Australian Race Riots

Cronulla beach, south of Sydney, was the scene of riots yesterday, as large groups of white Australians clashed with police and attacked people of Middle-Eastern origin.

The riots took place when around 5000 people gathered for a rally held after an alleged attack on two lifeguards by a couple of Lebaneese men. Police have said the attack did not appear to be racially motivated.

According to the papers, police believe that white supremacists may have used the incident to stoke up tension in an area which is often frequented by youths of middle-eastern origin from working class nieghbourhoods of Sydney.

"There appears to be an element of white supremacists and they really have no place in mainstream Australian society. Those sort of characters are best placed in Berlin 1930s, not in Cronulla 2005," said New South Wales police minister, Carl Scully.

Retaliation attacks against white Australians have taken place in other areas.

Australian Prime Minister John Howard declared that "attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians irrespective of their own background and their politics. I'm not going to put a general tag of racism on the Australian community."

Yet Howard is well aware that there have always been undercurrents of racism in Australian society, and Howard's critics have accused him of capitalising on nationalism and prejudice for his own political ends, particularly in the run up to elections. It seems there has been increased tension between the Muslim and white Australian communities since the attacks of September 11th 2001 and the Bali bombings.

This is to say nothing of the systematic discrimination against Aborigines and the human rights abuses carried out against them which stretches back from the foundation of the British colony right up to the present day. Howard has stated publicly on a number of occasions that present day Australians should not have to feel guilty about the genocide of the indigenous aboriginal population and has tried to play down the racist aspect of his nation's history. Yet this is not an issue confined to the past, as evidenced by the incidents over the last couple of days.

As late as March of this year a UN body, the CERD (comittee for the elimination of all racial discrimination) found the Australian government guilty of discrimination against the indigenous population on a number of counts.

"In particular, the Committee expressed concern about the abolishment of ATSIC; the practical barriers Indigenous peoples face in succeeding in claims for native title; the continuing over-representation of Indigenous peoples in prisons; and the extreme inequities between Indigenous peoples and others in the areas of employment, housing, health education and income. The UN Committee called on the Australian Government to work towards a meaningful reconciliation and to properly address the issues of the Stolen Generation."

Howard also used the issue of the boat people and Asian immigrants to garner votes in the campaign for the 2001 election, persuading voters that he was the man to keep refugees out of the country, and pandering to widespread hysteria about 'floods' of immigrants pouring into the country. This helped to deflect attention away from the real issues affecting the many white Australians in poor communities with high unemployment, who were led to believe that it was immigration that was behind their own marginalised circumstances.

"The government has deliberately targetted its anti-refugee xenophobia at those social layers, particularly in rural and regional areas, that have been uprooted and left vulnerable by the processes of economic restructuring. Adopting the program of the extreme rightwing Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party, both Liberal and Labor cynically prey on fears and insecurities, which their own policies have been responsible for creating, to blame immigrants for the lack of jobs and services."

Last year there were prolonged clashes over a weekend between Aboriginal youths and police in the Redferns area of Sydney after an aboriginal boy was impaled on a fence during a police chase. It is not difficult to see similarities between this and the trigger which caused the rioting of another marginalised community in France quite recently.

There remains a huge over-representation of Aboriginies in Australian prisons and their life expectancy and literacy levels are way below other sections of Australian society. Check out the statistics in this interesting article from the time of the Redferns riots.

Howard, along with some other Australian politicians, and the Australian media, led by Rupert Murdoch, have certainly had a role to play in generating the kind of racial tensions and anti-immigration hysteria which have led to these latest riots.

A simple "we are not racist" statement sounds pretty hollow when it comes from a man who has built a political career on pandering to prejudice.