Challenges abound for Asian Australians

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.