It’s amazing to chart the reaction to Laura Tingle’s comment at the Sydney Writers Festival one week ago: “We are a racist country, let’s face it.” There have been at least 20 stories in The Australian alone, all tending in the same direction – that the ABC’s chief political correspondent is a crazed leftie who hates this country, while the national broadcaster is no more than a lame, confused, hopelessly biased, enabler.
If only the Oz, or any other media outlet, were prepared to devote so much space to the ongoing destruction of the Powerhouse Museum by the NSW state government! They could still get in a kick at the Labor Party, and actually do some good.
The Tingle story is a gold-plated beat-up that allows the Murdoch press to fan the flames of one of their favourite culture wars. To say Australia is a racist country is not a controversial claim. Racism is a universal condition, found in every country to a greater or lesser degree. It’s fundamentally the fear of the Other – of those who look different to us, have different customs and worship different gods. It takes a lot for most people to overcome their instinctive distrust of difference – which is why racism must be identified as an endemic social evil and called out whenever it appears.
In a world which is ever more radically divided between haves and have-nots, where billionaires support a would-be dictator like Donald Trump for purely selfish purposes and millions of impoverished Americans with no education, no jobs and no future, just want to tear everything down, it’s inevitable that racism undergoes a resurgence. The Trump phenomenon is fuelled by hatred and resentment, and the most obvious targets are people of another race, whether they be African Americans, Asians or most Muslims.
It’s an effective tactic, and it’s incredibly dangerous. We don’t need or want this kind of mass hatred in Australia, but it represents a huge temptation to a political party such as the Libs, who are hardly more than a rabble after their defeat in the last election. Whatever federal Labor’s shortcomings, as Tingle rather testily pointed out, they have at least made an effort to govern the country and deal with its problems. The legacy of the Coalition government was nine years of inertia on energy policy, climate change, housing, health and education – that is, when they weren’t being actively destructive, as in the Robodebt scandal.
As one can see from the Boiled Egg’s Budget reply, there are still no policies in sight for the party in Opposition, so the illusion of a plan must be created. In order to keep avoiding the facts of global warming and the push for renewable energy, the BE tells us we need to build nuclear power plants all over Australia. This ignores the clear message from the CSIRO – repeated on multiple occasions and backed with extensive research – that a nuclear option would be twice as expensive as renewables. Besides, who wants a nuclear power plant in their electorate? None of the Coalition members, I suspect. The billion-dollar plants would all be placed in Labor heartland, such as the Hunter Valley.
The Egg’s plan to fix the housing crisis is not to build more homes but to put a block on immigration. This policy appears to be based on scientific research he conducted by speaking to Coalition voters in remote parts of the country, who complained that the refugees and migrants were taking our jobs and houses. In reality, a block on immigration would not only be an act of wanton cruelty for those waiting to renunite with family members, it would deny Australia skilled workers, and have a negative impact on the economy. This is not just my opinion, it’s what the leading economists have said.
It doesn’t take much imagination to see the Boiled Egg’s migration policy as a barely disguised racist dog whistle: “Blame it on the foreigners.” The Murdoch press is horrified that Laura Tingle could suggest such an outrageous thing about a politician who got his charisma lessons in the Queensland police force.
Tingle’s controversial comments seemed to be born of frustration that, as a reporter who spends her life looking hard at the politicians, she saw the destructive and divisive potential in the Coalition’s ‘policies’. Entities such as the Oz or Sky spend a ridiculous amount of time telling us Albo is on the run and the Egg is a national hero, so it’s hardly surprising when they take an antithetical view and seize the opportunity to try and tear down an ideological oponent.
