Most of the reported attacks on Indian students have occurred in Sydney and Melbourne, so I can’t profess to have any personal insight.
Nevertheless, they are shameful examples of intolerance.
Australia’s reputation is being damaged abroad, just days after high-profile former Telstra chief executive Sol Trujillo branded the country racist.
It’s disturbing that, according to media reports, many of the perpetrators are migrants themselves.
That’s the point of this post; to question if we got it wrong on multiculturalism.
Previous waves of migrants largely assimilated, but then it became government policy for people to retain and celebrate their own cultures.
There’s nothing wrong with that, to a point. Keep the recipes, even the language at home, but generally intermingle as my Dutch grandparents and their children did.
Don’t bring your ethnic and religious tensions to Australia.
It may be politically incorrect to criticise immigration, but across the world we are seeing people do exactly that as societies that were previously harmonious now contend with new divisions inherited from old prejudices.
A danger exists that far-right extremists will take advantage of the situation for political purposes. There was a noticeable swing to the right in recent elections for the European Parliament.
In Australia, we need to have a balanced and mature debate about immigration policies, although arguably it is too late.
The recent attacks on Indians have reportedly been committed by people of “Middle Eastern” appearance and “dark skinned”.
Have recent migrants from the Arab world and Africa been less suited to assimilation? Have they brought with them rivalries and historical tensions that are unwelcome in this country?
It shouldn’t be considered anti-immigration to pose these questions.
Immigration has been great for Australia, but needs to be managed carefully in the national interest.
I’m not going to offer a solution here, because I don’t have one. I just think we need to be having the discussion.
It takes a brave man to begin such a discussion Michael. I guess many people like me, only dare to think about these issues because they feel totally inadequate, or are uncomfortable with the nature of the topic for discussion due to a level of ignorance about the subject, and appropriate communication skills, and/or/ intelligence required to participate.
In other words..I am interested, but would love to learn more because there is so much misinformation out there in the community.
I believe that these attacks are part of the general criminal activity of sydney and Melbourne and have no particular racial significance.
The average person can’t tell one type of dark-skinned Caucasian from another. Unless they give an indication of their origins by speaking and revealing their accents, Indians, Pakistanis, Nepalese, Bangladeshis, Afghans, Arabs and many southern Europeans are indistinguishable from each other on the basis of external appearances. The “men of Middle Eastern appearance” could themselves be Greek, Italian, Hispanic or a dozen other things as well as Arab.
People who commit criminal acts for profit may like to add in opportunistic racial/ethinic/sectarian abuse as it offers a sort of ideological excuse for their behaviour as well as humiliating the victim. An examination of the stats for these offences will probably prove that there has been no spike in the graph for crime against Indians. I say “has”. Now that the Indians have got the idea that they are being targeted and published this belief, it probably will put the idea into some scruffy heads.
My response when I heard that they were calling on our government to protect them was to bust out with, “The government can’t protect British – descended Australians or any other kind of us from being bashed, robbed, raped and murdered! Why should the Indians be an exception?”
Twitter: mgorey
says:
You’re possibly right about criminal elements, Retarius. They are probably immigrants though, or second generation at least, knowing the Melbourne suburbs involved.
There’s been pretty poor media reporting of all this. Nobody has tried to seriously identify the perpetrators.
Journalism is getting pretty shallow, I’m afraid, and it won’t get better with all the job cuts happening and the new rush to publish first, check facts later.
It was such a bad news
G’day Michael,
I absolutely agree that the reporting of this story has been woefully shallow and unnecessarily provocative. And I agree with ‘Retarius’ that there’s little evidence these are anything other than opportunistic criminal attacks. Most universities in Australia have a high proportion of Asian students of all kinds, and from my experience they are often the ones studying and wandering around in the middle of the night, and obviously most open to attacks.
The real shame is the (further) warped story that the rest of the world is probably getting.
Michael Outhwaite.
Twitter: mgorey
says:
Michael, the shallow reporting worsens. Front page of the Adelaide Advertiser today claims the “racist” attacks are spreading to Adelaide on the basis of one minor altercation. It’s not even clear from the story who provoked it.