There’s not much to say about the riots that hasn’t already been said, but one point that hasn’t been stressed enough is the small numbers of people actively involved. The crowd at Cronulla on Sunday was large, but it seems that only a couple of hundred were engaged in violence. Similarly, forty car loads of thugs were said to have been involved in the subsequent round of attacks on Monday night. That’s alarming but again it amounts to a couple of hundred people. The same was true in the French riots, which mainly consisted of small groups burning cars under cover of darkness. The availability of mobile phones makes organising this kind of thing a lot easier, and calls for a response. I hope that, in addition to those already charged, the police will pursue everyone involved in this shameful behavior. Many of them have been recorded on film and ought to be easy to identify.
Then there are the instigators of the violence. The senders of SMS messages will no doubt be hard to trace, but there’s no doubt about the role of talkback radio and 2GB in particular. It’s unclear whether Alan Jones or his talkback callers have committed a criminal offence, as suggested in comments here and elsewhere, but if he hasn’t, then the government’s spanking new sedition laws are clearly a dead letter.
The laws governing broadcasting are also relevant. Radio stations like 2GB get free allocations of valuable spectrum under a system of licensing which includes a prohibition on broadcasting matter that is likely to incite violence. If this system is to be maintained, 2GB should be stripped of its license by the Australian Broadcasting Authority for broadcasting people like Jones.
John Quiggin 
That would move us towards the notion of “equality before the law”.
Never was one, as far as I know.
Note that Windscuttle says: “But it became corrupted by partisan politics. As former Labor Government minister Barry Jones has admitted, immigration became “a tremendously important elementâ€? in building up a long-term, non-English-speaking political constituency for his party.”
But as far as I can tell, what Jones actually said was: “The handling of population by the previous Government was less than distinguished – partly because immigration was seen as a tremendously important element in building up a long term political constituency. ”
That is, Jones was saying the exact opposite of what Windschuttle wants to claim Jones said.
Windscuttle is full of crap.
Terje,
As you’d expect of anything written by Windschuttle these days the article in question is a mighty edifice of lies, innuendo and deliberate distortion built on a tiny foundation of fact.
From the simple fact that Labour (and Liberals) sought to encourage migration from ethnic groups they thought woudl tend to favor them, he invents the claim of delierate creation of “ethnic suburbs”.
As for “equality before the law” I presume you also want to abolish sex discrimination laws and legal protection for the disabled.
Steve & Ian,
I was not making any value judgements – I was merely pointing out the way to achieve Katz’s desired effect was not quite what he had thought. Steve is right that it would affect laws based on any race prefernce, however. Whether that would help or hurt the Aboriginal people is another question entirely.
.
Steve,
I made no comment on my desires in the sex discrimination or disabled protection areas either.
“Andrew and Katz- If you abolish the section of the constitution that allows the making of laws “for any raceâ€?, wouldn’t that adversely affect Aboriginals?”
Can’t speak for Andrew, but I wouldn’t lose any sleep over this.
Sorry to subvert your preconceptions about Leftists, Steve, but as a non-wet, left libertarian, you’re talking my language.
In terms of Australia’s racist record, my only desires are;
1. Own up to our past.
2. Get rid of our vestigal racism, such as the Race Powers provision.
3. Move on.
Given the appalling situation that many Aboriginals are in I would prefer some degree of positive discrimination to help them out. In communities that are hopelessly dysfunctional, as many Aboriginal communities are, I have no problem with special assistance. I did a tour up the centre of Australia thru Alice Springs, Uluru, Katherine etc and what I saw there was depressing. I can’t turn a blind eye to that.
Steve,
I know they are disadvantaged, but government assistance is not always the way to correct that.
Terje, firstly thanks for your insightful explanation of the issue of housing unaffordability. The reasons you have given are :
That builders charge for their services; and
Council zoning restricts the availability of land
So are we to conclude that the reason why, in the 1960’s, and 1970’s when I grew up, ordinary working class families, with single incomes, could, unlike middle class families of today, with two incomes, afford free standing homes, close to their place of work and close to amenities, was that builders did not charge for their services back then?
More seriously, council zoning policies come a little closer to the mark. It is one factor that effects the supply and demand equation.
Another, of course, is population size. Property speculators are well aware that higher population leads to greater demand and, so drives up the price of land and housing for all of us.
This was confirmed when, to my astonishment, in May last year, an economist working for the Property Council of Australia, openly stated, more than once, on Radio National’s “Australia Talk’s Back” radio talk-back program that they were looking forward to continuing immigration to lift the property ‘industry’ out of its ‘doldrums’, and cause house prices to go beyond the already obscene levels of the three hudred and four hundred thousand dollar mark. (Yes, you may have noticed that I made a similar point on the forum arising from the After the Riots article.) (Silly me. And to think that I had thought that the prime motivation for Australia’s immigration program was humanitarian.)