Tingle’s big sin is that she expressed her personal frustration in a public forum in a blunt manner. When we learn she has been “counselled” (as opposed to “cancelled”, which is what the Oz wants), all the talk is about how her comments were insufficiently “contextualised”. Fair enough, but so what? Aren’t we smart enough to provide the context for her remarks? Are we obliged to agree with everything Tingle or her detractors have to say? The same people who are scandalised by Tingle’s views on racism and migration policy are quite happy to say the most outrageous things on a regular basis from their own platforms. They are vehement advocates of free speech until somebody says something they don’t like. Then it’s “Call out the firing squad!”
It was almost a comedy routine to find Janet Albrechtsen refuting Tingle by pointing to her own family’s benign experience of migration – from Denmark. How heartening it was to learn that the hard-bitten Aussies of Adelaide entertained no racial animus against a family of Scandinavians.
When not leading us down memory lane, Albrechtsen does make a distinction between countries in which racism is enshrined as a principle, and where it is officially repudiated. Think of the old South Africa under Apartheid versus modern Australia. Officially, it’s true, we are a country that rejects racism on every level, but that doesn’t mean racist attitudes don’t flourish amid the general population. Many would point to the comprehensive defeat of the Voice referendum as Exhibit A, as so many ‘no’ voters seemed to think it would allow the Aborigines to rise up and reclaim our suburban backyards. I don’t think it’s a good example because the Voice proposal was flawed in many ways and never made a decisive case for its necessity. Without political unanimity it was always destined to be a failure.
If we leave the realm of government policy, Tingle’s comment that Australia is a racist country may be viewed as a mere banality, applicable at all times to all places. Where her opponents have gained traction is that nobody wants to think of themselves as racist. Not even a woman I remember on the TV news once, saying: “We’re not racist, it’s just that this is a place for white people.”
The Oz has portrayed Tingle as a hardliner who is pointing a finger at each of us and calling us racists. This is rubbish, but such claims are enabled by the approach taken by prominent ‘anti-racist’ ideologues such as Robin DiAngelo, whose appallingly shallow book, White Fragility (2018), became a best-seller in the United States. To be white, in DiAngelo’s view, is to be racist. To be black means that one is structurally excluded from being a racist, even if one makes apparently racist comments. These are views that fly in the face of common sense, and may actually be conterproductive, confirming rather than dispelling racial anger and prejudice.
It’s a bad idea to go around calling people racists when they may not have done or said anything in particular to justify this label. To grapple with racism requires good will on both sides: a willingness to acknowledge prejudice and deal with it, and an acceptance that a sincere effort has been made. Nothing is fixed by finger pointing and name calling, only by tact and mutual understanding. In an ideal world this would be a template for all politics. Ha!
Laura Tingle may not be a comedian like many of the buffoons on Sky Channel, but neither is she an ideological extremist. The campaign to portray her as such is a textbook example of what is wrong with our politics and our media. There are worse crimes for a journalist than having an opinion. Stupidity, dishonesty and opportunism spring quickly to mind.
Speaking of stupidity, it’s Archibald Prize week! As the Herald folks haven’t asked me for anything in advance, I’ll save my comments until next week. I suspect the Archibald, with all its attendant chit chat is the reason Spectrum has once again held over this week’s art column, which is devoted to Cutting Through Time, an exhibition at the Geelong Art Gallery featuring work by Cressida Campbell, Margaret Preston and the Japanese printmkers of the Ukiyo-e school. As you may remember, my arrangement with the SMH is that I won’t post a piece until it has had a first run in the newspaper, but this becomes a joke when columns are constantly being held over with no warning. When the unwritten contract is broken in this way I have no choice but to post the review, otherwise my weekly schedules become a mess.
The film being reviewed is High & Low: John Galliano, a staggering documentary on the British fashion designer who became a haute couture icon, then crashed back to earth following a series of drunken anti-Semitic incidents. Would he have met with the same outrage today, now that anti-Semitism is enjoying such worldwide popularity? One would like to think so. As it is, Galliano is still with us, and trying to clean up his act. In this film one can’t help seeing him as a victim of an industry that rewards extremism, then professes to be shocked when it goes too far. Perhaps he should have been counselled by the ABC.