Speech to FECCA Workshop on
Multiculturalism
Speech by Acting Race Discrimination Commissioner Dr William Jonas AM to the FECCA Workshop on Multiculturalism, Sydney, 25 October 2001.
I would like to acknowledge the Eora people, the traditional owners and custodians of the land where we meet today.Today's theme, considering strategies to support multiculturalism in the current climate, is a most timely one. It is of great interest to me, coming as it does after HREOC's consultations across Australia looking at experiences of racism and how to address it.
As you would be aware, the Commission has taken an active role in preparations for the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which was held in Durban South Africa in August - September this year. The Commission conducted a national summit and youth summit on racism in Canberra in May 2001, followed by regional consultations across Australia. These consultations were based on the discussion paper Combating Racism in Australia, which also formed the basis of an internet bulletin board. We also conducted specific consultations with Indigenous women in western NSW and with refugee and migrant women in Sydney.
The Commission's strongly held view about these consultations was that for the World Conference to be meaningful it must relate to the day to day experiences of people who suffer racism. The consultations sought to engage communities in a dialogue about racism - the extent to which it exists and measures to overcome it.
The responses and comments we received clearly demonstrate an overwhelming sense that racism is widespread, institutional in nature and practiced at all levels of society. As one Indigenous woman told us during the consultations:
'We just live with racism everyday. It's like getting up, washing your face and having a cup of tea.'
Every community consultation identified that Australia's Indigenous people are worst affected by racism, both directly and indirectly. Many people saw that past discrimination against Indigenous peoples has left them in a disadvantaged position, for example through limited access to education and consequently lower educational achievement rates and higher unemployment.
Our consultations identified people from diverse cultural and linguistic groups as victims of racism through the lack of tolerance of cultural diversity and inappropriate service delivery. "Visible" ethnic and religious minorities were identified as being groups regularly subjected to racism, including Arabs, Muslims, Africans, Jews, Palestinians and Turkish people. People expressed significant concern about the stigmatisation and criminalisation of asylum seekers as 'illegals'. This was seen as leading to an increase in xenophobia against particular nationalities such as Palestinians and people from Middle Eastern countries and appearance.
Particular concerns were raised about the intersection of discrimination on the basis of race with other forms of discrimination, such as that on the basis of gender, youth or age, disability and sexuality. In these circumstances, discrimination was seen to be multi-layered and cumulative. People suffer disadvantage within and between fundamental aspects of their identities and often feel forced to 'choose' between different communities and aspects of themselves.
The consultations sought to identify the sources and causes of racism, to understand how and why racism arises in order to identify effective strategies with which to respond to it. What was particularly remarkable about the consultations was that regardless of the location, educational level or backgrounds of the people who attended, common themes were identified in relation to the causes of racism in Australia. There was overwhelming agreement on three key issues.
Firstly, the legacy of colonialism was seen as the main cause of racism in contemporary Australia. The inherently racist process of colonisation provided the basis for continued and systemic racism against Indigenous Australians. The consequences of colonialism are evident in the disadvantaged position of Indigenous people in today's society.
A second source of racism was seen in the ignorance, fear and lack of understanding of cultural difference that participants saw in the communities around them. For many, ignorance and fear have been present throughout Australia's history of immigration of non-British people after colonisation, primarily given expression in the White Australia Policy. While policy advances such as multiculturalism were recognised, there was still an underlying tendency to define non-British people as "others" and to fear cultural practices different from those of Australians of British origin.
More recently the effects of globalisation have generated fear and isolationism among many Australians. The fear and lack of understanding is also present among and between culturally and linguistically diverse communities. No one group in Australia has a monopoly on racial intolerance or xenophobia.
Finally, throughout the consultations a recurring theme was that the structures and power relationships in Australian society are a major factor behind racism. Racism can be used to maintain power and privilege, and the fear of others can express a fear of having to give up power and influence in society.
We will be releasing a report of the consultations in the coming months and so I don't intend to recite the full findings of the report to you. For the remainder of the time available I want to focus on some of the broader issues that these main findings raise. In particular, I want to talk about the issue of recognition of cultural difference and its significance for multiculturalism.