Your presumed solution to this problem created, in the first place, by our Governments, at the behest of land speculators and property developers, is to remove all zoning restrictions.
Possibly, it may help to solve the supply side of the equation, but for how long, if population numbers continue to rise inexorably (1 million more in South East Queenlsand expected by 2026 and similar numbers expected in Sydney in the same period)?
And what of the effects of yet more open slather urban sprawl? How much further will people need, each day, to travel through gridlocked traffic, in a world running out of petroleum in order to reach work? How much of today’s remnants of bushland and farming land can be expected to survive yet more relentless urban development?
Clearly we need to find ways to house the people we have, but those of us, who have watched the market gardens of Brisbane disappear as a consequence of thoughtless unplanned urban expansion, may, this time, prefer to see local councils and state Governments begin to exercise effective urban planning, rather than leaving it all up to developers.
Finally, how about, next time, just simply sticking to the point?
Everyone needs secure shelter in order to live a dignified life.
If someone, for example, my friend, whom I quoted above, finds that it is not possible to obtain this basic necessity without having to enter into crippling financial commitments for decades to come, then perhaps you should accept that he is fully entitled to state that he doesn’t quite have the same feeling of freedom which Andrew tells us incessantly we all enjoy.
(Whoops, sorry, the above was posted into the wrong forum. Ishould have been the Peak Oil forum)
Dear Professor John Quiggin,
Please remove this and my previous post from this forum.
I know this is ‘After the riots’, but – people should check out Zoe Brain’s post on the riots if they’ve not already done so. There are issues in the background she doesn’t go into but her account of the riot itself is better and more immediate than anything I’ve seen in the mainstream media.
Apologies if it’s been linked before.
Gee, thanks, Rob.
Galbally’s report was in, what, 1978? Under Fraser? 27 years later, you think that the recent Cronulla problem was caused by a (reasonably successful, in my opinion) attempt to deal with the the abandonment of the white Australia policies?
P’raps I should have said ‘principal post’.
No sweat, Rob. 🙂
Terje, a paper in the March 2000 issue of People and Place discusses ALP ethnic branch stacking. It’s titled: “Ethnic recruitment or ethnic branch stacking? Factionalism and ethnicity in the Victorian ALP” and is the fourth one down.
‘But on the other hand, I don’t believe that James Farrell has countered the central thrust of Jack’s argument. I take this argument to be that multiculturalism, as practised in Australia, and civil society are, at a fundamental level contradictory.’
Well, I said it was silly. That’ a start!
Saturday afternoon and so far the media isn’t reporting any new violence.
Marcian S is right.
This was due to racism. Lebanese racism towards white Australia, and white Australias racism towards itself.
His comment, along with the articles of Tim Priest, have summed up the matter very succintly. I have no idea why people refuse to face the truth.
https://johnquiggin.com/index.php/archives/2005/12/14/after-the-riots/#comment-38986
” This was due to racism. Lebanese racism towards white Australia, and white Australias racism towards itself.”
What about white australian racism towards the lebanese? Do you deny that exists?
Ping, no one is denying that ‘White’ Australian racism towards Lebanese exists.
But the point forgotten is that many of these young lebanese are equally racist – if not more so.
There were a number of articles in today’s SMH touching on this.
Eg: http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/years-of-rejection-erupted-in-open-rebellion/2005/12/16/1134703611519.html
and
http://www.theage.com.au/news/national/young-and-free/2005/12/16/1134703609550.html,
the story (we assume) of Christian Lebanese racially abused by you know who!
“Sitting at a nearby table with his blonde mother, 10-year-old Najee al-Mazri says they were walking through Bankstown this week when a young Lebanese man went up to her and called her a “f—ing Aussie”.
“My mum said actually we’re Lebanese too and then I said something to him in Arabic. And then he’s like ‘oh, sorry’. People shouldn’t be saying dumb stuff like that.”
And see also: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=3962
Steve,
Are you saying that if we visit a country town and find a group of white people living in an appalling situation with a community that was hopelessly dysfunctional then you would deny them assistance?
And if you would assist the whites also then is there any need for aboriginal “special assistance”. Maybe they should just get mainstream assistance based on need.
Regards,
Terje.
James Farrell’s take on Strocchi – “Tolerance is only possible when ethnic identities dissolve. As soon as I insist on tolerance for practices that are characteristic of a group – an ethnic group in particular – suddenly I am inviting that group to be intolerant of others.”
I’ve been reading Strocchi’s denunciations of multiculturalism for what feels like years now.
Finally thanks to James – I have a handle on it.
>And if you would assist the whites also then is there any need for aboriginal “special assistance�. Maybe they should just get mainstream assistance based on need.
A good exampel of why specific programs are needed to assist Aboriginal people is Abstudy.
I have’t looked at the detaisl for years but when I did the benefits were the same as for Austudy but the qualification criteria were different.
