Skip to main content

The role of universities

Race Discrimination

Thank you, Queensland University of Technology, University of Southern Queensland, Griffith University, University of Queensland, Australian Catholic University, University of the Sunshine Coast, James Cook University, Central Queensland University and Bond University for the invitation to speak today about the Racism. It Stops with Me campaign.

It is a source of immense pride that the campaign enjoys such resolute support from the universities of Queensland. The fight against racial prejudice and discrimination is one about education – about changing people’s thinking and attitudes, empowering people to stand up for equality and justice. So it is only fitting that we have the support of universities.

Our universities play a crucial role in helping to set the tone of our public life – not only as seats of learning, but also as training grounds for citizenship. What we see on campus – in classrooms, lecture theatres, lawns and quadrangles – is a model for what our society could be. It is a picture of citizens, from all backgrounds and from many nations, living and learning together – sometimes in disagreement, but ultimately in a spirit of inquiry, animated by a desire for knowledge.

This is how it has always been for the modern university. As an institution, the university arguably emerged from what historians have called the republic of letters. In the late 17th and 18th centuries in Europe, scholars and intellectuals committed to the sharing of knowledge would communicate by letters and pamphlets. Literary and scientific academies were founded.

But it wasn’t until the late 1800s that universities became the natural home of arts, letters and science. Before that time, universities were bastions of scholasticism, defined by monistic practices where learning was focused on ancient texts. As Glyn Davis has described it in his Boyer Lectures of 2010, the republic of letters ‘encouraged universities to become lively, questioning institutions, concerned less with arid abstract contemplation and more with how we should live.’[1]

Through its support for our Racism. It Stops with Me campaign, Queensland’s universities are doing precisely this on matters of race and human rights: encouraging people to ask importance questions, to reflect upon how we should live, and to put their values into action. I will say more about the campaign shortly, but first it is important that we put some context on our understanding of racism today.

Talking about race

It is appropriate, of course, for us to be here this evening to be having a conversation about race. The Saturday just passed, the 21st of March, marked the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. Many of you might know the day better by its Australian alias, Harmony Day. It’s a day devoted to celebrating our cultural diversity. Schools mark Harmony Day with cultural festivals and performances. Increasingly, workplaces encourage people to share dishes reflecting their cultural heritage – to indulge in a ‘taste of harmony’.

Many of you may not know about the background to Harmony Day. It was first marked in Australia in 1999. This was a time when Hansonism was still a political force, challenging the consensus on immigration and multiculturalism. Though there had been an election pledge to introduce a national anti-racism campaign, the then federal government opted to pursue a softer approach – emphasising cultural harmony. It was feared that many Australians would push back against any campaign that explicitly sought to tackle prejudice and discrimination.

It’s worth remembering some of this. There is, I believe, a very Australian way to talk about race. Often we talk about it in a way that averts the very mention of race. This is because talking about race can seem to divide public opinion.

There is certainly a pattern in the way that racism can be discussed or debated. Whenever bigotry, prejudice or discrimination is revealed on the national stage, all of us can agree: we would never dream of endorsing it. We can all say, hand on heart, that racism is abhorrent. But before long, doubt emerges. Someone will ask: Is Australia a racist country? Is this evidence of some essential racist character, some ineradicable racist stain, in Australian society?

Often, the response is that of parochial defensiveness. According to this stance, Australians are not nearly as racist as others around the world. We should, it is argued, reserve the word ‘racism’ for only those instances when there has been racial violence or professions of racial superiority. Moreover, we are entitled to take offence when racism is alleged, as racism is the lowest judgment you can make of another person’s character. For the parochialist, to contemplate charging that a fellow Australian is racist is a mark of someone who likes to think the worst of their country and compatriots.

