Prejudices. Unless we’re lying, we all have at least one of them. I have a prejudice against music that doesn’t involve at least one hand-played musical instrument. Apologies to Iggy Azalea fans.
The latest Essential Report turned up an interesting mixed bag of voter prejudices. There was prejudice against Pauline Hanson (45% of those polled agreed with the statement that “Pauline Hanson’s views do not reflect Australian values and she should not be given so much media coverage”. Meanwhile 22% of the 49% who said they opposed Muslim immigration did so on the basis that Muslims “do not share our values”. Which I guess means Muslims are more consistent with Australian values than Pauline Hanson.
Still, it requires some nuance and an ability to perform basic statistical analysis to extract the above-mentioned conclusions. The kind of nuance that journalists appear to lack. But in electoral politics and emotive culture wars, nuance and rationality are best kept out of the scene and relegated to wherever it is those Muslims came from.
Funnily enough, the figures were worse (or better, depending on your perspective) for Coalition voters. How much does this make sense historically? Have Liberal voters always ignored the individual in favour of group identities?
The first episode of John Howard’s ABC documentary on his political hero Bob Menzies includes a section on the formation of a new political party for the “forgotten Australians”, the middle class, those who wished to be “lifters, not leaners”, whose core political beliefs included the free market and free individuals. This party’s ideology attracted enough votes in post-war Australia to deliver Menzies a landslide.
Now some 60% of the party’s voters have adopted a new freedom — the freedom to live in a country free of migrants who identify with a disparate group that make up some 25% of humanity. The party’s voters want freedom to imagine that each and every one of this huge rump of humanity are likely terrorists and are unable to integrate into Australia. No doubt the non-integrating terrorist wannabes to be stopped at the border would include people like Houssam Abiad, a former Liberal deputy lord mayor for the City of Adelaide. Three out of five Liberal voters were opposed to immigration by anyone who identifies as Muslim. Or is deemed Muslim.
The national figure was just under one half. Some 34% of Greens voters would oppose the migration of someone like NSW MP Mehreen Faruqi, notwithstanding her PhD in environmental engineering and her passionate support for marriage equality.
Apparently “[t]he most common reasons for wanting a ban were fears over terrorism”. Little wonder some 40% of ALP voters wouldn’t want any further Muslims from Egypt migrating here, Egyptians like the parents of counterterrorism expert and ALP federal member for Cowan Professor Anne Aly.
Apart from the usual suspects (Greens, a few Labor MP’s and an extra suspect in John Alexander), most pollies have been totally silent on not just the poll but also Hanson’s speech and the underlying prejudices and ignorance it evidences. The silence from the Coalition and from allegedly conservative commentators is even louder. The message this sends to both the perpetrators and victims of the bigotry is that Australia’s political establishment wishes to play a “wait and see” game.
More sober voices can throw facts — that 2% is hardly a swamp, that Hindu communities are growing at a faster rate, that most home-grown terror suspects aren’t migrants but were born here — but since when have facts mattered in such mass debates?
The best we can hope for is that bigger prejudices and problems come along. That other concerns — the economy, health, industrial relations, etc — take over from prejudice against Muslims or Africans or Asians. But how’s this for a scary scenario? The security risks in the future posed by Islamic State and other rogue actors could quickly and easily be dwarfed by the ambitions of the People’s Republic of China flexing its economic and military muscle. Australia could get dragged into conflict in the South China Sea. Our newspapers and media could be swamped with images of Asian-looking people threatening our security, with other Asian-looking people seeking refuge.
How will the average Aussie bigot be able to tell the difference between different kinds of people who look like Chinese leaders giving threatening speeches on TV? Nuance and prejudice tend to go in opposite directions. The likes of George Christensen, Cory Bernardi, Reclaim Australia, Pauline Hanson, etc, may find the notion that a migrant who speaks Mandarin and has a name like Tsai Ing-Wen or Lee Hsien Loong is a security threat.
And why stop at language? That pro-democracy bookseller from Hong Kong Lam Wing-Kee sure has a suspicious name. As does that Suu Kyi woman, who wears funny clothes and lives in Burma.
Why do they celebrate Chinese New Year? What’s wrong with our New Year? What are these moon cakes they eat? How can we tell the difference between a Chinese-looking person from Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia, Burma or Fiji?
Am I insulting the intelligence of the average Australian bigot? I wish I were. So do the thousands of Sikhs who must put up with the nonsense they cop due to non-Sikhs assuming the Sikh turban is the same as Osama bin Laden’s and the Sikh temple is a mosque.
So you don’t like unaccompanied singing, the oldest and purest form of music in the world?
“Am I insulting the intelligence of the average Australian bigot? I wish I were.”
So do I Irfan. I keep ratcheting down my assumptions of the intelligence levels of the average aussie bigot, and the average aussie right wing nut job, and I haven’t come close yet. Semi-epsilon moron is too high a setting, I can tell you that, at least.
Part of these surveys should be a question on whether the person surveyed has ever met and actually spoken to a Muslim. Seeing some woman wearing a hijab does not count. Seeing people associated with Arabic signage also does not count – large numbers of migrants from the middle east, such as for example from Lebanon (the Maronites) and Egypt (the Copts) are Christian.The irony is that because of Australia’s selective migration program many people would have met Muslims without realizing it – for example their doctor, pharmacist or some other professional. If someone knows a person who originally came from Pakistan, then it is highly likely that person is a Muslim given the religious composition of Pakistan. However given the education and status of Pakistani migrants in Australia they are unlikely to be recognised as such. The problem is building opinions based on stereotypes rather than real people.
I canot help but wonder if the years of Abbott Morrison and Dutton relentlessly banging the drum of fear of Islam for the basest of political reasons had much to do with this.
Like Ms Hussein, Yusuf slides too easily into taqiya – there are enough straw figures here to feed Randwick races’s entire stable for a month.
No bigot needs the “freedom to imagine that each and every one of this huge rump of humanity … are unable to integrate into Australia.”
They demonstrate this loudly, disdainfully and threateningly by their self proclaimed separatism & daily lives.
This is typical of the “lie to kaffirs” strategy -“ No doubt the non-integrating terrorist wannabes to be stopped at the border would include people like Houssam Abiad, a former Liberal deputy lord mayor for the City of Adelaide.” No, that is the point, Abiad integrated.
Exactly like “Egyptians like the parents of counterterrorism expert and ALP federal member for Cowan Professor Anne Aly.”
” Three out of five Liberal voters were opposed to immigration by anyone who identifies as Muslim. Or is deemed Muslim.” No, the objection is to those who won’t shut up about their religious delusions and demand that this society kow-tow and make allowances for their refusal to integrate and evolve.
As for “most home-grown terror suspects aren’t migrants but were born here” this simply proves the point that the problem is the ideology, not the genetics of the individual.
Nothing racist about sensibly not wanting to be within coo-ee of crazies claiming they know what the Great Flying Spaghetti Monster want them to do.
And you really shot yourself in the foot with “Hindu communities are growing at a faster rate, ” so, again, nothing to do with genes but deluded & dangerous beliefs.
Let us be clear – people emigrate because conditions in their homeland are not conducive to the flowering of their potential – ie the social system stinks.
Why then, when given a chance to breathe free air, do so many demand that the mores they fled be replicated here?