Under Austudy, you had to go throguh a fairly lengthy and rigorous process to qualify for the maximum “living-away-from-home” rate of assistance.
Because a much larger proportion of Aboriginal students come from regional and remote areas and because a much larger proportion of the Aboriginal students from metropolitan areas qualify under the “difficult home circumstances” provisions, it is simpyl much easier adminsitratively to have a separate program with easier criterai fro proving “livign away from home” eligibility.
Similarly, it makes sense to have separate programs for medical services and schooling in remote Aboriginal communities because you need to provide higher renumeratio nand better benefits in order to get staff. (Similarly, state school teachers in ALL communities in far west Queensland get additional leave to make up for the inconvenience of living in these areas. Presumably you think this should be abolished too.)
Re. your arguments about needs-based assistance: when major employers shut down in regional Australia or when a drought hits, the mainly white people affected get government assistance which beggars anything received by Aborigines.
Australia has finally made it onto the world map. The Onion has noticed the riots in Cronulla.
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/43652.
I hope that’s not too frivolous. Remember, there are more Onion readers than there are Australians.
The farmers get assistance because they are going through tought times, not because they are white people going through tough times. Do you seriously think that aboriginal farmers are excluded from drought assistance?
When your race is systematically and automatically regarded as a disability then there is a significant problem with the mentality behind the system.
Terje
I noticed that you were complaining in another thread that you were disallowed the opportunity to discuss Windschuttle.
It was you who earlier introduced Windscuttle into this thread. Where’s your defence of him? Or were you complaining just for the sake of complaining?
SJ,
You ask a strange question that suggests that you did not really read what I wrote.
I said that I knew next to nothing about Windschuttle but that I had read an article written by him in the Australian newspaper in the last week. That is the article that I introduced in this thread up above. I did not introduce the article because of the authors name. In fact in this discussion I did not even mention the authors name because I was more interested in the content of the article not the authors life history. John Quiggin mention the name before I did. And if fact I did not even set out to agree with the article that I posted or with Windschuttle but rather to question one of the assertions made in his article.
I can’t defend Windschuttle or in fact criticise him because I know next to nothing about him. What I complained about in another thread was John Quiggins way of introducing a topic (ie Windschuttle), giving advance notice that he would be censoring one side of any debate and then making an advance claim of victory. I thought it was intellectually shallow and quite disappointing.
If John had allowed an open debate about Windschuttle then I might have asked questions and tested other peoples assumptions but I could not have contributed much in the way of factual content because I know next to nothing about Windschuttle. Or did I mention that already.
Regards,
Terje.
P.S. I know next to nothing about Windschuttle.
P.P.S. John has redeemed himself by closing down the other thread. Any one sided debate has been averted.
Terje,
Just so you know, I think that PrQ was right in cutting the debate on he who shall not be named short – the last few threads on him just got plain boring. Personally, I think it would have been better not to bring the topic up.
I presume you mean it would have been better if PrQ had not brought up the topic. I seek to clarify because SJ seems to infer that I raised the topic (about he who shall not be named) by linking to a newspaper article and questioning its veracity.
My point all along was that it is intellectually weak to start a debate but insist on only agreeable contributions. As such I agree that it would have been better if PrQ did not bring the topic up. Assuming of course that this is what you meant.
PrQ might be a vigorous seeker of the truth or he might be wedded to his own narrow left wing ideology. The charitable optimist within wants to assume the former, however I did find his style in opening that particular thread somewhat challenging.
Regards,
Terje.
P.S. I also regard the particular style of opening that thread as being out of character for PrQ. He is usually good at being in the difficult position of being both a moderator and participant.
P.P.S. In my response to PrQ I may have infered that his behaviour said something global about him as a person. I regret that inference. I am pretty confident that he is a bigger person than that.
>The farmers get assistance because they are going through tought times, not because they are white people going through tough times. Do you seriously think that aboriginal farmers are excluded from drought assistance?
Do you seriouslty think there are a significant number of Aboriginal farmer owners?
Do you seriously want to argue that Aborgines aren’t “going through hard times”?
>When your race is systematically and automatically regarded as a disability then there is a significant problem with the mentality behind the system.
No when nondiscrimination is used as an ideological excuse to ignore the fact that a particular race is consisently discriminated against there’s something wrong with the system.
Do you seriously think you’d be as well (or better) off if you’d been born black?
I have no idea. However I don’t think it is relevant. If their are they are not excluded by drought relieve policy.
Some like Cathy Freeman are probably doing very nicely. However again I don’t think it is relevant.
I can’t decipher that comment.
I seriously have no idea. Perhaps I would be an AFL star making a fortune. Or maybe not. Its a pointless question to try and answer.
I don’t know why marginalised white people or marginalised chinese Australian people should not be entitled to the same government benefits. It seems silly to me that large numbers of people are excluded from Abstudy because of their race even if they are in need of such assistance.
