Racism on Slow Boil

They are deconstructing our country's identity and stealing its heart. They are the Howard Government. And, they have made me embarrassed to be Australian.

I was standing at a bar during an Amsterdam drag-show recently (I've probably already lost the far right and there go the homophobes!) and a bearded gay biker asked me: "Are you American?" I feigned mortification and said "No, puh-lease, I'm Australian." "Same thing", he retorted dryly.

A decade earlier, I would have mounted a strident defence of my country's proud identity as a fair-minded, tolerant, multicultural society. After all, we'd finally delivered land rights to Aborigines, admitted the genocidal nature of the child removal policies of previous decades and become a safe haven for people escaping international conflicts and crises. As a nation we were smug about our socio-cultural achievements and some of us subconsciously sat in judgement on Germans, American imperialists and white South Africans. But fast forward a decade, and all I could do was laugh in nervous agreement. My biker at the bar had a very valid point. Our government has led us into a dubious war as America's 'Deputy Sherrif'; made demonising non-Anglo Australians a shameless national sport; and turned the clock back 50 years on indigenous rights. As Australians we are now shamed in the international community like the pariah nations of past decades.

The seriousness of our moral decline became starkly apparent to me during my time in Amsterdam. I was there to participate in the 7th International Diversity conference - a gathering of academics, community workers and activists from around the world. At the conference, I anchored a discussion group about cultural diversity and the media and, in that forum, the distance we've fallen became patently obvious.

There were several Australians in the room and the discussion quickly turned to the coverage of multiculturalism in our country and, from there, to a critique of the political drivers behind what we agreed was increasingly narrow and racist coverage. This didn't surprise me - although there was catharthsis in the shared disgust. What did unsettle me, though, were the reactions of other international contributors to the discussion. Most notably, two Afrikaner South Africans in the group. They sat with jaws open and gasped while we debated the issues. "Do you mean they've abolished multiculturalism" they asked incredulously. "Yes" the Australians answered collectively. As a young Canadian post-grad student astutely observed: "What you've told us reminds the rest of us just how quickly the gains can be lost and the clock turned back on tolerance."

A week earlier my concern about Australia's descent into racism had been underlined by an exchange with another South African - an inspiring journalism professor [Guy Berger] who was a political prisoner in the apartheid years and exiled because of his activism. The concerned expression he wore while I 'down-loaded' - about the Australian government's clamp down on free speech; the policy of imprisonment without charge (the excesses of which were amply evidenced during the Haneef affair and APEC); the demonisation of minorities and the racist underpinnings of Aboriginal policy - made me realise how close to the edge we are teetering. In South Africa's apartheid past, courageous journalists like Guy Berger risked much more than being out of step with the pack and labelled 'Leftist' and 'biased' - they risked banning, exile, imprisonment and even death to challenge racism entrenched by a totalitarian government. I had to ask myself "what are you prepared to do to counter your own country's descent into officially endorsed racism?"

"Is she seriously drawing parallels between South African apartheid and Howard's Australia?" I hear you ask. Before you write me off as a reactionary exaggerator, ask yourself this...how unimaginable is 'Australian apartheid' in the context of the new racism afflicting our society and the clampdown on our civil liberties excused on the so-called 'war on terror'? I believe there are real historical and cultural parallels between the political climates that preceded apartheid in South Africa and Nazism in Germany...shocking as that may sound. It's crept up on me - this realisation that we've slipped so far. It's like we've been cooked in slowly heated water...lobster-like.

In 1996 I reported for the ABC on the election that swept the Howard Government into office. And, within weeks of Howard's assent, I began to despair about the ill, racist wind that he fanned - firstly by failing to counter the divisive and alienating messages of the xenophobic ex-Liberal Party candidate, Pauline Hanson, then by appropriating her policies. When I filed a long analysis of Hanson's racist Aboriginal affairs policies for ABC Radio's, The World Today, the unprecedented level of listener response - which ranged from positive and congratulatory to threatening and vile - should have been a harbinger of the social upheaval Howard's wedge politics would deliver. But I remained hopeful my country would wake up and defend its fair, just and multicultural image which had been so proudly embraced (or so I thought) by my generation.

Mindful of the democratic role of journalists as informers and watchdogs, I vigorously pursued stories about Aboriginal rights. I tackled the then Aboriginal Affairs Minister, John Herron live on AM after he said the Stolen Generations (Aborigines forcibly removed from their families under the White Australia Policy) were better off for having been adopted by white families. And I cried quietly during a long interview with the Aboriginal leader and the then head of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC), Lowitja (Lois) O'Donoghue, who revealed to me for the first time the story of her 'theft' from her mother as a toddler. The AM audience heard how she grew up culturally isolated - without her language - and how her mother had died not long before O'Donoghue had finally tracked her down. It was heartbreaking and I was confident her message would tweak the Howard Government's moral compass and encourage them to put down the dog whistle they were using to rally racists around the country. How wrong I was.

If you'd told me back then that within a decade ATSIC would be dismantled, Aboriginal self-determination would be abandoned; Indigenous land-rights would be rescinded'; multiculturalism would be killed off as official government policy and replaced with 'integration'; and, most shockingly, that Howard would send the military into remote Aboriginal communities to enforce new racist policies - which included forcible removal of children from their families on the pretext of protecting them from child abuse - I'd have called you loony. But you'd have been prophetic, not insane.

A decade later, our country's heart is breaking. We all suffer when we aid the genocide of our Indigenous people - and that is undoubtedly what we do when we stand silently by and allow their hard won rights to be trampled while their land is stolen again along with their dignity. This is a soul-wrenching suffering that we won't fully appreciate until it's too late to redress. And it's not just Aboriginal Australia suffering the effects of this new racism - Muslims and Middle Eastern Australians are increasingly demonised by this government as it seeks to exploit the fear of the post 9/11 climate. Pauline Hanson has also returned to the fray with an updated swag of racist election policies, including a threat to ban all Muslim immigration. These Australians are further ostracised by a media which has too frequently failed to question and critique discriminatory government policy and assumptions.

Again, we all suffer from Howard's socio-cultural 'retro-form'. We suffer because the ostracism of minority groups further entrenches feelings of isolation and resentment within the communities affected and, as the evidence of home-grown terrorism shows, such feelings are easily exploited by extremists. In other words, the Howard Government's exploitation of our fear of terrorism actually makes us less safe, as well as more insular and culturally bland. And, we suffer because we are collectively diminished by our tacit acceptance of new, narrow definitions of what it means to be Australian. We suffer because our government divides us rather than unites us.

The slow-boil effect of this new racism has caught many of us by surprise, but it's time to wake up and smell the injustice. It's time for increased community activism and, I believe, it's time for Australian journalists concerned with democracy and values like tolerance and equality to actively work against the racism colouring national debates about immigration, terrorism and cultural identity, in the interests of both good journalism and morality. I'll undoubtedly be labelled a Leftist "bleeding heart" by government apologists but this is not about party politics, it's about hope for the future. As the 17th century English historian and theologian, Thomas Fuller, observed "if it weren't for hope, the heart would break."