Tag: citizenship

Moving on from White Australia: Election 2022?

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Despite years of critique the Australian national parliament has been overwhelmingly White and massively male, unlike the country as a whole. But something changed at the 2022 election – most clearly around racism and sexism. How might this play out in the negotiations to come?

The Whitlam government supposedly ended the White Australia policy in 1973. For fifty years though, White Australia has hung on in the elite structures –Commonwealth cabinets, the High Court and the ABC Board as examples, even while changing at state and especially local levels. Prior to the 2019 election I argued that we would realise down the track that “Election 2019 was the last White Australia election, in which Euro-Australians dominated the parliamentary seats and both major party leaderships, and where xenophobia was the insistent leitmotif of the Right“. If this election marks an ending for White Australia we would expect to see change in voting, representation and policy.

Just before the election the BBC asked why the Australian Parliament was so White (and male). Sydney Policy Lab director Prof Tim Soutphomassane noted recently that “a celebration of cultural diversity has never been accompanied by a sharing of Anglo-Celtic institutional power”. Peter Khalil, an ALP MP , said in November last year that Australian politics was still swamped by an “Anglo Boys club”. Opting to describe himself as one of the 21% of the population who were NIPOCs (non-Indigenous people of colour) he reflected on years of racism and marginalisation he had experienced and witnessed inside the ALP and outside.

At the 2022 election the trajectories of change differed from each other along almost every conceivable parameter that was not old White male: middle aged well off White women took the elite Liberal urban seats from men. Younger people of colour, usually women, took many of the new Labor seats. Smart mainly young White people took the seats that were turning Green. White Australia was fragmenting along race and gender fault lines. The LNP was left with almost only older White guys in the House.

Voting

The election demonstrated the salience of specific ethnicity in contributing to voter-decisions in many seats, while the more general concern about rising racism played out for a more diverse electorate. “The Chinese vote” has been a focus for interest with many newspaper articles reflecting on the impact of the bellicose rhetoric of the LNP towards China and its impact on the “safety” that Chinese-ancestry voters felt with the conservatives. The Tally Room blog has argued that there was a significant shift towards the ALP (or better put, away from the Liberals) in electorates where the China-ancestry vote was significant. Where the opportunity existed for a potentially-successful Asian or Chinese candidate for the ALP, they were usually successful.

In Fowler, which is a very multicultural electorate with a large Vietnamese community (many with Chinese ethnicity) where the ALP ran the seemingly-resented candidate Kristina Keneally, the ALP vote dropped by nearly 19%. The local Independent Dai Le picked up all nearly all those previously ALP votes, while also taking nearly all the votes that left the Liberals (13%). The Senate vote in Fowler for the ALP also dropped significantly (8%) from 2019, while the Liberal vote rose slightly. In effect the ALP’s safest seat in NSW most likely cost the Party a secure majority.

The key electorates where an apparent anti-Liberal shift in the Chinese-ancestry vote was determinate included Bennelong, Reid and Parramatta in NSW, Chisholm, Higgins and Kooyong in Victoria, and Tangney in Western Australia (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-24/chinese-australian-vote-election-swing-labor/101091384). Some benfitted the ALP, some the Independents.

Representation

Peter Khalil (Wills, Vic) and Dr Anne Aly (Cowan, WA) had been fairly lonely non-European members of the ALP Caucus until the election. Aly (her origin is Egyptian Muslim) worked tirelessly during the long COVID lock-down in Perth to build opportunity for candidates of colour. In Perth Sam Lim (a Malaysian-Chinese immigrant) took Tangney with a 11% swing, building on his deep links with communities throughout Perth as a key police liaison person during the lockdown. Zaneta Mascarenhas, born in Kalgoorlie, whose parents arrived from Goa in 1979, took Swan with a 12% swing. Aly herself increased her vote in Cowan by nearly 10%.

