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This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on each aspect of politics because the Seventies.
In today’s political discourse, “racist” is a pejorative term, an accusation, an insult. No-one, aside from for a few white supremacists, accepts being labelled a racist, with its gross connotations of deadly violence justified by perceived biological differences — slavery, genocide and the Holocaust.
More mildly, racism refers to state-based oppression in differential laws, which the Racial Discrimination Act has rendered very unlikely, and to prejudicial social attitudes that create in-teams and out-teams. So is it beneficial to understand the patterns revealed in Bernard Keane’s checklist of Peter Dutton’s statements? Dutton and his supporters will reject out of hand the description of him as a racist. His opponents will take it as proof of something they already know. And no-one can be a lot the wiser.
Right here is no longer to say there’s no longer a pattern; there clearly is. But I bellow it is extra accurate — and beneficial — to narrate this as xenophobia rather than racism. The note would no longer carry such a heavy historical load, is no longer so like a flash reacted to as an insult, and facets us towards the history of nationalism rather than differences among our bodies. (What follows would no longer apply to Dutton’s feedback on Indigenous peoples, which raise various questions.)
Although “xenophobia” consists of two phrases from Ancient Greek — “xenos”, which means both stranger and visitor, and “phobia”, which means fear — its origins are no longer ancient at all. It was coined within the late nineteenth century to narrate the Chinese Boxer Rebel’s attacks on foreigners of all sorts. Generalised into a term for impolite sorts of nationalism, the note’s use started increasing within the 1940s. It then took a sharp upward turn within the early Eighties as nations tried to manage the multiethnic polities forming from successive postwar waves of migration, which brought “strangers” to dwell and work in largely ethnically homogenous host nations.
Nations are a creation of the nineteenth century, a rejection of the polyethnic, polycultural, polyreligous, polyracial empires where the harmony of the polity came from the end, created by the crown, the monarchy, the dynasty, preserving all who fell within its mild together as matters of the same state. The idea of the nation was powerfully radical: that folk that share a territory, a language, a history, a culture, perhaps a religion, and who stare fancy each various, ought to govern themselves rather than be matters of a “overseas” monarch.
The harmony of the polity would now no longer be top down nevertheless bottom up, inhering within the shared qualities and sympathies of the folk that detached it. This was a progressive, modernising idea, nevertheless one which had gross penalties within the 20th century when the ideal of the nation came up against the messy reality of various peoples cohabiting in a territory. Ethnic cleansing was one , as was the capacity of nationalism to mobilise folk for war.
When the Commonwealth of Australia was fashioned at the tip of the nineteenth century, it was normal sense that nations comprised folk that shared a language, a heritage, a culture and who have been breeze together by normal sympathies. In the debates of the day, the term “race” was traditional interchangeably with “folk”, a lot as we now use “ethnicity”. Having invaded and settled the Great South Land, why would the brand new nation invite strangers to dwell among us?
Half a century later, Australia did moral that, as the postwar migration arrangement brought in first non-English speaking Europeans, then moved south to the Mediterranean and the Center East, to plan our population. Sure, there was a racial basis to this, as a key criterion was the coloration of individuals’s pores and skin and the angle of their eyes, and there was anxiety about the strangers’ foreignness: their food, their beliefs, their lack of English. The booming postwar economy did a lot to assuage these anxieties, and governments started quietly to loosen Australia’s racially based immigration restrictions.
It was no longer till the Eighties, although, with the extremely visible migration of Vietnamese refugees, that there was a lot of a public debate about the way the Australian nation was changing. The Vietnamese migration was no longer especially popular, and historian Geoffrey Blainey seen it was a potential threat to social brotherly love. John Howard, who was then leader of the opposition, insisted the authorities ought to retain the fair to impose some gain of racially restrictive immigration if it deemed it necessary, regardless that he was no longer, in fact, advocating it at the time. Howard misplaced the Liberal leadership over this to the extra cosmopolitan-minded Andrew Peacock, and he later regretted his feedback. But he knew that there was a challenge. How was the harmony of the national polity to be understood now that it incorporated so many folk that have been essentially strangers to each various?
Nations are inherently dinky, and political leaders are boundary riders, conserving the nation from external threats and managing the accelerate with the stream of individuals, goods and money across its borders. Howard was as vigorous a boundary rider as any, along with his infamous claim: “We can bellow who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they approach.” But he failed to restrict his nation-constructing energies to policing the borders. He also place considerable effort into reinforcing the values he believed held the nation together: easy-going informality, the fair accelerate, practical mateship. In his “Headland” speeches, on Australia Day and Anzac Day, he supplied his take on what Australians have been fancy, their temperament, and he did this in a way that invited identification from non-British Australians. That is, he saw his task as the nation’s leader to no longer easiest defend the borders nevertheless also articulate what Australians share, to shore up and lengthen the bonds of normal sympathy.
The point right here is no longer whether or no longer or no longer one agrees with Howard on Australia’s core values, nevertheless the contrast with Dutton, who pays barely any attention to the complicated leadership task of constructing social brotherly love in a society as ethnically and religiously complex as contemporary Australia. In fact, he seems to scorn the task, as within the deaf ear he grew to change into to ASIO director Mike Burgess’ plea on the ABC’s Insiders to political leaders to be careful of their language when discussing terrorist threats. Almost immediately Dutton was calling for a ban on refugees from Gaza because of the danger of terrorists hiding among them, stoking passionate divisions among various Australians over Israel’s response to Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7 last year.
In the extra than two decades since Howard returned to the Liberal leadership, migration has persevered apace. The 2022 census came across that extra than a third of individuals have been born exterior Australia. Of us born in India are now the 2d-largest staff of overseas-born residents, after those born within the UK, and folk born in China the third, nevertheless novices have approach from all the continents and islands of the planet. So many strangers to welcome, to attempt to understand, to plan the bonds of sympathy with that create a nation, in a world where many folk remain emotionally invested within the politics of their homelands, as we can glance within the war in Gaza.
Stable leaders promise to guard the nation from threats, so it is of their political pursuits to search out threats and magnify them. Maybe it is as soon as in a whereas primarily folk’s pores and skin coloration that Dutton is responding to when he sees various teams as a threat, nevertheless it absolutely may presumably also be their spiritual beliefs, or their understandings of gender differences.
Nonetheless it is ghastly, I bellow, to assume pores and skin coloration is always the primary driver. It’s extra general than this: a response to the stranger, the foreigner, to folk whose lives and pondering are opaque, who challenge our taken-for-granted grip on social reality, who have habits and beliefs we don’t share and may vehemently reject. But in contemporary Australia, we have to learn dwell alongside each various with civility and tolerance.
We would prefer to call out Peter Dutton’s leadership no longer because he is racist — this accusation will moral bounce off him — nevertheless because his reflex xenophobia makes him in downhearted health-suited for lead the polyethnic nation Australia has change into.
Is Peter Dutton extra helpfully described as a xenophobe? Let us know your ideas by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please contain your elephantine name to be regarded as for publication. We reserve the fair to edit for size and clarity.
