I’ve been cynical about politics for a long time, especially when it comes to Australian attitudes to racism and immigration. The latter has always been the favourite scapegoat of rightwing politicians to blame for anything they don’t want to meaningfully address through policy – house prices rising? Unemployment rates too high? Economic inequality growing? It’s because of all those foreigners, obviously, coming here to steal jobs, houses and food right out of the mouths of “Aussie families”. It’s so predictable it’s almost boring.
But I will admit that even my hardened black heart was dismayed to see the recent polls that show a rise in popularity for One Nation. While I know that the factors driving poll outcomes are complex, it is gutting to see Australians falling for the same rubbish 30 years after I thought we were done with Pauline Hanson for good.
I grew up in the mid-90s in country New South Wales, having arrived in 1992 as a first generation immigrant, and Hanson’s initial rise to political notoriety is a core memory from my childhood. It is the first time I remember consciously realising that my family and I were not necessarily welcome in Australia, and that there was a cohort of the community who didn’t like us for no reason other than our visible cultural difference.
Because even then, I knew that the only markable difference between my family of six – my dad an engineer and my mum running our small takeaway store, my siblings and I in public schools – and my friends’ families was our skin colour. In every other way that mattered, there was very little distinction between our lives and theirs – my parents worked hard and paid taxes, we studied and hoped to build careers and families in Australia, and we were invested in our local community.
My parents were aware of the impact of her racist rhetoric even then. They made a joke of it, and we often listened to the Pauline Pantsdown parody, shouting “Please Explain!” from the backseat of the car.
When Hanson wasn’t elected in 1998, I thought that ugly period of anti-immigration rhetoric was behind us. And yet here we are, with polls recording One Nation’s popularity surging, and other high-profile ideologues like Barnaby Joyce joining their ranks and reinforcing their dangerous message.
I spent some time this week lurking through social media trying to pinpoint why people would possibly think that One Nation offers a viable solution to the issues facing the middle and working class in Australia – issues which are primarily around income and resource scarcity, a result of an unequal economic system that has more to do with the income gap between the highest and lowest earners in our country (and the systems that favour the former) than immigration.
The overwhelming message I got was “there are too many foreigners here, taking our jobs and houses” and also “they don’t want to assimilate”. The first I find bemusing, because as any immigrant will tell you, it’s not exactly easy to migrate to Australia. It’s costly, and you have to meet many strict criteria to qualify for any of the three main streams of immigration. I have seen plenty of family and community members over the years try and fail to do it.
And the second I find exhausting, because the idea that there is some golden standard of Australian culture, that hasn’t been entirely developed and constructed by the multicultural influences that have tried to form this nation (not to mention off the violent genocide and dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people), is clearly a myth. And as someone who has assimilated so hard that at times my sheer Australianness has been a barrier between me and my Indian culture, I can confirm there is no end point of assimilation that will counteract the racism that simply doesn’t like the fact of my skin colour.
As a child, my parents tried to counterbalance the racism we saw on the news, led by Pauline Hanson, by pointing out all of the people in our community who obviously loved the multiculturalism at the heart of Australian culture.
But when I think about trying to create this same balance for my own son, I feel deflated. Am I to spend the next 30 years dealing with the same, tired, repetitive racism that I thought we had finally conquered when Hanson was defeated the first time? Or will the rest of the country finally wake up and realise that focusing on immigration and culture wars is actually just a clever way of distracting us from the real inequalities we’re all facing, that have very little to do with skin colour or when we arrived here, and more to do with a system that functions off the oppression of many to secure the success of a minority?
Zoya Patel is a writer and editor based in Canberra