In NSW the 9% first preference swing against Liberals in Bennelong was achieved by Jerome Laxale,the popular Labor mayor of Ryde, whose parents were Francophones from Mauritius and Le Reunion. He repeated the victory that Maxine McKew had achieved against John Howard in 2007, also with strong Chinese and Korean support. McKew though was another outsider Capatain’s pick, and could not hold the seat against John Alexander. Kristina Kenneally tried to take it as a Captain’s pick in a Section 44 by-election, but did not get that local support and failed. In Reid a popular local candidate, Sally Sitou, of Lao Chinese background, reclaimed the seat for the ALP with an 8% swing, on the base of very strong Chinese support.

In Victoria both seats that went to the ALP were won by “ethnic background” candidates. In Chisholm Greek-background Carlina Garland saw a 7% swing away from Gladys Liu, though only 4% went to the ALP. In Higgins Dr Michelle Anada-Rajah, a Tamil born in Sri Lanka, saw a 5% swing away from Liberal Dr Katie Allen bring her 3% of first preferences.

In summary of the ten or so seats the ALP won from the Liberals across the country, six were won by “ethnic candidates”, four of whom were people of colour. On the other hand the seven new “teal” seats, though all won by women, are all now represented by Euro-Australians (aka Whites). So how might this matter?

Policy

The ALP released its Election Statement on Multiculturalism under the names of Katy Gallagher (Finance) and Andrew Giles (Multicultural Affairs) two days before the vote and well after most of the pre-polls and postal votes had been cast. The Statement appears pulled out of the 2021 Multicultural Engagement Taskforce Report chaired by Peter Khalil. Two critical additions include a commitment to a Multicultural Framework Review, which will have to consider whether Australia should have a Multicultural Act (which is Green’s policy), and a re-assessment of the standards for measuring Australia’s diversity. The COVID pandemic and the failures to protect multicultural communities have foregrounded the urgencyof these issues .

It is unlikely the LNP or the Teals will have an interest in or an appetite for pushing these concerns to the top of the food chain. However the new ALP NIPOCs and the Independent Dai Le will have a major investment in exactly that dynamic, creating with Aly and Khalil a significant bloc. The new government’s best-known leaders are Albanese and Wong, two surnames drawn from the deep hinterland of multicultural Australia. Farewell White Australia?

Two Strongs don’t make it Right

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ 1 Comment

During May 2017 two national inquiries were calling for public submissions to strengthen what an outsider might think sounded like the same policy challenge in a multicultural democracy such as Australia. On the one hand the Senate wanted to understand what action might be required to strengthen multiculturalism, while on the other the Government wanted to strengthen citizenship. The Senate inquiry is continuing and has taken public evidence, including for LyLy Lim  and myself, based on our written submission (Submission 8). The Government one barely stopped to take breath at the closure date, refused to make the submissions to its consultation public, and announced through Minister Dutton soon thereafter increased restrictions and constraints on gaining and retaining citizenship.

However the inquirers each defined “strengthen” in rather different ways, to the point where the word came to represent a totally opposing set of values, world views, and social priorities. In a period of political chaos, post-truth and Trumpet rhetoric, any claim to strength must necessarily suggest assumptions about the causes of the weakness to be supplanted, and the dynamic driving the moral erosion set to be removed.

The Senate inquiry dates from November 2016 when the Greens decided to push for a more robust multicultural policy, in particular one that would bring in national legislation to create a legislative basis for multiculturalism, a proposition last floated by the ALP in 1989 but never enacted or reintroduced by any government since the rise of the Howard opposition. The ALP went along with the Green’s initiative, as the reorganisation of the multiculturalism shadow policy was only starting to take shape. Meanwhile GetUp was moving towards its own firmer strategy on linking with culturally diverse communities, an initiative that would be first tested early in 2017 in the struggle to stop the proposed government changes to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

The Inquiry was launched on the International Day for the elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, in Australia known under its vanilla alias as “Harmony Day”. Any publicity hoped for at the launch was overwhelmed by the Government’s own statement of Multiculturalism, which carefully bypassed all the issues raised in the Senate reference. The senators identified issues such as the adequacy of data on racially motivated crimes, the impact of vilification and discrimination, and the impact of media and political stigmatisation of minority communities on bigotry and harassment. It looked for ways that might improve public discourse and recognise the contribution of immigrant groups. Centrally it wished to consider legislative underpinnings for the currently rootless amalgam of provisions that count as Federal multicultural policy, last put into the public arena for (inconclusive) debate in 1989.