Others take the path of self-flagellation. This is the position of those who believe Australian nationhood is inseparable from racism. It is asserted that even modern sensibilities cannot obliterate old biases and assumptions rooted in notions of racial superiority. On this view, national myths about fairness and egalitarianism – and about the happy harmony of multiculturalism – serve to conceal the true nature of the national psyche. So long as there is an Australian national identity, the argument runs, there will be racial exclusion. The only way to overcome this is to renounce nationalism in all its forms; we should instead embrace a cosmopolitanism in which people belong to a single community based on their common humanity.

There is an alternative to these two extremes. After all, why should we accept the premise of questioning whether Australia is a racist country? Such a question may miss the point. Every country has its bigots, its prejudices and its problems with discrimination. It is unhelpful to turn every incident involving racism into a test that demands of us a wholesale judgment about the Australian national character.

A more objective view would recognise that today’s Australia is largely free from the racial tensions and discrimination that afflict other societies. We should be able to take pride in our achievements as a multicultural, immigrant society since the demise of the White Australia ideal. Whereas places like the United States and Britain have periodic race riots, such episodes here are rare: the Cronulla riot of 2005, for instance, stands as an aberration. We have largely been untarnished by organised racism. Thankfully, we do not have the equivalents of the Ku Klux Klan, the Front National or the English Defence League. Australia has also avoided the contagion of extremist movements that have gained significant popularity across Europe in response to immigration and the supposed ‘Islamification’ of the West.

Australia has been a country defined by social cohesion. Such qualities were most recently evident in December 2014, in the wake of the deadly Martin Place siege in Sydney. In what most regarded as a terrorist attack, self-styled sheikh Man Haron Monis took 18 people hostage in a Lindt chocolate cafe. Hours into the siege, which ended in Monis and two of his hostages being killed, a large number of Australians demonstrated their solidarity with Muslim Australians through the viral ‘I’ll ride with you’ social media campaign. Inspired by the Twitter hashtag #illridewithyou, commuters from around the country offered to ride public transport with Muslims who may have felt vulnerable to any anti-Islamic sentiment stirred by the siege. The dominant response was one of unity – of Australians coming together and not allowing Muslims to feel unwelcome.

None of this means we should be in denial about the challenge of maintaining cultural harmony and racial tolerance. A significant number of people are affected by racism: about 20 per cent of Australians have experienced verbal racial abuse, and about 5 per cent have experienced racial violence in physical form.[2] There remains room for improvement.

But any progress requires that racial issues be the subjects of serious public debate. For this to happen, we should understand that racism is never as simple as it appears: it can be as much a product of ignorance or innocence as it is of anxiety and antagonism. And rather than always leaving us with moral clarity, racism can leave us with a sense of contradiction.

Let me share with you some personal examples. I have experienced occasions, in my current role, when well-intentioned people have expressed to me their support for racial equality and multiculturalism, only to proceed to compliment me on how well I speak English given my ethnic heritage. I have been subjected to threatening racial abuse in Sydney while travelling with a member of staff – by a taxi driver who was himself an immigrant from a non-European background. A few years ago in Canberra, within the space of a few hours, I went from feeling patriotic pride while attending an Australia Day event to being taunted by a car full of flag-draped youths making slit-eyed gestures while jeering, ‘Go home!’

The passing of an age

However, we shouldn’t lose sight of our progress on matters concerning race. We have had the opportunity to reflect on this in recent days, with the sad passing of former prime minister Malcolm Fraser. There have been many fitting tributes for Mr Fraser – celebrating his commitment to racial equality, multiculturalism and human rights. On these matters, there is no doubting the importance of his leadership.

In his 2010 memoirs, Malcolm Fraser tells a story about his time as army minister in the 1960s administering conscription during the Vietnam War. In a hotel bar in his Victorian electorate of Wannon, Fraser was upbraided by a constituent whose son’s number had come up in the draft. Nine months later, Mr Fraser returned to the same bar. The same man would again confront him; the man’s son had married “one of them” – a Vietnamese. The next time Mr Fraser returned to the bar, the man accosted him once more, only this time because he wanted to buy Fraser a round. His son had brought his new Vietnamese bride home. “That girl,” the man said, “she’s the best thing that ever happened to our family.”

