Over the weekend at the Sydney Writers’ Festival, high-profile political journalist Laura Tingle told the audience Australia is a racist country, and always has been. It prompted widespread media coverage and criticism from Coalition politicians and media commentators.
But is it true? Is Australia fundamentally a racist country?
We asked five experts what they think. Here’s what they had to say.
Nareen Young, associate dean of business (Indigenous leadership and engagement)
Yes. I can rely on data to answer this question. The first Gari Yala report, released in 2020 by the Jumbunna Institute of Indigenous Education and Research and Diversity Council Australia, was based on a survey of 1,033 Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander workers across Australia about their experiences at work.
The data in that first report, and we are about to repeat that survey, indicates there is significant racism toward First Nations peoples in Australia’s workplaces.
The survey found 38% reported being treated unfairly because of their Indigenous background, 44% reported hearing racial slurs and 59% reported experiencing “appearance racism”, where they get comments about the way they look or “should” look as an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander person.
We also know from social media that there are significant, deep and quite terrifying racist things said there.
By and large, the experience of non-diverse people seems to be that it’s not a racist country.
But if you are First Nations or not mainstream Australian, then you are subjected to a great deal of racism. For workplaces, this comes at a cost. People who experience racism at work respond appropriately and given the psychological and physical impact of racism, they leave. That has an impact on employers by increasing turnover and affecting the organisation’s reputation. Then employers wonder why they can’t recruit diverse workers.
It seems to me the people who aren’t subjected to racism in both systemic and individual terms think it’s not a racist country and get in a tizzy about comments like Laura Tingle’s. There’s this overreaction and defensiveness.
But we do need a national, open discussion about it. Many First Nations or non-mainstream people don’t talk a lot about the racism they experience because it’s traumatic. So it’s actually helpful for the discussion when a mainstream person like Laura Tingle says it.
Erika Martino: research fellow in Healthy Housing
Australia’s colonial background has created a racist country through our institutions, systems and policy. There is also current evidence of racism in the housing sector.
I have been working on research with Tenants Victoria, which was getting reports from tenants who were experiencing what they called “rental racism”. That refers to difficulties accessing housing or even people feeling pressure to change the way they look or speak when they apply for housing.
Our research team — some with lived experience of racism — surveyed more than 200 people who were renters in the past five years about their experiences of being treated badly or unfairly because of their race, country of birth, ethnic origin, or skin colour. Our yet-to-be-published research found more than 80% had had at least one experience of rental racism in the last five years.
The most common experience (64%) was people witnessing someone being treated unfairly because of their race or ethnic background by a rental or property manager.
One person found they had no response to applications once their race was known. Another person said they and their partner were the only white couple at an inspection and they got the house; they saw this as an example of rental racism that benefited them.
One person told us: “A previous rental provider told me to go back to my own country during a mediation with Consumer Affairs.”
Respondents had negative emotions associated with these experiences, including feeling ashamed and fearful (71%); angry (82%); and powerless, or depressed (80%).
The main perpetrators were real estate agents or landlords, with almost half of our respondents never reporting the incident or confronting the person.
It’s extremely hard to prove a person is denied housing based on their racial or ethnic background because it is such a discretionary process. Digital technologies that agents and providers use facilitate such discrimination because the property agent is able to collect so much data. And the landlord-tenant power imbalance exacerbates this issue because many tenants who experience racism are unlikely to report it when we are in a housing crisis.
Fethi Mansouri, director of the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation
We do have a serious racism problem in Australia, inducing systemic, institutional racism. To characterise the whole country as racist, however, is problematic on a number of other fronts.
First, this characterisation does not reflect the subtle and nuanced ways in which racism actually manifests in everyday experiences.
Second, if you apply this generalised statement, you are assuming the whole system of governance, all the institutions, all the interpersonal practices, the educational system, the judiciary — everything is explicitly and deliberately motivated by discrimination. And I don’t think you can say that about Australia.
For example, most universities have a charter on diversity and inclusion. So, system-wise, in terms of mission statements and values, they tick all the boxes. The problem in Australia is we just stop at ticking the boxes and we don’t follow up with the capacity to measure the impact of certain policies or interventions. We don’t take the reviewing or evaluation of policies seriously.
