“Are Muslims the only real Australians?”  

 - Anti-immigrant backlash betrays multiculturalism on which country was built 

by Tessa Morris-Suzuki. This fine commentary first appeared on the Korea-based “OhMyNews” international news website, URL

 

http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?
no=276786&rel_no=1

 

Tessa’s  theme dovetails with the John Pilger “New Stateman” piece dated 27 February, “John Pilger refuses to fly the flag”,  and with my own as yet unpublished commentary  “Howard’s 10 years – An alternative political analysis”.  I am putting up this set of three dissenting pieces on my website, being my contribution to the Howard regime 10^th Anniversary which we are all currently either celebrating,  or in my case mourning.

-           Tony Kevin, 2 March 2006

 

 

In a speech on Feb. 24, Australian Treasurer Peter Costello stated that immigrants should not be admitted to Australia unless they to commit themselves to the "compact" of core Australian values. Specifically identifying Muslims who embrace radical causes, he added that those here already who deny those values should be stripped of their citizenship and expelled.

 

The response from the leader of the opposition Labor Party, Kim Beazley, was not to condemn these comments as divisive, but merely to ask why the government had not been more effective in keeping out such disruptive and revolutionary immigrants in the past.

 

These statements, according to the Australian media, have upset Muslim leaders. To prove the point, prominent Australian Muslims, given their thirty seconds before the television cameras, duly express concern. They suggest, a little diffidently, that Australia should be willing to allow diversity, to accept people with different, even disturbing views. They mention that disreputable word "multiculturalism."

 

I still remember the delight my multicultural family experienced when, as eager would-be-migrants, we visited the Australian High Commission in London to apply for visas in 1981. The brochures we were given, and the information provided by the friendly High Commission staff, emphasized that Australia was a country of migrants whose core values were openness to diversity and tolerance of difference. There were even colored pictures to prove the point.

 

Like first-car buyers in a showroom, we believed the sales pitch. And for the first 15 years of our lives in Australia at least, we were not disappointed. Multiculturalism, of course, was controversial. Not everyone liked the word, and there were endless debates as to what it meant. No one ever suggested it was going to be easy. But there was also confidence that Australia was gradually creating a society whose very identity was founded on that most wonderful of human values -- the willingness to live alongside people with different habits and ideas, the ability even to like those with whom one deeply disagrees.

 

But those core values, it now turns out, were just a passing fad. "Our" new core values, as enunciated by Treasurer Costello, are apparently "economic opportunity, security, democracy, personal freedom, the physical environment and a strong physical and social infrastructure." Tolerance and diversity have evidently gone the same way as punk rock and Rubik's cubes.

 

And, if we are to believe the media reports, the only people who are seriously upset by their comments are "Muslim leaders."

 

Where are the rest of them: the many prominent politicians who, throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, swore their bipartisan allegiance to values of diversity; the academics who built their careers researching multiculturalism; the High Commission employees who sold us multicultural Australia?

 

Are they not upset too? Or have they all been assimilated into this amorphous but all-powerful "we" who clamor for state protection of their values, security and strong infrastructure? Why, I wonder, are Muslim leaders the only people speaking up loud and clear for the thing that I was led to believe was the Australian way of life?

 

It is, indeed, a symptom of our looking-glass world that, when the media need people willing to stand up for the supposedly Western liberal values of tolerance, pluralism and openness, they turn first to prominent Muslims.

 

The Western liberalism to which Beazley, Costello and Australian Prime Minister Howard claim to be heirs was built precisely on the belief that a democratic nation cannot exclude ideas that its leaders, or even the majority of its people, find repugnant. The most culturally vibrant of societies have been those -- including the U.S., France and Britain in certain phases of their histories -- that were willing to let in people with radically different ideas and ways of life, from anarchists to Amish.

 

What liberals understood then, but have forgotten today, is that democracy is never safe or comfortable, because (almost uniquely amongst ideologies) it cannot be defended by censorship, prison bars or the exiling of dissidents. This has always involved risks, and the risks in the past were no less then than they are now. The anarchist bombs of the nineteenth century and communist conspiracies of early twentieth were just as real as Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiya today.

 

But now our "liberal" leaders on both sides of politics want us to exclude, not only the actively criminal, but also those liable to commit what in pre-war Japan was known as "thought crime"; the refusal to embrace the core ideology of the national polity.

 

Our leaders suggest that there is some "test," some magic technique for achieving this. They propose that, in order to defend Australian democracy, it is necessary (and possible) to introduce screening processes which, alongside the chest X-rays, the AIDS tests and fingerprinting, will certify that recent or future immigrants are free from the taint of revolutionary ideologies or anti-Australian values.

 

This is arrant nonsense, and (since nobody conceals the fact that it is targeted at one particular section of the community) it is deeply divisive nonsense. Immigrants will always retain a wide variety of different ideas and values. Some of those already here will (let us fervently hope) go on inventing new ways to be different, even heretical, in the future.

 

Australia cannot remain truly open, liberal and democratic and at the same time be guaranteed protection from dangerous thoughts. And if we lose sight of that fact we (all Australians) will still be living with consequences of our mistake long after the political ambitions of Peter Costello and Kim Beazley are footnotes in the history books.

 

So, thank you, Muslim leaders, for standing up for what I thought were the real Australian values.

 

And as for the Christians, atheists, Jews, Buddhists, parliamentarians, media stars, academics, business leaders, trade unionists and others who may also feel upset at the trashing of those values -- c'mon guys, lets hear a bit of leadership from you.

 

-           Tessa Morris-Suzuki, OhMyNews Australian Contact Reporter