"Is Australia a Racist Nation?"
Speech by Zita Antonios, Race Discrimination Commissioner, 8 July 1998
Let me begin by acknowledging the Eora people, the traditional owners of the land we are on today.
It is an acknowledgement which I make where ever I speak in Australia.
It is an acknowledgement which I made to the Dene people last month when I spoke at Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories of Canada.
This small gesture of respect to indigenous peoples is perhaps a useful starting point for us today in grappling with the question:
Is Australia a racist nation?
I have no doubt that to some Australians my acknowledgement of traditional Aboriginal connection to this land would be seen to be somehow racist. A kind of inverse racism. To the same people the very existence of native title would be regarded as inherently racist, because it is a right to land only held by indigenous people.
To many other Australians the attempts to deny our history of indigenous dispossession and repeated calls to extinguish native title are certainly seen as racist.
This sharp divergence of opinion, this collision of perspectives, reveals the complexity of the issues which have created so much division and turmoil in Australia. It also reveals the emptiness of the mere term ‘racism’ to analyse and resolve these issues.
This is, of course, not to say that racism and racial discrimination are empty expressions without meaning.
The assumption that people of a certain race, colour, descent, national or ethnic origin are inferior to others (and adverse treatment based on this distinction) clearly leads to the mistreatment of both individuals and communities within Australia.
In plain terms, racial discrimination is real. It is an abuse of human rights. It is proscribed by our domestic law at both national and state levels. It is internationally condemned by the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (CERD) to which Australia is a signatory.
The problem is not with an understanding that racial discrimination is profoundly wrong. With a few virulent exceptions, parallelled in other countries, Australians reject overt racism. That is why the term has so much currency at the moment. It is fired as a common term of censure across a political no-man’s land of social justice, where Indigenous rights, multiculturalism and Asian immigration are both attacked and defended by appeal to the same catchcries of fairness and equality.
The real problem in Australia lies in the lack of a commonly understood meaning for these words.
If the opposite of racism is equality; and the One Nation party constructs its platform on an appeal to equality, then you know you have a problem of understanding.
Essentially two broad concepts of equality are in dispute in Australia today.
Formal equality and substantive equality.
Formal equality is as simple and as obvious as the Earth is flat. It asserts that everybody should be treated in exactly the same way. Sameness of treatment is equated with fairness of treatment.
On the other hand, substantive equality recognizes difference and responds to it. The object of substantive equality is to achieve equity in outcomes. The focus is on fairness in results.
Whether difference stems from historical circumstance or some inherent factor which requires recognition, distinctions are drawn to achieve justice in substance.
Indigenous spiritual beliefs are unique in form, sacred sites and places of ceremony lie unstructured within the landscape of this country. Because of their nature they require special legislative protection. This is not preferential treatment, it is the protection of a common human right to freedom of religious practice. (Articles 18 and 27 ICCPR)
Similarly, the native title right to negotiate is required, not as a special privilege, but as a means of achieving substantive equality in the protection of a distinctive form of property.
Specific Aboriginal health, education, employment and housing programs target the accumulated disadvantage of generations of discrimination, indifference and neglect.
Immigration settlement support, interpreter services, migrant resource centres, English as a Second Language programs - all of these - are not inherent rights, but they respond to particular needs.
These measures are based on a rational, commonsense recognition of difference, not to give special advantage, but to ensure practical equality of opportunity.
Within a multicultural society such as Australia these responses to diversity are not an affront to equal treatment, they are essential to give it reality.
Generally Australia's political and legal systems have produced an innovative mixture of laws and policies to protect commonly held human rights and to meet particular needs.
However, a sound understanding of substantive equality has never really achieved a secure foundation at the political level.
For example, the right to negotiate in the Native Title Act 1993 has always been considered by government to be a special measure capable of modification or withdrawal at will. It has never been considered as an inherent right - which leaves it vulnerable to the vagaries and shifts of the political process.
Even more so, substantive equality has never become embedded in the popular mind.
A general notion of fairness... "a fair go"... Remains the most potent idea which draws general allegiance. And it is a loose, highly subjective notion capable of distortion under pressure. And we are now seeing the degree to which it can be distorted.
There has been an eruption of anger and resentment triggered by a cascade of economic and social changes. They are as diverse as structural unemployment, the variability of commodity prices, the bite of raw economic rationalist policies withdrawing services in rural and remote communities, bankruptcy, the recognition of native title and the examination of our past treatment of indigenous Australians, the Asian economic crisis, the fall of the Australian exchange rate, the rate of rural suicide, the privatization of public services, the loss of confidence in public institutions including the parliamentary process, republicanism, el nino, environmental degradation, globalization and GATT. We have the MAI to look forward to.
From the intensely personal, to the communal, to the national, to the international - from the barely manageable to the inexorable and erratic movements of market forces and natural forces beyond human intervention - the tide of change has heightened anxiety and excited a level of insecurity which has broken a threshold of tolerance. There is a feeling that the centre will not hold.
It is by no means exclusive to rural and remote areas, farmers and primary producers, but many of these factors have a particular impact on their lives.
It is simply not fair.