The recognition of cultural difference was identified in the lead up to the World Conference as one of the key issues that we face in relation to contemporary forms of racism. It is, essentially, the flipside of racism and one of the main ways of combating racism. As the Vision Declaration for the World Conference Against Racism states:
Racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance have not gone away. We recognize that they persist in the new century and that their persistence is rooted in fear: fear of what is different, fear of the other, fear of the loss of personal security. And while we recognize that human fear is itself ineradicable, we maintain that its consequences are not…
Instead of allowing diversity of race and culture to become a limiting factor in human exchange and development, we must refocus our understanding, discern in such diversity the potential for mutual enrichment, and realize that it is the interchange between great traditions of human spirituality that offers the best prospect for the persistence of the human spirit itself. For too long such diversity has been treated as threat rather than gift. And too often that threat has been expressed in racial contempt and conflict, in exclusion, discrimination and intolerance.
Government policies and practices must aspire to this vision. And this is the main challenge that multiculturalism faces today.
As Race Discrimination Commissioner, I see the necessity for there to be legislative mechanisms such as the Racial Discrimination Act which prohibit racially discriminatory forms of behaviour accompanied and reinforced by positive recognition and celebration of cultural diversity and difference.
Under the Racial Discrimination Act, for example, the responsibility for holding someone accountable for discrimination or racial vilification lies with the victim of that racism. Multiculturalism and EEO policies, on the other hand, require government agencies in particular to ensure that their services and programs are reflective of and responsive to our diverse society. Put differently, they are required to demonstrate that their programs are not discriminatory.
It is within this
multilayered context, that I would like us to consider and analyse multicultural
policies and programs. We should constantly ask ourselves how do they
further the enjoyment of civil, political, economic, cultural and social
rights of individuals and communities.
Multiculturalism was initially intended to rectify the lack of recognition
and protection of these rights. But in the last 15 years these rights
have slowly been wound back. I would like to give just a few examples
by looking at some elements of the 'Agenda for a Multicultural Australia'.
The principles of the Agenda are Civic Duty, Cultural Respect, Social Equity and Productive Diversity.
On the surface it would be hard to argue with these principles. I would contend that we need to closely look at the assumptions which may underpin these principles.
Let us look at Productive Diversity. It has been part of the multicultural agenda for over 15 years and it has gained in importance and significance. While no one would doubt that there are comparative economic advantages that Australia can draw from its linguistically and culturally diverse make up we have to ask ourselves why is it an underlying principle of a multicultural policy and what consequences may it have.
It could be argued that there are two assumptions underlying the productive diversity principle. One is that it is there to ensure that individuals from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds have equal access to the economic structures thus ensuring their economic rights of being able to equally share in the financial opportunities offered by society. The other assumption could be that unless there is a net economic benefit to Australia from people of linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds then we need to reconsider not only multiculturalism but also the intake of our immigration program. I would contend that the second assumption has more sway than the first, we need to only look at the increase in the skills and business focus of our immigration program.
Basically, your rights and place in society could be circumscribed by your capacity to economically contribute.
Civic duty is another one of those terms which is often bandied around but rarely analysed. In the Agenda it is stated it obliges all Australians to support those basic structures and principles of Australian society which guarantee us our freedom and equality and enable diversity in our society to flourish.
The clear assumption here is that Australia already has in place a civil and legal fabric which guarantees freedoms and equality. One of the main outcomes of the recent consultations for the World Conference, and indeed from the scrutiny by United Nations human rights committees in the last eighteen months, was to highlight the clear inadequacy of legal structures in Australian society for guaranteeing rights. We are, for example, the only 'western' country in the world without a Bill of Rights or entrenched protections against racial discrimination in our constitution.
Clearly, it is legitimate for any citizen to challenge the structures and principles of that society. I would contend that this falls within their 'civic duty'.
We could argue that civic duty is about guaranteeing the rights of individuals to be equipped to effectively participate in the political, social and cultural life of the nation. A notion of 'civic duty' in this sense ensures that the views and opinions of all citizens - from differing backgrounds and cultures - can contribute to the broader public discourse that determines the future direction of the structures and principles of our society. This would place the responsibility on the political and civil structures within society to ensure that people's participation rights are actively facilitated.
I would argue that the difference is not semantic but substantive and provides a useful analytical tool for questioning and challenging the assumptions that underpin many policy statements - not only in the area of multiculturalism.
I trust that my comments are not seen as a criticism of the National Agenda. I merely wanted to pose some challenges for today's discussion which hopefully will lead to a debate about the substantive issues confronting multiculturalism and race discrimination in Australia.
For the Commission, we will be focused on this task in our follow up to the World Conference. While the World Conference outcomes were deeply flawed, nonetheless they do represent a series of commitments by governments to address racism - commitments to which we can hold them and other sectors of the community accountable.
