The Golden Country by Tim Watts

Author:Tim Watts
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
Published: 2019-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

This dynamic isn’t unique to Australia, but it’s dominated our public debate since John Howard was elected in 1996. ‘I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country,’ Howard insisted. ‘I have always taken a more optimistic view of the character of the Australian people.’338 He framed any claim of racism in Australia as an affront, an attack on the ‘character of the Australian people’ as a whole and, by extension, on every Australian who took pride in it.

It was a deft rhetorical sleight of hand. Anyone who had the hide to suggest that there is racism in Australia was not an anti-racist: they were anti-Australian. There was no room in this perverted logic to take pride in Australia’s achievements in overcoming racism, because there was never anything to overcome. Howard effectively made the denial of racism in Australia a precondition of being a virtuous Australian.

The unresolved legacy of our European colonisation notwithstanding, I don’t believe Australia, as a nation, is intrinsically and irrevocably racist. Our national identity is not static and there’s far too much goodwill when you cut through our political debate and ask Australians how they actually feel about these issues to render such a verdict. From my limited perspective as an Anglo-Australian man, I don’t believe there are many countries in the world where my Eurasian-Australian children would have a greater opportunity to reach their full potential than in Australia, and I think we can feel pride in the distance we have travelled as a nation on these issues. Australia is a different, and far better, nation than it was in the days of Sir Henry Parkes.

Racial prejudice and discrimination exist in Australia, though—as they do in every country on earth. We can admit this without sackcloth and rending of clothes. This was the second near-universal perspective I heard from the dozens of Asian-Australians who I spoke with when writing this book. Australians might genuinely think and say that everyone who buys into Australian values is equally Aussie but, in reality, members of my family are treated differently in our nation on the basis of their race.

The kind of public racial prejudice and abuse that I saw at the pub with Sam is a real part of life for people of colour in Australia. There are a small minority of Australians who are personally, consciously, prejudiced on the basis of race and discriminate against people accordingly. Asian-Australians still report regularly experiencing racial discrimination in our schools, workplaces and public spaces—on our sporting grounds and public-transport networks. The 2016 Scanlon Mapping Social Cohesion report found that around a fifth of Australians have experienced discrimination because of skin colour, ethnic origin or religion.339 These findings are echoed by research undertaken by the University of Western Sydney which found that 17 per cent of respondents had experienced racism in the past year.340

Visible minorities were significantly more likely to report public abuse, with 58 per cent of people who speak a language other than English having experienced

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