Following earlier posts with world news links – there’s an article today on cronulla and the aftermath in Pakistan’s Daily Times http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=20051222story_22-12-2005_pg3_2
Could someone point me to news reports on those arrested for the lifesaver assault that led to the cronulla rally in the first place.
i also meant to point to yet another article on it in the latest economist on p27
Terje,
Why should any business get government assistance to stay in business? If they cannot continue where they are, then they should get out of the game. Drought assistance is just a disguised subsidy.
Andrew,
I agree entirely. However if we are going to have drought assistance (and currently we do have it) then it should not be based on the colour of the farmer (and currently it isn’t).
I think you are tackling a different point to the one which I was making.
I’m not big on handouts. However if we are going to have them then the racial profile of the recipient should not be a policy factor.
Regards,
Terje.
No, but like most government assistance it “just happens” to be massively skewed towards whites in its actual outcomes.
which oddly results in no objections from the people forever beatign their chests over any assitance that my actually help the most disadvantaged group in our society (who also happen, over the course of their lifetime, to be on average much larger net contributors to the government than non-aboriginal Australians).
The primary purpose of drought assistance is NOT to financially help “farmers”.
Keeping alive the breeding females (cows & ewes) of the national livestock herd is the sole purpose behind drought assistance.
How drought assistance may or may not mutate in practice, or any sense of entitlement which may be felt by recipients is another matter.
The criterion for eligibility to recieve drought assistance has always been such that the less prudent “farmers” recieve more assistance than those who plan for drought.
I don’t know if I am right about this, but here is my impression about the events in Cronulla and the way they have been reported. It seems so
difficult to talk about them. I would be interested to know if anyone else shares my perceptions, could develop them or could make me see things more clearly.
When I read about the riots in Cronulla, I feel as if we are looking at the results of a cynical manipulation of naivety.
The cynicism is in those who are driving and facilitating population
boosting via high immigration. They have focused benefits to gain from
creating a demand for land and the products of the industries upstream
and downstream of the housing industry. Secondary to this is the whole
industry of immigrationism and multiculturalism.
The naivety is in the attitudes of well-meaning ideologues who think it
is going to be easy to satisfy people imported from war-torn countries
where anglophone governments and the commercial interests they protect,
tend to be identified as political interferers, oppressors and
exploiters. Even a very sophisticated, educated person must have
difficulty loving and accepting the occupants of his/her new country
when they know the role of exploitation of the middle east that is part
of the history of western economic ‘progress’. What does an ordinary
unsophisticated religiously trained person do when in the country of an
historic enemy? Add to this the daily culture shock and any problems of
personal disempowerment, plus the blame that popular Islamic ideology
places on western beliefs and morals for the state of the world.
With respect to Cronulla, gang confrontations are common in young men
approaching adult independence. This is a way that they test eachother
and rise up their local pecking order. What more natural than a split in
the suburbs between two visibly, linguistically, and ethnically
different immigrant groups where competition for every ammenity is
growing as the population increases? And what territory to dispute more
appropriate than the sacred Australian beach? And what better
invitation to a battle from surfies than to target the iconic
life-saver? What do we expect of either side?
It is not as if we live in orderly times of secure employment, uniform
education, and a clear-cut dominant culture. No, we are expected to
behave as if we were all chameleons with no true identity and no vested
interests to protect. Because we have been indoctrinated with the
desirability of tolerance, and we know there are big sticks that can
shame us and punish us if we are perceived to be intolerant, we find it
difficult to criticise where criticism is justified.
Multiculturalism seems to have become part of the problem, since it
really seems to expect mutually contradictory attitudes and values to
coexist in close quarters and for people to always put ideals ahead of
egos, security, and territory.
Most horribly, multiculturalism has been used by our state and federal
governments to define and manipulate groups via wedge politics in order
to acheive undemocratic situations. Most undemocratically,
multiculturalism has been used as a trojan horse for /mass/ immigration
since the time of the Fraser Government. Mass immigration is not the
informed choice of the many who pay the diffuse costs, but only of a
very small group of people whom it benefits directly and who have
influence over the media and government. The rate and volume of
immigration have also recently been stepped up. As well as the rort
immigration represents for the housing and allied industries, at the
same time as immigration has been stepped up, the industrial relations
laws that actually defined our Federation are being dismantled to allow
employers to take advantage of cheaper imported workers. This is an
attack on the Australian ethos and on every worker’s security and
ability to survive. That would be frightening enough, but there is
more: Australians are expected to accept new crude restraints on
political expression in the form of anti-terrorist laws. Yet,
ironically, and insultingly to our intelligence, the Federal and state
governments that support war against Islamic countries for oil are also
wholesale supporters of mass immigration from Islamic countries. Even
if we only managed to import political dissenters from those countries,
we would still be inviting trouble from those back home who would
despise them as rats leaving the sinking ship.