HREOC will be seeking to inform key sectors and civil society generally about the racism consultations and the outcomes of the World Conference and, where relevant, to seek commitments to implementation. Media organisations for example will be alerted to those paragraphs of particular relevance to them, asked to make a commitment to comply and challenged even to improve on Durban. We plan to seek such commitments from local and State governments, police forces, unions, employer representatives, major businesses, education authorities, universities and others. In this way we plan to build a national action plan on racism from the ground up.
We will also undertake a number of activities over the coming months to further develop work against racism, including convening a forum on racial hatred and the Internet in order to identify ways of effectively monitoring and countering Internet content for racism and race hatred and of utilising the Internet for disseminating anti-racism campaigns. This process will culminate in March 2002 when the Commission convenes a National Conference to present the findings of these consultations and to develop a national plan of action for combating racism in Australia.
Finally, I could not address today's forum without commenting on the current issues faced by Australia in regard to asylum seekers.
Many of you may recall at last year's FECCA National conference I talked about 'lifeboat ethics'. In light of recent events, I think that this is worth revisiting.
Developed some years back, lifeboat ethics asks us to imagine that the countries of the world are lifeboats floating in a perilous ocean. Some of the lifeboats have few people in them - they are well - stocked with provisions, and are in no danger of sinking. Other lifeboats are leaking, they are full of people and in danger of sinking, and there are very few provisions on board.
Lifeboat ethics asks, what should the rich lifeboats do for the poor lifeboats?
Lifeboat ethics suggests that they can't really do anything because:
- if the rich take
all of the poor people onto their boats then the rich boats too will
become overcrowded and sink;
- they can't take
just some of the poor people and leave the rest because this will create
impossible ethical dilemmas about who is taken and who is left behind;
- they can't give
them much in the way of aid because this will deplete their own resources;
and
- the people in the poor boats breed like rabbits anyway so giving them resources will only increase their numbers and make things even worse.
I used this example last year to expose the fundamentally wrong assumption underpinning this model - namely that we are on different lifeboats. The reality is that we are all on one boat - a few people might be up the front in first class while the rest of the population cling on precariously down the back of the boat. But if the back of the boat sinks, the entire boat goes down.
This year I would like us to think again about life boat ethics, especially in the light of the current policies of both major political parties towards asylum seekers who seek to arrive in our waters on over-crowded boats. Apart from the obscenity of both political parties seeming to use this human tragedy for domestic political purposes, I think it is very salutary to remind ourselves of what one very perceptive write said as far back as 1978. At that time Geoffrey Lean wrote,
(what would be the situation)… if, by some tragedy, the rich nations of the world were to act upon the lifeboat theory? 'Can we imagine… any human order surviving so gross a mass of human misery piling up at the base?' Our precious lifeboats could be overturned by the hands clutching at them from the water. Big holes could be blown in them by the nuclear bombs likely to be in the hands of third world countries and terrorist groups. The engines might stop because they were no longer supplied with oil, or the greed of the people in the lifeboat might lead to fights which would imperil the whole enterprise.
When we read this, almost twenty five years later, and in the light of some recent events, one of the things it does is to reinforce our knowledge that we live in uncertain times.
I don't know if lifeboat ethics are being acted out, but some recent decisions certainly seem to be in line with them. I don't know if terrorists will ever use nuclear weapons but when we think of the simultaneous hijacking of three jet planes and the awful following events, not to mention the likelihood of biological terrorism, I am forced to stop and think about such a scenario. Equally, I don't know what dropping bombs on Afghani goat-herders and their families is supposed to achieve but it is happening as we speak.
One I do know is this: often when people are confronted with such uncertainty and the problems associated with it is seem so huge they ask 'but what can I do?' I would suggest that there is a better question than this and it is 'what can we do?' And in our current situation where our aim is to combat racism and to promote multiculturalism, I would suggest that at least part of the we are HREOC and FECCA. At HREOC, as I've said, we deal with legislation that applies when victims feel that they have suffered discrimination, and FECCA is involved in multiculturalism policies where the onus is on decision makers to show that there practices are not discriminatory. And, of course, we are involved in raising awareness about these issues and conducting in various ways education programs about race and diversity. I hope that we can continue to work together, keeping each other informed and calling on each other as needed. It is we rather than any individual who can help us realise that vision of seeing difference as a gift rather than something to be feared.
Thankyou.