It is always dangerous to reduce a political career to a single event or issue. For a long time, many were ambivalent about the legacy of the Fraser prime ministership because of the 1975 Dismissal of the Whitlam Government. Yet the episode in the Western District described by Mr Fraser was something that prefigured many of the changes in Australian society that would occur as a result of his period in office.

The political historian Robert Manne, writing one of the many articles about Fraser last Friday, described it best. The ‘central achievement’ of Fraser as prime minister was that he had normalised ‘the most significant cultural achievements of the Whitlam government in the fields of ethnicity and race’. It was, for example, Whitlam who began the movement that would lead to Indigenous land rights; but it was under Fraser that land rights legislation would first be passed. Whitlam as prime minister was responsible for concluding the work of dismantling the White Australia policy and for making the first embrace of multiculturalism. Yet, ‘it was only under the conservative Fraser that the old Australian ambition to assimilate all migrants to an Anglo-Celtic norm was finally and definitively abandoned’. [3]

Indeed, it was Fraser’s decision as prime minister to accept, during the late 1970s and early ’80s, close to 70,000 refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Per head of population Australia took in the largest number of refugees in the world.

This decision forever changed the complexion of the Australian population. Until that point, there had been no significant influx of non-European immigrants – at least not since the 1800s. Australia did embark upon a program of mass immigration following the end of the Second World War, but the immigrants came from Europe, not Asia. The new multicultural Australia, which Whitlam had proclaimed, was to face its first test.

That Australia would pass that test owes much to Fraser’s political leadership. He was genuine in his humanitarianism and in his commitment to multiculturalism, the latter embodied by his establishment of SBS. And it was by no means inevitable that the Fraser government would decide as it did, not only to take in Indochinese refugees, but to do so in such large numbers. By 1979, there was clearly a refugee crisis. Camps throughout south-east Asia were overflowing; boats were arriving on Australian shores. The Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs warned that the arrival of these refugees would spark a "hostile public reaction", stimulated by traditional fears of the yellow peril and concern about high unemployment.[4] A politician more inclined to follow public opinion – rather than to lead it – may have opted for a different course.

In 2013, I had the opportunity to interview Malcolm Fraser for a documentary I made for Radio National. I asked him about his reasons for embracing multiculturalism:

I believed we had no option, no alternative. We couldn’t live as an Anglo-Saxon outpost in this part of the world. And I thought the days of isolation, of exclusivity were just passed. And I thought that sort of attitude was wrong. It was reminiscent of colonialism and a sense of superiority which was totally and absolutely misplaced. So how do you explain to the community that has, in its origins and its attitudes, been Caucasian, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic – how do you explain to that community that the world is changing, that they’ve got to change? ... you talked about multiculturalism, about a stronger country through diversity, respect for all people. Australia just did not – and does not – have an alternative to multiculturalism. [5]

With the passing of Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser, we have come to see the passing of an age. But the decisions made by Whitlam and Fraser, at least on matters of race, were the right ones. They remind us that some questions should sit above partisan politics – they remind us that political leadership is about courage. It was only with figures such as Whitlam and Fraser that the racial attitudes associated with the White Australia policy would be definitively banished and rejected.

The Racial Discrimination Act

Of course, we should never be complacent on such matters. There continue to be contests about race. We have seen this during the past year or so, with the debates about the racial vilification provisions of the Racial Discrimination Act. As you would know, the Federal Government last year had proposed repealing section 18C of the Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate others because of their race.

Debates about race can often divide more than unite. Yet throughout 2014, the contest over section 18C united Australians in one sense. There was an emphatic affirmation of our commitment to racial tolerance. There was opposition to the proposed reform to the RDA: by multicultural and Aboriginal communities, members of the legal profession, human rights experts, psychologists, public health advocates, churches and civil society.

