The release of Pauline Hanson, coinciding with some offline discussions with Jack Strocchi have led me to try to crystallise my thoughts about the role of racial, religious and ethnic prejudice in Australian and international politics (I’ll mostly avoid, as too contentious to be useful, the term ‘racism’, and will use ‘racial prejudice’ to encompass religous and ethnic prejudice). I begin with the paradox that appeals to racial prejudice were successful in 2001, whereas previous attempts by Howard and others to exploit such prejudice were notably unsuccessful. Another fact I want to look at is that parties and politicians appealing to racial prejudice have done very well in Europe recently, at the same time as the American Republicans have abandoned (or at least played down) the same kind of appeal, exploited very successfully in the 70s and 80s.

I begin with the observation that hardcore racism (systematic beliefs about the superiority of one race over another or about the importance of racial separation) is very rare in Australia and in most other countries. On the other hand, prejudices of various kinds, not necessarily consistent or strongly held, are very common. Attempts to convert prejudice against particular groups into systematic discrimination, for example, in immigration, have generally failed to secure majority support. People may be prejudiced against, say, Asians, as a group, but few are willing to advocate open racial discrimination and fewer still to support unjust treatment in individual cases.

One kind of appeal to racial prejudice that has worked moderately well is based on the spurious notion of ‘political correctness’ as a threat to free speech. Broadly speaking the claim is that speech that is vigorously critical of those who express prejudice somehow threatens the freedom of speech of the latter group. Howard pushed this line while trying to use Hanson as a wedge in the Labor vote. However, the artificiality of scares about political correctness mean that they don’t work for long.

The only case when appeals to racial prejudice work effectively is when they are combined with law and order politics. Appeals to law and order work most effectively when a lawbreaking ‘Them’ can be set against a lawabiding ‘Us’.

‘Them’ can be juvenile offenders, users of nontradtional druges, an economic underclass or members of a minority group. An important part of the success of this political combination is that it’s objectively true that, for the crimes that most perturb people such as burglaries and muggings, large proportions of offenders are young, unemployed drug users. And in most societies, members of recently arrived or historically downtrodden minorities are more likely to fall into these categories. (Note though, that taken overall, immigrants have slightly lower rates than Australian natives).

By contrast, even though speeders kill many more people than terrorists, law and order politics doesn’t work in the case of road laws because the lawbreakers are Us or People Like Us. Things like anti-hooning laws are the exception that proves (that is, tests) the rule.

Howard’s success with Tampa is an instance of all this, and it’s important to observe that it was working before September 11. There were two central components to the integration of law and order with racial prejudice. The first was panic about the potential arrival of large numbers of unauthorised asylum-seekers, summed up in the insistent use of the term ‘illegals’. Given the complexities of asylum law, this term would be more clearly justified in the case of, say, British tourists who overstay their visas, but such people are not ‘Them’.

The second important factor was the spate of gang rapes by young Muslim men in Western Sydney, exacerbated by ludicrously light sentences handed out to the first rapists convicted in these cases. Judge Megan Latham, who handed out sentences as low as 18 months in one case (later increased on appeal), and who denied the glaringly obvious ethnic component in these crimes, can take as much credit as anyone for Howard’s success with Tampa.

Very similar points can be made about the US and Europe. As crime fell in the US during the 1990s boom (aided by, effective if indiscriminate, resort to imprisonment), so did the political appeal of “Willie Horton”-style appeals to racial prejudice coded in terms of law and order. The reverse has happened in Europe where crime has generally risen somewhat.
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What can be done to resist the combination of racism and law and order? The first lesson, which social democratic parties are already learning, is to neutralise the law and order issue as far as possible. This does not mean accepting the demagogic politics of talkback radio. But it does mean dumping the baggage of the past, including the romantic pro-criminal line that was part of 60s radicalism and the reflexive (and scientifically unsupported) opposition to lengthy terms of imprisonment that characterises a large proportion of academic criminologists and legal scholars. The Blairite line of ‘tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime’, is spot-on, even if its delivery has been less than perfect in practice.

The best approach on racial prejudice is simply to tell the truth as far as possible. That means not dodging the fact that communities with high rates of youth unemployment are going to have high rates of youth crime, nor the fact that, even under adverse circumstances, those who choose to become criminals have to take the consequences. It also means not being cowed by claims about political correctness. Politicians who play on racial prejudice, such as Howard, should be called for doing so. When, like Philip Ruddock, they have previously built careers on reputations for tolerance, and support-bases on pork-barrelling for favored ethnic groups, they should be hounded throughout their political careers and into the history books.