Racism tied to unemployment issue

By Ratih Hardjono

SYDNEY (JP): The racial outbursts of an Australian member of parliament by the name of Pauline Hanson can be compared to a virus within the body of Australia, which will burn itself out with time. Nevertheless, her statements reflect a certain apprehension felt by the ordinary Australian.

Is Australia a nation of racists? Certainly not. But to understand why suspicion of Asians is not far from the surface, we must understand the country's geographical location. Australia was never intended to be a country. Rather, its origin lies in its establishment by the British as a place to put the criminals who could no longer be accommodated in English jails.

Australia was chosen because of its distant location. If convicts wanted to escape, they could not go far because they had few options: there were oceans surrounding the continent while its interior presented extraordinarily unfavorable natural constraints.

When Australia began to grow as an independent part of Britain, it remained orientated toward England in almost everything from the sale of wool to cultural relations. At that time England did not recognize the rights of the Aboriginal peoples of Australia to the land that they inhabited. When free settlers started migrating to a continent that was new to them, they arrived with a vision of building a new world different from any other. For most people this turned out to mean facing a variety of challenges to human existence that were extremely difficult for people from any other part of the globe. That Australia is now able to play a role as a developed country in the international arena is indeed a reason for admiration since the country is only 200 years old.

Australians perhaps first became aware of the fact that their country was surrounded by Asian nations when Chinese workers started arriving in the gold mines of Victoria and New South Wales. Records show that in 1857 there were 23,623 Chinese miners and 203,966 white miners. In 1861 the number of Asians in Australia represented 3.3 percent of the Australian population. This figure is not very different from the 1996 figure for the number of Asians in the country.

In gold-mining days Chinese languages could be heard throughout the town of Ballarat in the state of Victoria. These Chinese workers had arrived in the gold mines of Australia after working in mines in countries like Malaysia. They came in groups of 600 to 700 people and worked together on a basis of mutual assistance in their search for gold. The approach of the Chinese was to sift through the mounds of earth excavated and thrown aside as valueless by the English miners.

It frequently happened that the latter moved from one place to another on the basis of rumors about new discoveries of gold. When they reached the new site but did not find gold, they then returned to their original holdings, only to find hundreds of Chinese miners busy sifting through the mounds of earth that they had abandoned. Social distrust could not be prevented since the English miners felt that the Chinese ended up with more gold than they did. No one will ever know whether this was true since findings of gold were never recorded and gold-bearing land at that time did not belong to anyone.

Ultimately this situation led to the tragedy that occurred on June 30, 1861 in the small town of Lambing Flats, now known as Young, a few hours' distance from Canberra. Some 3,000 to 4,000 English miners became angry on hearing a rumor that another 1,500 Chinese workers would soon arrive at the gold fields. Mounted on horses and carrying heavy instruments, they destroyed the tents of the Chinese miners in the town. At the time the government stated that no one was killed. But when I visited the place a few years ago, several people who were descendants of Chinese miners who had intermarried with members of the local community stated that a number of people had been killed but no one knew exactly how many because the bodies had been dumped into the shafts of abandoned mines.

The Lambing Flats incident encouraged the government of the time to introduce legislation restricting Chinese immigration. This marked the beginning of the White Australia Policy, which was only done away with in the 1960s when there was a Liberal Party government under prime minister Holt. At that time the Cold War was still raging and the world was divided on a basis of ideology into Communist and non-Communist blocs. Holt felt that it was impossible to maintain the White Australia Policy because quite a few Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore belonged to the anti-Communist bloc.

Even so, Australia's feeling of uncertainty as a nation in which the majority of the people were of European descent and which was surrounded by Asian nations, was never far from the surface. Imagine how we would feel if Indonesia were located in Europe! We would always feel suspicious of European nations. This feeling of distrust usually emerges whenever there is a high level of unemployment. Even though Australia's economic growth has been good and inflation is low, the level of unemployment has remained high at close to 9 percent for more than five years. Any drop has been only temporary, for a rise has again followed. By contrast, unemployment in the United States has remained around 5 percent. The people of Australia have been feeling the consequences for some time now.

It is because of this high level of unemployment that the comments of Pauline Hanson have found a place in the hearts of certain Australians. In reality Australia now has approximately one million people without jobs, out of a population of 18 million. For a nation whose ancestors sailed to Australia in search of work and a better standard of living, this fact is disturbing. The further fact that the previous prime minister, Paul Keating, was seen as moving too fast in approaching the nations of Asia did nothing to help allay underlying fears in the Australian community. Keating's real purpose was to link the Australian economy to the economic growth occurring in North Asia. This purpose, however, was not understood by the people of Australia.

As long as unemployment remains high, this anxiety will always rise to the surface. It is this that explains the Hanson syndrome. The last time it emerged was in 1989 when John Howard, now prime minister of Australia but at that time leader of the Opposition, stated that "the rate of change (in the level of Asian immigration) has perhaps been too great". In 1990 Howard was defeated very largely because of this view when his position as leader of the opposition was challenged by Peacock.

Today John Howard is prime minister of Australia. His experiences in those years should provide him with a unique understanding of the issue. Hopefully he will be able to reduce the level of unemployment in Australia.

The writer is a correspondent of Kompas daily based in Sydney.