Becoming open to a smorgasbrod of interesting values, looks, ideas,
cultures, is a fun idea, but it should never have been imposed as a
government enforced ideology. It probably should have remained a
luxury. Multiculturalism as a non-political attitude was okay as a way
of appreciating the good things about immigration. I guess the rot
set in when it started to be taught as a fundamentalist moral play in
schools, without solid basis of geography and history, leaving people
with incredibly shallow understandings of what a culture really is.
For instance, it has also been taught as a crude judgement of British
colonialism, whereby those peoples whose cultures British colonialism
sidelined between the 18th and the mid-20th century, are owed a
particular respect. But this is what is wrong with shallow
interpretations of culture. Culture is not just a layer of style and
content; culture is the expression of soil through the people who
cultivate their livings from it. British colonialism did not just
sideline culture; the colonialists actually alienated the /land and its
produce/ from the people who had owned it up until then. So it is
dangerously shallow to think that people who were more or less
dispossessed are going to be impressed by polite comments about the way
they sing and dance and permission to worship in a particular kind of
building. If Australia endorses the view that those who live here now
are the direct beneficiaries of stolen land, then that means we have to
give it */all/* back.
And that includes the beach.
It has clearly become a state ideology because it seems that people who
are not identified with any particular oppressed minority culture feel
they cannot stick up for what they believe in now if the person/people
who are trampling on their values have obviously exotic origins. The
press, which represents the interests of the powerful, has made them
aware that, not being minorities, they will be made to look like
bullies, even if their cause is reasonable. None of this would have
happened if people who used and loved the beach had been able to enforce
their sense of ownership in the usual territorial sense whereby
newcomers need to fit in with those who were there first. The fear of
being labelled racist has robbed people of the normal prerogatives
available to any occupiers when a new individual is introduced to their
patch. We have been taught, against our instincts and against safety,
not to ask questions, not to state rules, but to roll over and let the
newcomer make the rules. No-one normal would want this. It only serves
one purpose – to make us feel less at home and less in control. That is
the objective of the corporate sector that wants us to lose confidence
until we can no longer stand up for anything, but will dejectedly accept
an authoritarian response to situations that have been allowed to go
completely beyond the pale, knowing that nothing will ever fix what has
been destroyed and that the authoritarian solutions are somehow the
outcome of our involuntary altruism.
The view that the mainstream and majority incumbents of Australia are an
anglo-saxon elite who are here because they made slaves out of everyone
else, completely ignores that the same industrial revolution that drove
British colonialism had already dispossessed enormous numbers of
ordinary English people and Irish, Scottish and Welsh people, before it
was launched outside Britain. And the view that anyone pink here is
anglo-saxon ignores the presence of Celts in this country. It ignores,
further more, that the convicts were, in the main, political prisoners.
So, /of course/ it is not right to say that /everyone/ in Australia is
guilty of stealing this land. Industrialists and capitalists stole this
land and brought the landless of Britain here to work for them.
And, in ignoring those original landless victims of anglophone
industrialism and its machine of colonialism, multiculturalism protects
the interests of the powerful. As every Middle Eastern must realise,
colonialism is ongoing in the Middle East, but now it is called “foreign
aid, development, economic growth and globalism”. Although government
officials appear to be conducting affairs of state, the affairs that
States now prioritise are all commercial. But then, that was also the
case during Queen Victoria’s reign.
And finally, Multiculturalist ideology, by focusing on symbols but not
on what they stand for, ignores the material reality that we are all
still prisoners of the industrial revolution machine, here in Australia,
back there in the Middle East, and everywhere else. Resentfully or in
blind obedience we continue to exploit oil, gas and coal in ever greater
quantities to make the machine go even faster. For declining per capita
returns, in an increasingly unprotected industrial and civil
environment, we sacrifice ever more of our lives and and our freedom for
the greater enrichment of the corporate elite whose greed and
ostentation are paraded in the mainstream media. These are the people
who have made their fortune from financing, providing the materials or
constructing the infrastructure that supplies our unfortunately growing
population and they probably laughed their heads off to see the hoi
polloi fighting eachother over a public beach.
Sheila N
Sheila N,
I think your contribution stands head and shoulders over above just about everything esle I have read about the matter, so far. My own contribution, above, raised some of the same concerns, but does not seem to have drawn a response, so far.
(But it’s a shame that your thought-provoking, if somewhat politically incorrect, contribution was marred by so many unsightly line breaks in the wrong places.
Perhaps if I succeed in posting this together with a complete copy of your contribution, which has had the line breaks fixed, the good Professor Quiggin, might find a way to replace the above post with that.)
Reformatted copy of Sheila N’s above contribution follows :
I don’t know if I am right about this, but here is my impression about the events in Cronulla and the way they have been reported. It seems so difficult to talk about them. I would be interested to know if anyone else shares my perceptions, could develop them or could make me see things more clearly.
