Racism within Australian culture

Dean Durber, West Australia

The Australian government has not publicly supported the actions of the person(s) who recently sent a suspect batch of white powder to the Indonesian embassy in Canberra. It would not dare.

In today's world, it knows that overt racism is unacceptable. To be a successful racist, one must be subtle. Racism must be hidden so well that those who perpetuate it cannot even see it; that those affected can find nothing concrete to substantiate any claims of discrimination.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard says he is disturbed by this most recent event. He urges people to remain calm. It is a shame he did not display such emotion or encourage such behavior when the Australian media and the Australian government were involved in a frenzy of attacks against the Indonesian legal system with regards to the case of Schapelle Corby.

The Australian Foreign Minister, Alexander Downer, has urged Australian citizens to "remember that abusing and denigrating Indonesia is not likely to be helpful." But he is part of a government that has done nothing to stop the abuse of Indonesia that has run wild in the Australian culture for the best part of the past few months.

Indeed, the current Australian government has supported and promoted a culture of racism in Australia. This is a government that is racist to the core. The highly publicized cases of Vivian Alvarez Solon and Cornelia Rau -- deported and detained Australian citizens respectively -- reveal this.

They expose the extent to which the Australian government's current policy on immigration and its treatment of immigrants have encouraged a system of abuse of those seen as "foreign." To say the government's behavior does not reflect the extent to which racism is ingrained in the Australian culture and its institutions is to live in denial.

Are we to think that any Australian with a face so white and an accent so unequivocally Australian could meet the same fate? Could any Australian be detained behind a barbed wire fence indefinitely and without access to legal representation? Could any one of us be told someday that it is time we went home? For the majority of people living in Australia today, the thought of being treated with such disrespect is ludicrous.

It is beyond what we might imagine could ever happen to us. Indeed, it is beyond what we insist could ever happen to us. For those who are white and speak with a recognizable and full- bloodied Australian accent, there is surely nothing to fear. But any hint of an accent or any sign of being not quite white, and you do run the risk of being considered and treated like a foreigner in this land.

These blunders of the Australian Immigration Department are not isolated and unique mishaps. They are not outside of the everyday. Rather, they reveal the extent to which racism is systemic in the Australian culture; how it has become part of the blood of the institutions of this country and of the people who support the one -- and only one -- Australian way of life.

Under the Howard government, the foreigner has become a regular and accepted target of attack. Today, no immigrant to this country can be allowed to consider Australia as a safe and stable place. Immigrants are always here temporarily. Their decisions to take up Australian citizenship do not change this. Whenever they walk around talking differently or looking differently, they risk being looked at, ridiculed, spat on, verbally or physically attacked.

When John Howard gets upset by accusations that his government's decisions are racially motivated, he acts like the worst kind of racist. People who announce their racist views publicly through speech or acts of violence are easy to condemn and control. Those who demand that racism has nothing to do with them permit deeply embedded racist practices and policies to continue unnoticed and unchallenged.

The writer is working at the University of Tasmania.