Most were worried that amending the law would have the dangerous effect of licensing racial hatred. They also believed it was unclear why any change was necessary when the Act already provides a broad protection for artistic work, scientific inquiry and fair comment. Under section 18D of the Act, even if something should cause offence on racial grounds, it is exempt from being in contravention of the law – provided that is done reasonably and in good faith.

Faced with such public concern, the Abbott Government abandoned its legislative proposal in August 2014. Announcing the retreat, Prime Minister Tony Abbott said he had made a ‘leadership call’.
The issue was briefly revisited in January 2015. Following the Islamist massacre of staff at satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris, some commentators called for an urgent reconsideration of section 18C. It was argued that, were the magazine’s provocative cartoons about the prophet Mohammed and racial groups to be published in Australia, it would be ‘banned’ or ‘shut down’ because of the Racial Discrimination Act.[6]

These arguments were misleading. While the RDA covers the attributes of race – which includes colour, ethnicity and national origin – it says nothing about religion. Conduct that offends people on religious grounds is beyond the scope of the legislation. Moreover, the case law has established that satirical cartoons, even those that may racially offend or insult people, is to be regarded as protected speech, if it has been done reasonably and in good faith. In the Bropho case, some cartoons which some Aboriginal people found to be offensive were ultimately regarded as conduct exempted as artistic work and fair comment under section 18D.

In any case, the Federal Government in January this year quickly rejected calls for the RDA debate to be revisited. Prime Minister Tony Abbott confirmed that there would be no changes: it remained his government’s position that it would not proceed with a repeal.

The public debate about the RDA has been intense; at times, it has involved some inaccurate depiction of the legislation. Some commentators, for example, have referred to people being ‘prosecuted’ or ‘charged’ under section 18C. This makes little sense, when the Act only provides for a civil protection against racial discrimination and vilification. Put very simply: you can’t be charged or prosecuted under section 18C. Someone may complain about unlawful conduct, but in the first instance this means only that the Australian Human Rights Commission will investigate and attempt to conciliate the matter between parties.

It would be timely, though, for our community to reflect upon the broader significance and impact of the Racial Discrimination Act. This year marks the 40th anniversary of the legislation. Passed by the Commonwealth Parliament in 1975, it was Australia’s first piece of federal legislation concerning human rights and discrimination.

Australian society has changed significantly since the RDA came into force. From a population of 13.8 million in 1975, Australia today is home to 23.8 million. Ethnic and racial diversity has increased over that time, as a result of immigration from countries in Asia and the Middle East. In addition, there has been a softening of attitudes on race and multiculturalism. Public surveys demonstrate strong public support for cultural diversity. For example, the most recent Scanlon Foundation study of social cohesion in Australia found that 85 per cent of respondents agreed that multiculturalism is a good thing and 58 per cent agreed that immigration intake in Australia is ‘about right’ or ‘too low’.[7] For the most part, the story of Australian multiculturalism since the 1970s has been one of extraordinary success. The RDA has played an important role in this, providing the legislative architecture of racial equality.

The very existence of the RDA is itself of importance. The legislation embodies a statement from Australian society that it does not accept racial discrimination and is committed to the equal dignity of its members. It gives people the assurance that they will not be treated unfavourably or with contempt because of their race. In light of Australia’s past history of racial discrimination, this is no trivial feat for our legal and political culture.

While it is hard to measure such an impact, the law has also arguably shaped people’s behaviour. On the matter of race, one early American legal scholar of anti-discrimination laws put it in the following terms:

... the mere existence of the law itself affects prejudice. People usually agree with the law and internalise its values. This is because considerable moral and symbolic weight is added to a principle when it is embedded in legislation ... The law, embodying as it does the societally acceptable norm, constantly holds before people an image of what their feelings should be. Over an appreciable period, this cannot help but influence them in their private attitudes. As a result, while we may not be able to repeal prejudice by law, [it] ... is an essential part of the enterprise of education which alone can end prejudice.[8]

Racism. It Stops with Me

It is on this note of education that I will turn to the Racism. It Stops with Me campaign.

