22 December 2005Pragmatists have the best solution to civil disorder, argues David Burchell




THE violence and civil disorder in southern Sydney this past week has stoked a furious public debate in the newspapers and on radio. On the whole, though, this debate has been an entirely predictable and un-illuminating business - repetitious, almost choreographed in character and so formulaic that it could have been a response to any and every ethnically related disorder in this country over the past 30 years.



On the one hand we have had what can only be described as the sleepwalking liberal position - the all-purpose, repetitive view that all ethnically related unrest is a product of a ‘deep vein of racism’ in the Australian people, which is just waiting to come out at any opportunity.



So the story goes, this vein of racism is both innate and carefully cultivated by its evil genius, Prime Minister John Howard, who has only to put his finger to his lips for the Australian public to come out barking like a pack of rabid, drooling Alsatians.



While this presents itself as a leftist view, it’s probably better understood as a legacy of the nineteenth century liberal religious imagination, when middle-class Christians with noble intentions feared the reactionary political influence of a mass electorate. But that’s another story.



What’s striking about this position nowadays is how blissfully fact-free it is. Where does the view come from that Australians are somehow essentially racist at their core, as if this distinguishes them from any other human being? Where is the factual basis for the oft-expressed view that we have somehow become more racist in recent years - a view that seems, as it happens, to fly in the face of every significant indicator in social attitudes and public opinion data?



On the other hand, we’ve been treated to what one could term an all-purpose conservative social-anxiety-by-numbers view. By this I mean the attitude of mind which treats every symptom of ethnically related social tension as evidence that Australian society is unravelling in some fashion, and that this unravelling can be sheeted home to the supposed failure of multiculturalism (usually very vaguely defined) to create a unified nation under a single set of social and cultural values.



Again, it’s striking how little concerned this point of view is with inconvenient social and historical data. Ethnically based unrest has been common among multi-ethnic countries, quite regardless of the formal political doctrines by which they justify their multi-ethnic status.



The United States had race riots, lynching and ethnic-tribal gang wars throughout its era as a formal melting-pot, just as much if not more than during its more recent multicultural era.



By the same token, ethnic communities were every bit as distinct and distinctive in melting-pot America as they were in the post-melting-pot era, when Italians in America came increasingly to see themselves as ‘Italian-Americans’, rather than ‘Italians in America’.



Conversely, you can inveigh at ethnic communities all you like to integrate. History suggests that, short of compulsion, they will do as migrants do - they’ll maintain a cultural balancing-act.



There’s a crying need to move beyond this tired and tiresome emotional and political combat over race and multiculturalism, if only because neither of these well-rehearsed positions offers much of substance towards the solution of specific inter-ethnic tensions.



With the grand benefit of hindsight, it was probably predictable that something not entirely unlike the Cronulla violence was going to happen in Sydney, or another major city, sooner or later. At least since 2001, Muslim and Arab-Australians have been living under a good deal of cultural pressure. They haven’t always dealt with this pressure well.



No one in their right mind would want to suggest that the recent events have been a good thing. Law-abiding citizens have been stabbed and bashed, or had their property trashed.



Yet it’s hard to see how either the one-eyed liberal view that attributes all blame to a shadowy thing called Australian racism, or the conservative one-eyed view that wants to point the finger exclusively at cultural problems in a single community, can possibly help with this. They’re not so much about resolving issues as pointing fingers.



Despite all the puffing from the editorial pages, the most helpful and constructive attitudes have been evidenced not by arm-waving theorists, but by the humdrum law-makers and law-enforcers - specifically the NSW Premier and his police commissioner. They have insisted that the problem is not ethnicity but lawlessness.



Cronulla beach won’t become a pleasant place to visit again until everyone, regardless of their assumed or actual ethnicity, can swim there safely and without anxiety. •



David Burchell teaches humanities at the University of Western Sydney. He is the author of Western Horizon: Sydney’s Heartland and the Future of Australian Politics (Scribe, 2003) and associate editor of APO. This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review.



Photo: Andrew Jeffrey