For the Senate then to strengthen multiculturalism appears to entail building a stronger legislative base, improving the information about the impact of xenophobia on minorities, and extending the human rights base for multicultural practice.

The Citizenship inquiry, despite its wattle and gum tree green discussion paper, was framed by consultations initially managed by Sen Concetta Fierravanti-Wells and former Immigration minister and now human rights ambassador Phillip Ruddock. They reported that there was a widespread fear among older multi-generation Australians that potential terrorists and other ne’er-do-wells were finding it too easy to get citizenship, and that not only should the access be toughened, but the loss of citizenship should be more readily used to punish miscreants. The second of those measures, the cancelling of citizenship for terrorists with dual nationality was enacted early on. Raising the bar by lengthening the time people need to prove their commitment to Australia (by volunteering at school tuck shops among other proofs), increasing the level of English required to the equivalent of a year 10 school-leaver, and swearing to uphold a set of values yet to be defined, makes citizenship (and the voting rights that come with it) a much more challenging exercise for humanitarian entrants and both older and less well-educated applicants from non-English speaking backgrounds.

Thus strengthening citizenship is concerned not with bolstering the quality of the process of citizenship achievement for the applicants, but rather in quietening the concerns of the most xenophobic elements in Australian society. That is, the process in place is designed to increase the stigmatisation experienced by minorities, normalise low levels of racist discourse and moral vilification against immigrants, while increasing the sense of marginalisation and exclusion for wide sections of the community. Such concerns about exclusion were once voiced by former Liberal MP Petro Georgiou, who almost alone stood against the Howard government’s last round introduction under then Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews of the first Australian values and ‘strengthened’ English language test. He commented sadly that his parents, proud Greek Australians, would never have made it through the hoops then being applied.

By strengthening citizenship in the way it is proposed, whether intentionally or uncaringly, the sense of exclusion widens, the possibilities of achievement lessen, and the value of the future citizen is adduced from their class rather than their character (think perhaps Asian billionaire vs rescued Yasidi grandmother). Asserting a human rights perspective provides a more reliable basis for strengthening social cohesion than does an approach that merely toughens the rules. For loyalty to Australia will ultimately depend on the recognition and respect paid to its aspiring citizens, not their performance of ritualised elements of culture which is far more complex than Minister Dutton and his black shirts are able to recognise.

 

 

Myanmar’s rocky road to multiculturalism:Aung San Suu Kyi’s challenge

~ Andrew Jakubowicz ~ Leave a comment

Slightly different version published in ABC The Drum 27 November 2013.

Aung San Suu Kyi will be in Sydney Australia today (27 November 2013)  to receive an honorary doctorate from the University of Technology, originally bestowed on her in 1996 and given to her late husband in 1997 in her absence (she was unwilling to leave Yangon). Daw Suu Kyi is widely expected and hoped to be the winner of the 2015 election in Myanmar, but her accession to the leadership, even if it occurs, leaves many problems yet to confront. Even the pathway over the next eighteen months remains treacherous.

Key issues Myanmar faces in the lead up to the 2015 election, a turning point that many commentators hope will produce a final transformation of the polity into one which is both politically democratic and economically egalitarian, can be traced back to its origin as as an “abandoned colony”.  The Economist recently argued that of these ethnic conflicts were the main road-bloc to economic development and democratic stability.

Myanmar cannot escape its history as a former British colony as easily as changing government. In a statistical analysis of the impact of forms of colonialism on post-colonial violence, two Montreal sociologists Matthew Lange and Andrew Dawson  have argued that ex-colonies formerly ruled by the UK have a shared profile of fractured social relations once the colonial power has left. The reason for this is the way in which the British typically organised their colonies, and as importantly, the way in which they departed. Ethnic violence or suppression are the most characteristic of the forms of conflict that emerge. Australia went that way (think Indigenous Australians and think White Australia), as did a myriad of other places, from Singapore to Zimbabwe. Myanmar continues today to deal with the fall-out from having been British Burma.

