Your Voice

The story you cannot get away from today is of yesterday's riots - or perhaps "disturbances" once the police commissioner has had his say - in Cronulla and other southern suburbs. Even Triple M got involved with talkback this morning, with Fitzy (producer of the regular morning show, "The Cage") and another announcer whose name I do not recall getting in on the act while the regular Cage talent is on their Christmas break.

The nameless announcer took a fairly clear position during the show, and while not endorsing the actions of the crowds yesterday, he did suggest that the Lebanese community had brought this on by alleged long-standing conduct in the area involving intimidating and abusing other beachgoers, and acting as if they owned the place.

There were some callers to this morning's show who were suggesting, in effect, re-establishing the White Australia policy. Some of the rioters were claiming that this has been building up for many years and is "what Pauline Hanson was warning us about" back in 1996.

While some of the alleged antagonists of recent times may be Lebanese or otherwise of middle eastern appearance, their racial and cultural background is not the distinguishing factor that gives rise to this behaviour. Like most people I have experienced intimidation and violence from others in society when I was merely going about my business. On the occasions that the perpetrators of the violence where identifiable, they have in all cases but one been white Anglo-Saxon males in the 16-25 age bracket. In the only remaining case the perpetrator was of Greek extraction. Of course if these were all to be reported in the media, they would be recorded as violence "by a man aged X" in the case of assaults by white Anglo-saxons, but at "by a man of Mediterranean appearance" in the case of the remaining incident. The non-white ethnic identity would be named, and so that culture would be given some blame, but the Anglo-Saxon perpetrators would not be identified by race and so the incident would not cause people to reflect on a particular culture.

And so, by the carelessness of the media, it is easy to get the impression that it is the non-white sections of our community that are the problem.

The truth is that there have always been anti-social people in the community who have sought to intimidate others, and whose conduct has involved, at times, physical as well as threatened violence. This has been so whether we had a single, homogonous culture, or a diverse, multicultural one. However there is one common thing among those who perpetrate such intimidation - they have almost always been members of a disadvantaged section of society. They have been the poor, or minorities who suffer discrimination or alienation from others in society. They have been, above all, people who have a sense of overwhelming powerlessness in society, who react to that sense of powerlessness by seeking to assert compensatory physical power over others.

That is not to say that wealthy people do not exhibit violence, but when wealthy "gangs" of the same age commit violence, it appears to involve naked and unexpected aggression rather than any real effort to control or intimidate.

When people exhibit what appears to be gratuitously intimidatory behaviour - whether those people are Middle Eastern people today, Mediterranean people 30 years ago, or white people from poor families in poor suburbs - it arises as an attempt to regain a sense of self-respect lost through the feeling of powerlessness elsewhere. This should at ring true to some degree in almost everybody - most people have at some time experienced the desire to lash out violently - and if you think back to those times you will probably recall the overriding sense that you needed to regain some control over your own circumstances.

If we want to reduce the frequency of this conduct, we need to look at the factors that produce the feelings of powerlessness.

For a middle eastern man in the 16-25 bracket, there are a number of sources of this sense of powerlessness. A small part of this was the rise of Hansonism in the 1996-1999 period, although most people were able to recognise and disregard the racist undertones of Hansonism. The real problems started with Tampa, when a Government desperately behind in the polls and seeking to retain power vilified refugees - predominantly from the Middle East - even going so far as suggesting that they may be terrorists. In the months that followed, Australians of Middle Eastern extraction began to experience - many for the first time in their lives - derogatory remarks from white Anglo-saxons. One Australian born woman I knew at the time, who was born here, was told by somebody to get out of Australia and "go home".

Now the Government claimed and continues to claim - and they may well be truthful in this regard - that their policies were not racist and they had no racist intent. Nevertheless the policies, and particularly the approach they took to them, had an increase in racism as an inevitable and foreseeable consequence. The difference between intentionally promoting racism and engaging in a policy stance which has a foreseeable and inevitable consequence of increasing racism is a vanishingly small one.

Since Tampa things have only gotten worse. Of course we had the World Trade Centre attacks which, in the environment formented by Tampa could not fail to increase suspicion and racism within Australia. Since then there have been continual efforts by Australian politicians - both Coalition politicians and some Labor politicians - to talk up the threat of terrorism for political ends. By talking up that threat they increase racism and suspicion of those ethnic groups identified as possible sources of terrorists. The recent passing of the Anti-Terrorism Bill has added to this because a person of Middle Eastern extraction is likely to feel that they, much more than any white Anglo-Saxon, may be subjected to the new powers, thus giving them more reason to feel powerless.

Being poor, being subjected to racism, being viewed with constant suspicion, being the most likely losers under a new law increasing powers of the police - these things all serve to give people in those racial groups a feeling of powerlessness that leads to attempts to compensate by establishing physical power.

The attempt to establish that physical power has a secondary effect - it makes those over whom the power is asserted feel, in a small way, some of the chronic powerlessness felt by the minority. The result is a reactionary desire to assert a "balancing" sense of power - in extreme cases, the riots that occurred yesterday. This reaction can be especially intense among the poorer of the white Anglo-Saxons in our society because they already experience powerlessness to some degree.

To a large degree, the Hansonist claim that cultural diversity would lead to cultural violence has become a self-fulfilling prophecy - it has helped to create the environment which would be conducive to violence that has at least the appearance of being based on a clash of cultures.

The conduct of the AM shock jocks does not help matters. Today a second-string FM announcer got in on the act. People who seek to identify trouble-makers by race in this way and to address it as a racial problem have just as much responsibility for causing this problem as the people who are acting out by asserting physical power over others. Such announcers are to be condemned in the strongest possible terms.

If we want to improve the situation, we need to identify the causes of the problem and address them. We need politicians who, rather than pursuing the vote at all costs, are willing to educate and speak the rational truth. We need politicians who are willing to stand up for what is right and just, rather than pushing hysteria further along. We deserve better from our Parliamentarians and our Government - we deserve people who can take current events and put them into perspective. We need out politicians to be community leaders who are not afraid, rather than populist chearleaders who are driven by their own fears and an exaggerated sense of the fears of others.

We should expect better of our politicians. And if they cannot do better, we need to replace them with people who can.