It should go without saying that we cannot rely upon legislation – and legislation alone – to achieve social change. It is unrealistic to expect that law can deal exhaustively with the causes of social phenomena, for the law is more typically equipped to deal with the symptoms. If we are interested in educating people for social change, it must be at the level of policies and programs, and be done in schools and communities. As well as through the power of the state, through our parliaments and our laws, such work must be conducted through the habits of civil society. Changing attitudes and values is work we must do in our family, our work, our churches, our sporting clubs, our neighbourhoods.[9]

At the same time, there remains more to be done in providing formal, legal guarantees against racial discrimination. There are two current provisions of the Constitution, which permit governments to discriminate on the ground of race. Section 25 entertains the possibility that persons of particular races can be disqualified from voting at state elections. Section 51 (xxvi), the so-called race power, which confers on the Commonwealth Parliament the power to make laws with respect to ‘the people of any race, for whom it is deemed necessary to make special laws’. As we move towards recognizing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first Australians in our Constitution, it is important that we eliminate these discriminatory provisions. In my view, any Indigenous recognition should also be accompanied by a clause that explicitly prohibits racial discrimination. The constitutions of Canada, South Africa and India each prohibit racial discrimination; a similar prohibition is contained in the Bill of Rights Act 1990 in New Zealand. The Australian Constitution remains anomalous in not having anything equivalent. As a result, it remains possible for Commonwealth Governments to suspend the operation of the RDA, as they have on various occasions.[10]

Returning to my earlier point about social change, the limitations of legislative protections against racial discrimination have, to be fair, always been explicitly recognized. Those who introduced the Racial Discrimination Act understood perfectly that it would never be sufficient to provide a legal mechanism for complaints about discrimination. They recognised that education and policy initiatives would be vital to achieving social progress on racial matters.

Since 2012, such work at the Australian Human Rights Commission has been centred on leading the National Anti-Racism Strategy.[11] The strategy aims to improve public understanding of racism, and to empower Australians to respond to prejudice and discrimination. Educational work conducted as part of the strategy covers the workplace, schools, sport, public services and the internet. There has, for example, been curricular material developed for primary and high school students in history and physical education, as well as guidance for employers on dealing with cultural diversity in their workplaces.

The Racism. It Stops with Me campaign is also part of this strategy. It invites individuals and organisations to pledge a stand against racism. Currently, there are almost 340 organisations across the country that are formal supporters of the campaign (AFL footballer Adam Goodes is also a prominent ambassador of the campaign). Some express their support through public events; some use the campaign as an opportunity to begin systemic change in their organisation. We do not prescribe what support for the campaign must mean – it is important that each organisation does what is right for them.

That is because organisations join the campaign for different reasons. Some organisations join because of local incidents involving bigotry and hatred. In country Victoria, Bendigo council supported the campaign as part of the community’s response to anti-Muslim protests over the building of a mosque in the town. In the case of Ventura Bus Lines, the company responded to a much publicised incident on one of its buses in Melbourne, where a passenger racially abused and threatened another passenger who had been singing a song in French: as part of its support for ‘Racism. It Stops with Me’, the company introduced new training for bus drivers about how to deal with racist abuse. Other organisations, such as the 26 universities across the country who are campaign members, join because they believe it is a powerful way to build a more welcoming atmosphere within their organisation. Whatever the context, membership of the campaign is one way of expressing public commitment to racial tolerance and cultural harmony.

The efforts of the campaign, however, underline one thing. It is important – vitally important – that we consider our personal and organizational responsibility to stand up to racism and to make our communities better places. When racism occurs, it does damage harm: to the individuals who experience it, but also to our society. Every time an act of prejudice or discrimination goes unchallenged, there is the danger that someone may feel empowered to deal out more of it.