Lange and Dawson review 160 ex-colonies once ruled by a range of European metropolitan powers: where the British have been in charge, the picture seems to be:

  • a diverse range of ethnic communities, some “imported” to fill key colonial tasks,  with embedded and conflicting identities
  • a political economy where the division of labour is “communalised”
  • a stratification system in which the distinctions within the hierarchy are ethnic in form
  • animosity between indigenous and non-indigenous populations
  • the imposition of arbitrary political borders that suit the ruling power
  • despotic forms of rule
  • ineffective states
  • a power vacuum at independence.

When the post-war British Labour government said to the Burmese independence leaders that they were “out of here” in 1946, they set in train a tragic sequence of events. These are acutely poignant for Aung San Suu Kyi; her father, a wartime leader of the struggle against the British and post-war architect of a possible egalitarian nation state, was assassinated by competitors for state power. His dream, of a united states of Burma, became instead the nightmare of decades of wars and struggles between various ethno-national and sometimes Christian quasi-states on the periphery of the nation, against the Burman Buddhist majority in the centre.  Most recently, as most of these statelets on the edges of the nation have made a sort of peace with the centre, Buddhist violence against Muslims has re-ignited.

When the British finally defeated the last king of the Burmans in 1885 and sent him into exile in India (exchanging him for the last Muslim rajah of India, who was buried in an unmarked grave in Rangoon), they significantly transformed the country through manipulation of ethnic boundaries and the imposition of ethnic hierarchies. Importing thousands of Indians from Bengal and beyond to fill jobs from labourers to clerks in government and business, the colonial power sought to destroy the capacity of the Burmans to resuscitate their defeated kingdom.  They empowered the hill peoples, and enabled the conversion of many to Christianity – Baptists and Catholics found ready converts where economic and political advantage would follow.  The colonial army offered career opportunities to the  Shan, while opium production began to provide monetary rewards in the hill country, as did the logging of the teak forests.

Muslims have been in the territory of Burma since their earliest days as purveyors of their evangelising mercantile religion.  By the time of the first British invasion of 1825 they were well integrated, including as military servants of the King, some captured in raids in Bengal before the British came.  Their numbers increased with the import of Indians and the spread of Bengalis along the coast and through the mountains into the west of Rakhine state (the Rohingya).

Anti-Muslim sentiment was interwoven with British colonial power, with economic competition, and with the support of Muslims for the British against the Japanese in 1942 . The Japanese were initially supported by the Burmese National Army, led by Aung San, in a war of independence against the British, who then pulled back to British Bengal, behind a native defensive shield including Muslim troops.

The contemporary unrest builds on decades of an essentially militarised neo-fascist regime that had locked together Burmese nationalism with Buddhism; its civilian replacement has not entirely escaped that heritage. A specific trigger for anti-Muslim local conflicts in lowland Myanmar came in 2001 the wake of the Taliban destruction of the buddhas of Bamyan in Afghanistan, seen by Burmese Buddhist activists as a sign of the utter treachery of Muslims en bloc. The recent release from prison of a Buddhist monk active in that conflict has provided new leadership and revitalised the movement, with tragic consequences.

The Myanmar nationality law of 1982 contains a very essentialist definition of who can be a citizen. It adopts a jus sanguinis approach, which lists the blood and soil peoples (none that come after the British invasion of 1825 are acceptable). The Rohingya of Rakhine are especially not part of the national story, and are corralled into their edge of the country and prohibited to travel elsewhere. Some Burmese Muslims try to distance themselves from the Rohingya so as to avoid the constraints and the prejudice they fear for themselves. Aung San Suu Kyi has also found the Rohingya a difficult issue, embedded as she is in the ideology of a national Burmese federation of original peoples, promulgated by her father.

In the lead up to their  2015 election, the peoples of Myanmar have some tricky issues to resolve – how to articulate a plural nation that ensures economic equality and opportunity; how to smooth the edges of ethno-national resentments that have the capacity to crack open the whole development story; and how to take the country from the poly-ethnic conflict of the British legacy to a multicultural egalitarian democratic polity based on inclusion and social justice. Critical to this will be how they deine who can be a Myanmar citizen and share in the democratic story. Exclusion of any group may erode the legitimacy of the system for everyone.