From Fairfax

I am first generation. When I say that now, despite my years of privilege, I still get goosebumps. I have inherited gratitude. People in Australia were and are sometimes vile about Jews but they don’t betray them to the authorities. They don’t shoot them in the back of the head. This is not to forgive anti-semitism in any respect, because it is at the heart of genocide; but genocide only exists in Australia for one group of people; and it isn’t Jews.

Of course, like most of us, I abandoned some aspects of the values of my parents and grew out of hiding my displeasure at the government, even though I know that both my parents would be appalled at my critique of governments past and present. The gratitude should outweigh the analysis. I wonder if my parents would have come around to my way of thinking if they knew how the Australian government treats refugees now.

Australia Day was huge in my family. My parents worked 11 days a week but Australia Day was a serious celebration. We’d go to Nielsen Park in Sydney’s Vaucluse and swim. Or what passed for swimming in my family, breaststroke without putting your face in the water (it is with some pride that my offspring can all swim freestyle and breathe on both sides. Pride and amazement. How do people actually put their faces in water and live?)

So in 1988, when I was pregnant with my second child, I’d planned January 26 events very carefully. Watch boats. Have picnics. Watch Aboriginal dancing. See fireworks. Be extremely grateful. I was. Two years later, we organised a holiday up on the far north coast with another family. The topic of Australia Day came up and they were hugely critical. I burst into tears.

Of course, they were right. And wrong. And I was right and so wrong.

Nearly 30 years ago, when I had that fight with my friends Robin and Neil, Australia Day was still acceptable and it’s become less acceptable now. For me, then, it was a time to celebrate being in country which didn’t kill me or reject me or exclude me in a systematic way. But it marks the day when the colonisers of Australia began to kill, reject and exclude the Aboriginal people. Or, as Stan Grant put it when describing how the brilliant Swan Adam Goodes was treated last year: “I can tell you what we heard when we heard those boos, we heard a sound that was very familiar to us . . . we heard a howl of humiliation that echoes across two centuries of dispossession, injustice, suffering and survival. We heard the howl of the Australian dream and it said to us again, you’re not welcome.”

I doubt there could ever be a day when Aboriginal people could or would celebrate the colonisation of this land or the formation of this nation nor should we ever question the motives of anyone who doesn’t want to take part in a joyless jamboree. Australia Day is connected to the destruction of another culture, this country’s first people, although we must acknowledge that every day, the life expectancy, the education, the health, gap between Aboriginal and whites continues to exist.

As Grant says later in his speech at the IQ2 racism debate last year: “My people die young in this country, we die 10 years younger than average Australians and we are far from free.”

If we move Australia Day, it allows a bunch of martyr rightists to claim Aboriginal activists won. If we don’t move Australia Day, we ignore the destruction of the Aboriginal people.

But we could change Australia Day, make it a time when we can account for ourselves and our progress. January 26 will always be a day of mourning and it could also be a time when we examine the state of the nation and all who live here.

It will also make it possible for those of us who were given shelter here to give thanks for that shelter.

A friend wrote* to me to say he’s had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s Indigenous people. Me too. We have become unwilling parties to the war on Aborigines.

Could Australia Day be reshaped, away from drunkenness and celebrations, towards acknowledgement, reconciliation and peace?

I wrote:  “I’ve had enough of war. My parents survived theirs through luck, guts, and hope – a bit like all refugees then and now. But I’ve had enough of being a continuing unwilling protagonist in the war against Australia’s indigenous people. Fed up to here and beyond. Australia Day is about two wars – the one my parents escaped that let us be, and the war they entered despite themselves that I’ve inherited. Time to make peace; and what better day than Australia Day to declare we are committed to finding a lasting and effective peace. That means we need to decide we don’t want to win that war through annihilating or crushing Indigenous Australia,  and we don’t want the war of attrition  to roll endlessly into a god forsaken future of misery. We want to end it ASAP.”

This Youtube Vid of a Powerpoint provides a work in progress for a paper under development. The paper is an output of the Cyber Racism and Community Resilience research project, funded under the ARC Linkage scheme. We seek informed and constructive feedback, which can be posted through the Comments link. All on topic comments will be approved subject to basic codes of civility.

See on SBS Page
In December 2005 I was discussing inter-group issues with a Palestinian sociologist at Haifa University; reflecting on the breaking news from Cronulla, he suggested I might like to stay in Israel for a while. News of the conflict travelled far and fast.

Who has learned what from those violent days in that hot summer? The build up at Cronulla was set against a year of growing tension, with news reports of gang rapes, beach-front violence, and increasing racially-charged stirring by shock-jock Alan Jones.

Despite the denials of PM Howard, Cronulla was a quintessential modern Australian mess.