When I read about the riots in Cronulla, I feel as if we are looking at the results of a cynical manipulation of naivety.
The cynicism is in those who are driving and facilitating population boosting via high immigration. They have focused benefits to gain from creating a demand for land and the products of the industries upstream and downstream of the housing industry. Secondary to this is the whole industry of immigrationism and multiculturalism.
The naivety is in the attitudes of well-meaning ideologues who think it is going to be easy to satisfy people imported from war-torn countries where anglophone governments and the commercial interests they protect, tend to be identified as political interferers, oppressors and exploiters. Even a very sophisticated, educated person must have difficulty loving and accepting the occupants of his/her new country when they know the role of exploitation of the middle east that is part of the history of western economic ‘progress’. What does an ordinary unsophisticated religiously trained person do when in the country of an historic enemy? Add to this the daily culture shock and any problems of personal disempowerment, plus the blame that popular Islamic ideology places on western beliefs and morals for the state of the world.
With respect to Cronulla, gang confrontations are common in young men approaching adult independence. This is a way that they test each other and rise up their local pecking order. What more natural than a split in the suburbs between two visibly, linguistically, and ethnically different immigrant groups where competition for every ammenity is growing as the population increases? And what territory to dispute more appropriate than the sacred Australian beach? And what better invitation to a battle from surfies than to target the iconic life-saver? What do we expect of either side?
It is not as if we live in orderly times of secure employment, uniform education, and a clear-cut dominant culture. No, we are expected to behave as if we were all chameleons with no true identity and no vested interests to protect. Because we have been indoctrinated with the desirability of tolerance, and we know there are big sticks that can shame us and punish us if we are perceived to be intolerant, we find it difficult to criticise where criticism is justified.
Multiculturalism seems to have become part of the problem, since it really seems to expect mutually contradictory attitudes and values to coexist in close quarters and for people to always put ideals ahead of egos, security, and territory.
Most horribly, multiculturalism has been used by our state and federal governments to define and manipulate groups via wedge politics in order to acheive undemocratic situations. Most undemocratically, multiculturalism has been used as a trojan horse for /mass/ immigration since the time of the Fraser Government. Mass immigration is not the informed choice of the many who pay the diffuse costs, but only of a very small group of people whom it benefits directly and who have influence over the media and government. The rate and volume of immigration have also recently been stepped up. As well as the rort immigration represents for the housing and allied industries, at the same time as immigration has been stepped up, the industrial relations laws that actually defined our Federation are being dismantled to allow employers to take advantage of cheaper imported workers. This is an attack on the Australian ethos and on every worker’s security and
ability to survive. That would be frightening enough, but there is more: Australians are expected to accept new crude restraints on political expression in the form of anti-terrorist laws. Yet, ironically, and insultingly to our intelligence, the Federal and state governments that support war against Islamic countries for oil are also wholesale supporters of mass immigration from Islamic countries. Even if we only managed to import political dissenters from those countries, we would still be inviting trouble from those back home who would despise them as rats leaving the sinking ship.
Becoming open to a smorgasbrod of interesting values, looks, ideas, cultures, is a fun idea, but it should never have been imposed as a government enforced ideology. It probably should have remained a luxury. Multiculturalism as a non-political attitude was okay as a way of appreciating the good things about immigration. I guess the rot set in when it started to be taught as a fundamentalist moral play in schools, without solid basis of geography and history, leaving people with incredibly shallow understandings of what a culture really is.
For instance, it has also been taught as a crude judgement of British colonialism, whereby those peoples whose cultures British colonialism sidelined between the 18th and the mid-20th century, are owed a particular respect. But this is what is wrong with shallow interpretations of culture. Culture is not just a layer of style and content; culture is the expression of soil through the people who cultivate their livings from it. British colonialism did not just sideline culture; the colonialists actually alienated the /land and its produce/ from the people who had owned it up until then. So it is dangerously shallow to think that people who were more or less dispossessed are going to be impressed by polite comments about the way they sing and dance and permission to worship in a particular kind of building. If Australia endorses the view that those who live here now are the direct beneficiaries of stolen land, then that means we have to give it */all/* back.
And that includes the beach.
It has clearly become a state ideology because it seems that people who are not identified with any particular oppressed minority culture feel they cannot stick up for what they believe in now if the person/people who are trampling on their values have obviously exotic origins. The press, which represents the interests of the powerful, has made them aware that, not being minorities, they will be made to look like bullies, even if their cause is reasonable. None of this would have happened if people who used and loved the beach had been able to enforce their sense of ownership in the usual territorial sense whereby newcomers need to fit in with those who were there first. The fear of being labelled racist has robbed people of the normal prerogatives available to any occupiers when a new individual is introduced to their patch. We have been taught, against our instincts and against safety, not to ask questions, not to state rules, but to roll over and let the newcomer make the rules. No-one normal would want this. It only serves one purpose – to make us feel less at home and less in control. That is the objective of the corporate sector that wants us to lose confidence
until we can no longer stand up for anything, but will dejectedly accept an authoritarian response to situations that have been allowed to go completely beyond the pale, knowing that nothing will ever fix what has been destroyed and that the authoritarian solutions are somehow the outcome of our involuntary altruism.
