hell’s paving stones

This is how the first candid national discussion of racism in Australia was aborted before time:

JOURNALIST: So you’re saying there was no element of race or racism in the riots on the weekend?

PRIME MINISTER: No, I said what I said. I do not believe Australians are racist. I thought the behaviour yesterday was quite unacceptable and I said that attacking anybody on the basis of their race or their colour or appearance is quite unacceptable.

That was the first question asked at a press conference given the day after the worst Cronulla riots. There was no follow-up question which might have gone along the lines of “Nobody is arguing that all Australians are racist. The question was simply if racism played a role in the Cronulla riots, and I asked it to interrogate the reasons why race has been such a divisive element in that particular part of Australia.” As a result, Howard was able to avoid addressing the root causes of the riots and implicitly deny the possibility that racism in society might be complicated.

As a result of the missing follow-up, and consequently the airing of Howard’s unchallenged interpretation of the debate, the frame of discussion became awkwardly skewed. The question asked in polls and commentary was whether there is, in Howard’s words, underlying racism in Australia. The bogus ‘big development’ in the discussion was when an AgePoll discovered that 75% of respondents thought there was ‘underlying racism’ in the country. It could be argued that a respondent might have interpreted ‘underlying’ racism to mean that there is an element of racism in Australia rather than a domination of racism in society. In any case, the back-and-forth became centred on the question of whether a majority of Australians are racist. The debate fizzled and didn’t even make it to Christmas. Instead of constructing an analysis of racial tensions in Sydney, and using it as a starting point for considering race relations in the rest of Australia, we had an ersatz debate and collapsed on the easy truism that we’re a country of migrants and at least we don’t have the White Australia policy anymore.

The name of the journalist who asked the founding question isn’t noted in the transcript, but our suggestion is that the record should attribute questions to reporters so that we might be able to put a name to significant failures in Australian journalism. This was one of them.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 27th, 2005 at 10:52 pm and is filed under Politics, Paving stones. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.