The key participants in those events and their aftermath are drawn from every part of Australian society – the coastal communities with their own histories of sexism and violence, the western suburban communities of the children of the refugees of a generation before, the conservative heartland of the Liberals, and the knock about branch stacking of the Labor Right. Despite the denials of PM Howard, Cronulla was a quintessential modern Australian mess.

When Strike Force Neil later reported to the NSW Cabinet on the debacle of the day and the retaliation raids in the aftermath, it revealed a police and government uncaring and unprepared, with no intelligence of what was happening in the communities, and no capacity to foresee and thus be forearmed or even forewarned, and no public presence in the ongoing debate.

The police learned a lot from Cronulla: they became militarised, they modernised with riot squads, body armour and anti-personnel ordinance. Their command and control structures were reinvigorated with a much greater planning and response capacity. Most importantly but not sufficiently, they realised that community relations and engagement would be crucial. While a battle raged in the upper echelons of the NSW Police over corruption and competence, the first steps were made, albeit on tottering ankles, to lay down long term positive relations with some of the communities. Ironically the relations are today better with the Muslim communities, from which most intelligence now comes, than their non-Muslim antagonists, whose rallies on Cronulla Day will do most to stoke community apprehension and anger.

So one lesson from Cronulla that has bitten for both absolutists and white racists, has been that hate speech works for them and their causes.

The political class has learned very little. They appear not to realise that the absolutist wing of the Islamic groups need their Islamophobia to gain purchase on the apprehensions of the wider Muslim communities. Whenever a Federal minister slings off at a Muslim leader, often in an ill-considered and demeaning way, he or she adds to the evidence that absolutists use to intimidate their own communities into subservience to the Jihadist fantasy of a Caliphate.

Whenever a ministerial slam is made on a Muslim leader, the racist Right draws courage from the affirmation they see for their claims to the irremediable deviance of all Muslims. So one lesson from Cronulla that has bitten for both absolutists and white racists, has been that hate speech works for them and their causes. Reclaim Australia and the Jihadists desperately and achingly need each other; no one else does.

The Muslim communities have learned that they face two enemies. Inside Islam, they are continually harassed by extremists, who want all Muslims to turn their backs on the values of democratic Australia and to bow unthinkingly before the ideologues of Islamism. Outside Islam they confront a spreading stain of invective and hatred from non-Muslim society, occasioned by the violence of small minorities, which preach the religion of despair. This has become an excruciatingly painful impasse in which to be trapped.

Ten years after Cronulla frightened and angry non-Muslims will rally at Cronulla to “celebrate” what was in truth then not even a Phyrric victory. They will be protected and deterred by a heavy police presence, now steered by people who have studied the mistakes of the past, and the somewhat limited successes (such as the prevention of the attack on the US Consulate through Hyde Park in 2012).

Cronulla has taught us that sustained engagement, active and respectful listening, and creative involvement…remains crucial to building the trust that necessarily underpins the social capital of a cohesive society.

State politicians in NSW will be better guided by a major strategy of community engagement and social cohesion, and few if any will be allowed by their leaders and advisers to erupt into the demagoguery and rhetoric of 2005. Federal Liberal politicians, with no such strategy and an emotional imperative that seems to demand they call out to the most fearful and least rational parts of the community, will probably do so again as they have done in recent days.

Australians have moved a few steps beyond the aged supporters of 18th century France’s Ancien Regime, which had learned or forgotten nothing. Cronulla has taught us that sustained engagement, active and respectful listening, and creative involvement, enabling people to put down a stake and a place in the complex web of reciprocal social relations, remains crucial to building the trust that necessarily underpins the social capital of a cohesive society. Unfortunately those who do not want to see that trust realised are all too eager to find every opportunity to let the conflict rip.

Shorter version publlished through The Conversation, with 100+ comments (some people are scary)

When Australia’s Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull in early November used a celebration of Australian multiculturalism  to open a speech justifying increased penalties for ever-younger potential jihadis, he made two rather profound statements. For the first time since Bob Hawke an Australian Prime Minister centred multiculturalism as a potential strength in building national security. In the same breath he demonstrated that it had failed in that task, as punitive sanctions were required because by implication multiculturalism had not been successful enough.

The reason for the failure was left to us to discern. I argue that the key reason for multiculturalism not providing “the cement for all Australians” that PM Howard had derided in 1988, lies in the refusal of national government after government since Hawke to legislate for its application to public life. Unlike the major states that have had no problem with multicultural legislation, the Commonwealth has surrendered the territory that effective multicultural policy should occupy, by pre-emptive buckling to nativist Right wing populists, and more recently, to jihadist ideologues with no interest in Australia. Continue reading “Why Australia needs a Multiculturalism Act and why Malcolm Turnbull should deliver one.” →