We are faced with some particular challenges today. There are signs that some extremist groups are feeling emboldened to spout their messages of hatred and division. While organised racist movements have largely operated as fringe underground operations, there are indications that they are becoming more confident – with their presence becoming more visible both online and offline. There has been a recent rise in anti-Semitism, including it would seem within some university campuses. Anti-Muslim sentiments have intensified, often taking on a racial tinge.

More generally, there remains the challenge of resisting complacency. Casual and everyday forms of racism may appear at best to be niggling complaints about a joke here, or an off-handed remark there. The subtle sideways glance, or the soft bigotry of low expectations may not appear worthy of our attention. But if we are not careful, prejudice and intolerance can quickly escalate. Low-level racism can give licence to something more serious. Racism needn’t involve a nasty incident of abuse on public transport before it is to be considered racism. Fighting it can more often than not mean having an important conversation with a friend or someone in your family – as opposed to confronting a hostile stranger.

Wherever racism occurs, fighting it is not easy. But as someone once said, life wasn’t meant to be easy. That is all the more cause for us to stiffen our resolve, and join in saying that racism stops with us. I thank you for your support in countering racism: your work in our universities reminds us that in achieving social change, we must necessarily rely on good citizens and not simply on good laws.


[1] G Davis, ‘The Global Moment’, Boyer Lectures 2010: The Republic of Learning (14 November 2010), at <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/boyerlectures/lecture-1-th…;
[2] K Dunn, J Forrest, R Pe-Pua, M Hynes & K Maeder-Han, ‘The spheres of racism and anti-racism in contemporary Australian cities’, Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal, vol. 1, no. 1, 2009, p. 5.
[3] R Manne, ‘Fraser's great conservative achievement: cementing Whitlam's progress on race’, The Guardian Australia, 20 March 2015, at <http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/20/frasers-great-cons…;
[4] T Soutphommasane, ‘The life and times of Australian multiculturalism’, Mongrel Nation (13 January 2014) at <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mongrelnation/the-life-and…;
[5] T Soutphommasane, ‘The life and times of Australian multiculturalism’, Mongrel Nation (13 January 2014) at <http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/mongrelnation/the-life-and…;
[6] L Bourke, ‘Charlie Hebdo attack prompts renewed calls for race-hate law changes in Australia’, Sydney Morning Herald, 12 January 2015, <www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/charlie-hebdo-attack-prompts-renewed-calls-for-racehate-law-changes-in-australia-20150112-12m7d6.html> ; S Medhora, ‘Racial Discrimination Act would outlaw Charlie Hebdo cartoons, say critics’, The Guardian Australia, 13 January 2015, <www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/13/racial-discrimination-act-would-outlaw-charlie-hebdo-cartoons-say-critics> .
[7] A Markus, ‘Mapping Social Cohesion: The Scanlon Foundation surveys 2014’ (2014) pp. 1, 4.
[8] Cited in F Chaney, ‘Second reading speech: Racial Discrimination Bill 1975’, Speech, The Senate, 22 May 1975, p. 3.
[9] S Rice, ‘Basic instinct, and the heroic project of anti-discrimination law’, Roma Mitchell Oration, delivered on 19 October 2013 at Adelaide Festival of Ideas, at <http://www.eoc.sa.gov.au/eo-resources/events/mitchell-orations/mitchell…;
[10] For example, see M Davis and G Williams, Everything you Need to Know About the Referendum to Recognise Indigenous Australians, NewSouth Publishing, Sydney, 2015.
[11] For more information about the National Anti-Racism Strategy, including the ‘Racism. It Stops with Me’ campaign, see <http://itstopswithme.humanrights.gov.au>

Dr Tim Soutphommasane, Race Discrimination Commissioner