This is why there’s still a big problem with racism in every area, from health care to education to sports.
What frustrates me is there’s a lack of nuance on this subject. Racism is very subtle, it’s very difficult to prosecute at times, but it is there. And this is because we haven’t gone deep enough in terms of reforms or addressing the historical legacies of racism.
We just recently published a comprehensive report where we surveyed 32 studies that look at racism in Australia. We looked at all the evidence and there is no doubt that racism hasn’t gone away. In fact, it’s actually becoming more entrenched and difficult to dislodge from society.
In addition, we aren’t able to have a very mature conversation on racism — the controversy around Laura Tingle’s comments is a good example. But more importantly, we have consistently lacked national leadership to take responsibility of tackling racism in key institutions.
Only briefly, under the Gillard government, did we talk about a national policy around social inclusion and anti-racism. And we didn’t see it implemented. We also don’t have the data telling us the prevalence of racism, nor do we have strong reporting mechanisms where people can go when they experience racism.
We are failing because we are not empowering key agencies and institutions to deal with racism when it happens. So, people stop reporting it and it becomes an accepted part of our lives.
Matshepo Molala: PhD candidate, School of Social Sciences
Yes, there is an insidious form of anti-Black racism that’s pervasive across the country, especially towards African Australians. I’ve experienced it myself, but it’s also backed up by evidence.
In 2022, a United Nations working group, Experts on People of African Descent, invited to Australia by the government, found people of African descent are living “under siege of racism”. They found many forms of discrimination across employment, criminal justice and negative racial stereotyping.
This, the group said, was due to the ongoing effects of Australia’s colonial history, including the White Australia policy.
This can be seen in health and aged care settings. Evidence shows African and south Asian migrant nurses can be denied the opportunity to provide care by patients refusing treatment from them. Their skills were also undermined or ignored in country with a significant workforce crisis — something the UN group also identified.
The idea of Australia as a multicultural country has been used to shield us from honest, mature conversations about race. It means the systems that uphold and perpetuate racism are not sufficiently interrogated or dismantled.
Days that could provide the chance to have those frank public discussions, like the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (March 21), are instead renamed Harmony Day, shying away from talking about race at all.
Andrew Jakubowicz, emeritus professor of sociology
The first time I was asked this question was in 1996, immediately after the election of John Howard’s government and I was giving a talk in Jakarta. I thought the best way to answer it was to say Australia is a society with a racist history, endeavouring in many ways not to have a racist future.
With all good sociological questions, the answer to this question is not a simple yes or no. Rather, we need to talk about what you mean when you ask the question and what counts as evidence one way or another.
If you are talking about a process in which distinctions between people based on colour, ethnicity, nationality, culture or background are used to allocate resources broadly in society, that’s racism.
There was very little doubt South Africa under apartheid was a racist society. Likewise, Australia during its White Australia policy was a fairly racist society. But both societies have made public and formal declarations they will avoid behaving that way again in the future.
Neither has managed this entirely successfully, but the path they are on is towards less apparent racism in the future.
When it comes to evidence of racism in Australia, there are two pieces of research I’ve been involved in. In 1996, the Howard government committed to carrying out a survey on attitudes to race and cultural difference. This research was put under lock and key by the government and it took 13 years for me to get it released to the public.
What we found was that more than 50% of Australians in 1998 held views that to some extent could be described as racist.
Then, in 2017, I was involved in a major research project funded by the Australian Research Council — it was the first big study of racism on the internet. We used some of the same questions that were used back in 1998 in a survey of 2,000 internet users.
We discovered 4–5% of people on the internet recognised they engaged in racist harassment of other people. And about 60% were what we call prejudiced bystanders — they held moderately to significantly racist views and were engaged in the amplification, though not the creation, of racist material online. And just under 30% were opposed to racism.
Another key point to make is that the hierarchy of power and wealth in Australia is also associated with race. Looking at the key institutions of Australian society where key decisions are made and where the power rests, there is little doubt it reflects a racist structure. People from particular ethnic groups, primarily western and northern European, sit at the top of the hierarchy.
So, is Australia a racist society in which moderate racism is widespread and perceived as “normal”? On all objective criteria, yes. Is it better now than it was? Yes, but it’s a more complex situation than it was.
This piece first appeared in The Conversation.