Feeling rubbed back to the bone there are a significant number of Australians who are willing to find fault-lines within our country based on race. Characteristically it is not a sense of superiority so much as a deep sense of grievance which spills intemperately into expressions of hostility towards Aboriginal people and immigrants, especially those from Asia.
Without a shred of irony, the most dispossessed and chronically disadvantaged people in Australia, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, are attacked as privileged and the recipients of preferential treatment.
Ethnic minorities, because of their desire to maintain their distinct cultural traditions and identity, are stigmatized as a threat to nation unity and cohesion. Yet the assertion that "it is never immoral to want to retain one’s own independence and identity" is a core principle of the One Nation immigration, population and social cohesion policy.
The confusion and illogic of people who would strip others of their identity to maintain their own, who would deny the need for specific Aboriginal health programs to transfer funds to their own special needs, whose fear of dispossession fuels the further dispossession of peoples historically reduced to poverty and humiliation by their loss of country is not difficult to understand. Australians are not impervious to anxiety, insecurity and fear.
The rapid decline of a national atmosphere, where the celebration of multiculturalism mirrored a growing willingness to deal honestly with our past and negotiate a durable, just reconciliation between Indigenous and non-indigenous Australians has shocked many people. The rate of change and economic factors are rightly seen as powerful catalysts of this decline. But they are an insufficient explanation.
The stresses touch on particular Australian vulnerabilities. They are deep unresolved tensions regarding the foundation of this nation and a fear of being overwhelmed by Asia. Both are issues which have been vigorously debated. The reconciliation process, Mabo, and particularly the Wik decision, have accelerated that debate.
Immigration levels and Australia’s relationship within the Asian region are not new issues. There have always been differing views. The inter-relationship between immigration and employment levels is a perennial issue. However the tone of these debates in the past was generally controlled and guided by reason.
Both matters need resolution through rational debate. This requires vigorous, principled leadership to check excess and hold to the facts. Unfortunately the perception that too much ground has shifted and that the rights of minority groups have swung out of balance with the interests of mainstream Australia has been interpreted by some as encouragement to assail the accommodation of difference, to isolate groups within our country and aggressively insist on uniformity.
Formal equality has become a means to deny rights. The removal of the native title right to negotiate on pastoral leases is a clear example . It is said that because pastoralists do not have such a right, native title holders should not have it, irrespective of the unique nature of their title and its unique vulnerability.
"All Australians should have the same rights". It has a ringing appeal. Sounds fair. Race does not enter into the equation. But race is the suppressed premise and the outcome is unjust. Where this is the leading edge of government policy it should be no surprise that crude racial discrimination spills out and that anger and resentment is focussed on those who are visibly different.
It is clearly right to acknowledge the hardships of all Australians and to seek equity across our society, but this cannot be achieved by denying legitimate rights which flow from our history and the diversity of our people.
The stresses of acute economic and social change are not limited to the bush in this country, they permeate through every aspect of Australian society. They are experienced in virtually every country in the world, globalization is precisely that. The same pressures have stimulated the growth of right wing parties in France, Germany, Canada, Austria and the United States of America to name only a few where their emergence is similarly contrasted against a backdrop of broadly democratic societies, each with their own particular historical burdens.
This does not excuse the eruptions within Australia, but it places them within the broader context of nations grappling to maintain or define their sense of identity, security and sovereignty while achieving substantive social justice for all their citizens.
Within our country there is also another story.
The same critical events which have sparked a conservative reaction have created a quite different response.
Mabo, Wik and ‘Bringing Them Home’ the report of the national inquiry into the separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, have galvanized a generation of Australians to look, perhaps for the first time, without flinching at our full history, and to stand up in support of another side to that history.
Our past is deeply etched with racism: the attempt to forcibly assimilate Aboriginal people and cut the descent lines of their culture; a white Australia policy which leaves us with the residue of the ‘race power’ in our constitution.
But conscious of this past we should also be proud of another tradition and the achievements of our national institutions which express a deep belief in justice. The high court’s mabo judgement unambiguously stated that the common law of this country "should not be, nor should it be seen to be , frozen in an age of racial discrimination".
And grass-roots movements such as Australians for native title and reconciliation, and the tens of thousands of people who have signed sorry books throughout Australia stand in proof of that statement. Their signatures do not only acknowledge past wrongs, they are a commitment to a future in which our racial, ethnic and cultural diversity is not a source of division, it is source of strength.
We need to recast our perspective. Last week the one nation party’s policy on immigration, population and social cohesion stated:
"Australia has a unique political history of which we can be proud. Australia led the way with the secret ballot, the 8 hour day, votes for women, invalid and old age pensions, strong trade unions, the arbitration system and the basic wage.&Quot;
New Zealanders may take issue with who was first with the vote for women, but the general point holds true. Australia has a strong tradition of social justice which can provide a common source of inspiration across political divisions.
We also have a history of racism.
Just as the past is not a source of guilt, but guidance for the future, so the past is no guarantee that justice will prevail.
Nothing is static.
And nothing is assured.
Whether Australia is a racist nation lies with the people of this country and the answer still lies in the balance.
Last updated 1 December 2001
