Australia’s commentariat has been all a-twist over the past few days over whether we’re a racist country. They’re coming at it from the wrong end: it’s not the country that’s the problem, it’s our politics — with the complicity of an amoral media.
Since Peter Dutton centred migration as a problem in his budget reply almost three weeks ago now, Australia has lurched into a dangerous place, trapped by our traditional media in a news cycle turning around the opposition leader’s heated rhetoric.
The spinning cogs of Australian political discourse have become linked to the global right-wing outrage machine, which has recalibrated itself across the developed world to equate migration as part cause, part effect, of a crisis of social breakdown.
Dutton has gone full-bore on the “no vacancies” critique, telling the ABC’s 7.30: “It’s not just housing. People know that if you move suburbs, it’s hard to get your kids into school, or into childcare. It’s hard to get into a GP because the doctors have closed their books. It’s hard to get elective surgery.”
And that’s before we worry about migrants also causing all this “congestion on our roads”!
Or, as Laura Tingle truncated it, “everything that’s going wrong in this country is because of migrants.”
For Australia’s conservatives, it’s old rhetoric turned to a new purpose. About a decade ago, during the 2013 federal election, the Liberal candidate for the outer Sydney seat of Lindsay, Fiona Scott, made headlines when she blamed asylum seekers for the panic points at the time: hospital waiting lists and traffic jams in western Sydney.
Back then, it was shocking — too overt an anti-migration message. The party’s rising star, Scott Morrison, had to do clean-up, nodding to the concerns while shaving off their bluntness, bringing the focus back to “Stop the Boats” dog-whistle basics.
Ah, for that gentler time, when it was “just” asylum seekers arriving by boat offering political rhetoric a small, identifiable group of outsiders, primed for demonisation. Then, Trump elevated criminality in the mix by launching his first presidential campaign with an attack on migrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Dutton picked up the beat, rhyming to his crew on then Fairfax-owned 2GB about crime in western Melbourne, saying, “Need to call it for what it is — of course it’s African gang violence”, which he coupled with the Trumpian waiver that there’s “many good people in the community”.
Malcolm Turnbull, then prime minister, had to do clean up, with a lawyerly explainer: it wasn’t African gangs, just Sudanese gangs. It was another of those moments that, in retirement, Turnbull would regret, hanging on to the defence of Dutton’s “verbal clumsiness and awkwardness”.
Now, with his budget reply, the opposition leader has made “we’re full up” commonplace — and the news media can’t get enough of it, eager for the viral hits it believes touch anti-migration buttons in their audience.
A handful of “violent criminals” provide the “if it bleeds, it leads” repeat highlights for commercial television and tabloid mastheads. Administrative stumbles in a struggling Home Affairs Department left politicised by the former government offer a government-in-crisis talking point for the serious end of the gallery.
Nine media contributes to the mess, puffing up a poll that generates the traditional “Fewer migrants? Yes, please!” response.
In the Canberra gallery, there’s pushback; from Tingle, most famously, but also David Crowe from Nine’s mastheads. They’ve given Dutton the credit of taking him both literally and seriously, with explainers of what the “no vacancies” approach means. Tingle’s reward has been the unwanted attention of News Corp. Crowe’s has been the attention of Dutton himself, which according to Mark Kenny in The Canberra Times was “not just churlish but clearly intimidatory”.
Once, traditional media understood migration reporting as tagged “handle with care”. Migrants — even asylum-seeking refugees — were largely ignored, unless they could be celebrated as part of the “imagined community” of a modern, multicultural Australia built by a succession of leaders from Whitlam, to Fraser, to Hawke, to Keating.
Then the Australian debate lurched, first with the One Nation surge in the 1998 elections and then in 2001 with Tampa and the 9/11 terrorist attacks. When John Howard won the subsequent election off the back of it all, Australia’s media commentariat rethought how it understood the politics of immigration.
The result? A near quarter-century of ramping up anti-migrant rhetoric from the right and a news media prepared to pad along behind.
But outside politics (and outside the audiences of declining traditional media), the country has changed. It’s more diverse, more tolerant, particularly in the metropolitan seats that swung Labor and teal in the 2022 election.
The lesson for the commentariat? Time to recognise we’re not in 2001 anymore.