The view that the mainstream and majority incumbents of Australia are an anglo-saxon elite who are here because they made slaves out of everyone else, completely ignores that the same industrial revolution that drove
British colonialism had already dispossessed enormous numbers of ordinary English people and Irish, Scottish and Welsh people, before it was launched outside Britain. And the view that anyone pink here is anglo-saxon ignores the presence of Celts in this country. It ignores, further more, that the convicts were, in the main, political prisoners. So, /of course/ it is not right to say that /everyone/ in Australia is guilty of stealing this land. Industrialists and capitalists stole this land and brought the landless of Britain here to work for them.
And, in ignoring those original landless victims of anglophone
industrialism and its machine of colonialism, multiculturalism protects the interests of the powerful. As every Middle Eastern must realise, colonialism is ongoing in the Middle East, but now it is called ‘foreign aid, development, economic growth and globalism’. Although government officials appear to be conducting affairs of state, the affairs that States now prioritise are all commercial. But then, that was also the case during Queen Victoria’s reign.
And finally, Multiculturalist ideology, by focusing on symbols but not on what they stand for, ignores the material reality that we are all still prisoners of the industrial revolution machine, here in Australia, back there in the Middle East, and everywhere else. Resentfully or in blind obedience we continue to exploit oil, gas and coal in ever greater quantities to make the machine go even faster. For declining per capita returns, in an increasingly unprotected industrial and civil environment, we sacrifice ever more of our lives and and our freedom for the greater enrichment of the corporate elite whose greed and ostentation are paraded in the mainstream media. These are the people who have made their fortune from financing, providing the materials or constructing the infrastructure that supplies our unfortunately growing population and they probably laughed their heads off to see the hoi polloi fighting eachother over a public beach.
In two hundred years, no one will remember the riots.
No one will sing waltzing matilda.
No one will care.
However, species of animals and plants that have been in Australia for millions of years will be extinct.
And our pollution will still be a problem.
Maybe all Australians will be black, and talk ‘eskimo’.
I dont care.
Stop policy driven overpopulation now.
Save the Australia that was here a million years before your monkey ancestor climbed out of a tree.
Give something to future generations.
You idiots.
http://www.ppr.org.au
James and Sheila N
It’s unreadable nonsense. Please try to keep it under 60000 words.
I agree with Will about the length. It’s not very conversational.
Will, you found it unreadable because of the impatient inflexibility your belief system responds with when dealing with unfamiliar aspects of reality. That consequently inhibits your will and ability to concentrate, making a rigorously complete explanation seem like 60,00 words to you.
The irony in this that is evident to more competent observers is that if Sheila had submitted a far more summary comment, you would have accused her of a lack of substantiation.
The tragedy is that this stricture adds you to the grinding flywheel of the status quo, barking reflexively like Cerberus whenever life approaches the doors of doom that you and your like relentlessly, loyally and unthinkingly guard.
Terje, the status quo loves a conversation. Its increasingly untenable complexity depends upon such superficial gaiety for cover.However progression toward the undertanding of reality requires a little more. Shame you’re not up to it. I wonder though why you would hang around a supposedly academic blog if you are just after dilletante entertainment. Any clues?
Thank you, Greg. You have saved me and, perhaps, others, a lot of trouble.
I think Sheila, by her original and informed contribution has proven Professor Quiggin wrong when he wrote : “There’s not much to say about the riots that hasn’t already been said”.
Unfortunately, it is usually so much easier for people to take cheap shots than it is to take the time and effort necessary to come up with such useful contributions as Sheila has made.
However, I am sure that your contribution will help Sheila to overcome any discouragement she may have felt and I look forward to her making further such contributions here, or, better still, establishing a web site or blog of her own.
admin, I thoroughly agree with what was on the Party for Population Reduction website, although I might quibble over one or two minor details.
I will almost certainly be giving your party my first preference, at any election, although, I have to say, I remain skeptical about what can be achieved by any political party devoted to a single issue, even one as important as population control.
Best of luck, all the same, and thank you for taking the effort.
Greg Wood said
‘Will, you found it unreadable because of the impatient inflexibility your belief system responds with when dealing with unfamiliar aspects of reality. That consequently inhibits your will and ability to concentrate, making a rigorously complete explanation seem like 60,00 words to you.’
No, I found it unreadable because it was torrent of pompous sludge, the kind of narcissistic ramble that Ted Kazynski (spelling?) scribbled in his lonely shack. Ideologues’ first love is always the sound of the own voice. And it was condescending.
Gosh forbid that anything should be allowed to ‘inhibit our will’!! We obviously need more DISCIPLINE!
