The conference made several recommendations that will help Asian Australians access the system and engage in the political process. Begin with being seen in the public arena, said some workshop leaders.

The writer is a freelance journalist based in Melbourne.