This is a guest post written by Australian student and blogger Liam Getreu. We asked him to write it in response to this JTA article, “Study finds one-fourth of Australians harbor antisemitic prejudices.”
For a country of supposedly happy-go-lucky beach-goers without a care in the world, it’s shocking to think that Australia could, perhaps, be less than the picturesque and inclusive society we like to tell everyone we are. Could that be what we’re really like?
Right after Australian federation in 1901, until the early 1970s, Australia pursued a ‘White Australia Policy’ that limited immigration from almost everywhere but Anglo-Celtic countries and also included harsh, protectionist economic policies. Also, it was not until 1967 that all de jure restrictions against total inclusion for indigenous Australians were removed.
It was also part of this policy that Australian Minister for Trade and Customs, T. W. White, infamously said in 1938, after Australia had been asked to take some Jews fleeing Nazi persecution in Germany at the Evian Conference, that “as we have no real racial problem, we are not desirous of importing one.”
More recently, in the mid- to late-1990s, we had the rise of a racist ideology force its way into our national conversation. Hansonism–as it became to be known, after its patron saint, Pauline Hanson–shook Australian politics to its core, and its effects can still be felt today. (Luckily, we Australians know how to ‘take the piss’, so one transsexual comedian took individual real Hanson quotes and turned it into a number 1 hit on the Australian music charts. See video below.)
Hanson used her maiden speech to the Parliament to announce her fear that Australia was being “swamped by Asians,” to claim that Aboriginal Australians were mooching off white Australia and that urgent action was required to go back to the good old days of a more ‘white’ Australia.
This is all despite Australia’s strong tradition of multiculturalism, especially since the Second World War. It was in the 1940s and 50s that hundreds of thousands of Italians, Greeks and Jews began coming to Australia, bringing with them the languages, foods, religions and cultures of back home. Add the huge wave of Asian, mostly Vietnamese, immigrants in the 1960s and 70s and you can begin to understand how this tradition developed.
It often took time to fit in, but eventually their own cultures were poured into the Australian melting pot and the Australian culture was so altered for the best. (For an excellent example of how some Mediterranean immigrants struggled to blend into Australian society soon after they arrived, watch the scene embedded below, from the classic 1960s Australian film, “They’re A Weird Mob”.)
One example is that Australian coffee is considered to be up there with the best in the world–due in no small part to Italian immigrants. Another example is that the first Australian-born Governor-General was Jewish and that some of the best comedians of the past thirty years have been of Greek heritage. It’s something Australia has always been very proud of.
But despite how positive developments over the past half-century have been there has always been a lingering displeasure with immigration in some pockets of the wider community. Hansonism is one example, as is the Cronulla riots of 2005, where self-styled ‘real’ Australians went to Cronulla beach to beat up ‘un-Australian’ Lebanese-Australians (“Lebs”) and re-claim the beach as their own, all the while screaming, “we grew here, you flew here.” More on that from the New York Times, here.
A recent spate of bashings of Indian university students in Victoria similarly caused some to doubt our progress as a multicultural nation.
The recent findings by the University of Western Sydney’s Challenging Racism Project are just another part of this picture. It found that almost half of all Australians harboured negative feelings towards Muslims, more than a quarter held similar positions on indigenous Australians, and slightly less than that, 23.3 per cent of Australians thought negatively about Jews.
And so, the headlines screamed, that a quarter of Australians are antisemitic.
Somehow, despite all of this, Australians are overwhelmingly, more than 87 per cent of us, supportive of the diversity of Australian society. In other words, we hate Jews, Muslims and Aborigines, but we love diversity. Okay.
Many have doubted these statistics because of the nature of the study. Andrew Markus, the former director of the Australian Centre for Jewish Civilisation at Monash University in Melbourne, believes that the results are inaccurate because of the long length the study was taken over (more than a decade) which leads him to believe that the survey “may be serious flawed”.
Taking a look at the survey itself, the question asked is a little odd. In actuality, the question wasn’t asking what one thought of these groups, but rather how one would react to a member of your family marrying-out of your own faith and into the other. The survey was essentially asking, “If you had to choose another faith for your sister to marry someone from, which of these foreigners would you be willing to hide your animosity towards the most?”
When you think of it like that, the survey findings create slightly less cause for concern. The negative coverage of Arabs in Australian media, similarly to that in most other Western countries, means that the everyday Australian, hardly the most current affairs-engaged individual in the world, thinks they’re going to bring a bomb to Christmas Dinner instead of a Pavlova, perhaps helping to explain the high number of Australian who are supposedly anti-Muslim.
Based on my own experience, I am also led to cast aspersions on the survey. Have I experienced antisemitism in Australia? Sure, I have. There were a number of low-level incidents in high school where some friends and I were chased down the street screaming “Jew!” (God only knows how they knew!), including one time the delinquents ended up plastering my friends’ garage door with swastikas. During football games, too, there were occasions where another school would run onto the field chanting “Hezbollah! Hezbollah!” for reasons still unknown to me.
Big incidents sometimes do pop up, but most can be chalked up to the work of fringe group lunatics or drunken hooligans. A quite serious and recent example involved a friend of mine being taunted, threatened and harassed for being Jewish (the perpetrator was recently sentenced to three years in gaol [editor’s note: apparently “gaol” is how Aussies spell jail]).
But mostly, life has never been as good for Jews in Australia as it is now. Even at anti-Israel demonstrations there are only a handful of times where there are outward displays of antisemitism, and never have I felt threatened. One Sheikh in Sydney’s west is also known for his antisemitic speeches, but his views are so far on the margins–driven there by mainstream Australia seeing it for the antisemitic, anti-Western, anti-female garbage it is–that it’s scarcely something I worry about.
It’s entirely possible, though, that we’re kidding ourselves. Each year an ‘Antisemitism in Australia’ report is produced and there are still considerable reports in it to justify being weary. But do a quarter of Australians think ill of, or wish ill on Jews? I don’t think so.
I know that nothing of the sort will cross my mind, or many other people’s when we show up to work or uni on Monday.