Putrid. Just putrid.
Will,
As I wrote earlier, I can understand perfectly what Sheila wrote.
Why can’t you either:
Give an example of something Sheila has written which you found to be ‘unreadable nonsense’; or
Give an example of something Sheila has written which you find to be ‘putrid’ and explain why you found it to be ‘putrid’.
?
What you have done here I find to be no more acceptable than your slur of Paul Ehrlich as a racist, for which you have failed to provide any substantiation.
Hi Folks,
Simply put, my piece suggests that Australians’ consciousness of the class war has been replaced by the ‘race war’. This takes the heat off the employer/corporate/monied classes who are screwing us all more more.
You could stop reading here. If you go on, it gets more complicated.
The riots seem to have represented, for a lot of people, fights over territory. The ‘race’ aspect makes that problem difficult to discuss because anything that throws population growth and competition over resources into question throws multiculturalism into question. This is because population growth and multiculturalism have become inextricably linked.
I say in my article that I think this is a spin that serves the dominant Australian class, who rely mostly on land speculation and infrastructure expansion to preserve their wealth. I argue that any process linked to multiculturalism becomes kind of protected. In this case multiculturalism has been linked to population growth. This means that you cannot criticise growth. I also link the riots in Cronulla to population growth. (My main point, actually.)
In the end what this means is that people end up fighting over space they once had a right to, but the ‘authorities’ no longer support them because the rules have changed. Now the authorities take their orders from the growth merchants (the ruling classes, the rich speculators etc., who are responsible for the population growth policies and prioritising of property development uber al.)
I further observed that the ellites would be laughing at the lower classes. The irony would make them laugh. The irony is that these two ‘lower class groups’ [= hoi polloi] are pitted against each other when their real enemy target should be the developers who are cramming more and more people into Australia and Cronulla. (See Hirsch on positional goods)
But you cannot fight the elite classes. You cannot even get at them. they own the media and the media tell most of us what to think and who to vote for. So people finish up fighting for space in a situation that has been created by the elites, who benefit from congestion because it adds to land prices. But the elites’ role in this is not even in the media reports of the riots.
Eventually the police round up the protestors on both sides: Surfie vs Lebanese. I would contend that the police should be rounding up the developers and their friends, the politicians who facilitate the despolation of Australia’s coastline for focused personal profits at the expense of social and environmental ammenity. But most of the powers that be would say that is unthinkable, extreme etc. And they would say this is all to do with racism. We will hear again that people need ‘education’, but they will be told the same things as usual.
However, if you have never connected crowded beaches with increases in housing and increases in housing with increases in population, then these comments would be mysterious for you. And so would the observation that population pressure increases housing price inflation, or the link that can then be made to developer interests. And, following on from that, a link between developers and government, and to loss of democracy.
So, if those connections seem mysterious, then the explanation that is most offered by the media, of ‘racism’ would seem the only possible one. My explanation would seem crazy, or so turgid that one could only conclude that I was pompously cloaking my thin argument in a thicker veil of jargon.
It’s true that my piece does require a fair bit of concentration. It is turgid because it refers to specialist concepts in an unfamiliar context. Those being land-pricing, commodification, growthist population policies, and energy resources, which people rarely expect to see next to discussions of riots on beaches, if they have heard of any of them at all. And, then, of course, many people don’t even associate the industrial revolution with fossil fuel or with ‘enclosures’ and disposession of people in Britain, Polynesia, Africa, India, Australia …. They are not aware that it was the industrial era that saw most of land winding up in the hands of fewer and fewer people and the majority of the people fighting eachother for the remaining amenities at the tail end of the industrial revolution. They are not aware that the process is ongoing. They don’t know that our population growth rate is accelerating and they haven’t considered that this may be making things worse in Australian industrial relations, land prices, environment, and other ammenity.
Well, you win some and you lose some when you try something out in the mainstream.
Maybe those who cannot understand what I have written could ask me questions about some of my statements. Or maybe those who did understand something could re-interpret what I said.
Or maybe I will just get back to my book about the industrial revolution and how it sealed the capitalist land-use planning and inheritance system in the English speaking countries. 🙂
Sheila N
Sheila, your ideology had 70 years to do something and half the world to do it with. All it did was kill people and ruin lives, making a mess of the ecology into the bargain.
Life is grotty on the bottom of the heap in the capitalist world, but it is a country mile better than being on the bottom of the heap in a Leninist state.
The “riots” are a straightforward law & order issue. The public are sick to death of anti-social behaviour being tolerated, and are sick to death of the judicial system failing to punish criminals by giving them real time INSIDE jail.
The percieved racial bias by the police in favour of Lebanese muslims is not helping any.
Shorter Sheila N: the class war and the cold war have been replaced by the culture war and the war on terror, with the class warriors cleaning up.
Sounds about right.
Well summarised Jack!