Racism and Immigration [S1-06]

Show Notes

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Music: “Insurrection”
Written by Pierre Chrétien
Performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra
Courtesy of Do Right Music Inc.

Transcript

Callum Sinclair
Welcome to Why Can’t They Just, looking at politics, policy and getting stuff done. My name is Callum Sinclair. I’m a member of the Labor Party and joining me is Janaline Oh.

Janaline Oh
Hi I’m Janaline Oh. I’m also a member of the Labor Party and before we start, I would like to acknowledge that Callum and I are both recording on the unceded lands of Indigenous people in Australia and I would like to pay our respects to their elders, past and present, and extend those respects to other First Nations people who may be listening.

Callum Sinclair
So, Janaline, today is the 5th of September, and there’s been some recent anti immigration marches that obviously wouldn’t have been possible without the fertile ground of cost of living crisis and the general financial anxiety. But Australia has a history of accusing non-white immigrants of causing problems within Australia. Why can’t the government just call these people racists and make the case that immigration is actually really good for Australia and stop these people blaming immigrants and wanting to prevent them coming into this great country?

Janaline Oh
Such a good question. I have been asking myself exactly that question for quite some time now. Look, to be fair, the Prime Minister and other government ministers have, as have the leader of the opposition and members of the opposition have said that immigrants have been good for this country, that this country is built on migration and that it has been a very positive story. Having said that, when the opposition really went for the government over ‘migrants are causing the housing crisis and this government’s let a million people in in the last 12 months without looking at where they’re going to live’, the government, instead of actually addressing that with the facts, which is that migrants are not causing the housing crisis… The places in Australia with the biggest housing stress are not those areas that have the highest proportion of recent migrants, they’re actually much more established and much less diverse areas, particularly in the larger cities. The government has said that, you know, the reason for the quite considerable spike in migration after COVID was actually because we closed our borders for two years, and so you would expect that a lot of the people who would have come during those two years all kind of came at once, and that was just a little spike that needed to be managed.

I think it’s unfortunate that one of their solutions was to cap the number of international students. The evidence shows that international students are a tiny, tiny, tiny proportion of the rental market in Australia; most international students actually stay in student accommodation, which would not otherwise be available to locals. I would have rather have seen the government come out in a much more full-throated way in support of the migration policy and in support of migrants as part of the solution and not part of the problem, because that is actually a more accurate reflection of the economic history of Australia.

Callum Sinclair
Why doesn’t the government just call out what these people are saying and doing as quite racist? It seems that these are organised by Neo Nazis within the community. Why doesn’t the government just say that?

Janaline Oh
You know, I think it comes to the reluctance of politicians to say mean things about voters. I think it’s kind of like when Hillary Clinton said in the context of the 2016 US election that half of Donald Trump’s supporters were a basket of deplorables. That really consolidated his base and rallied them around him. So I think in Australia you’re not going to get a government who is willing to say to tens of thousands of Australians ‘you’re a bunch of racists’.

I would have preferred to see the Prime Minister call out the racism inherent in the actual protest itself, without necessarily name calling the participants. I think saying, ‘Oh well, you know, there are a lot of good people there expressing legitimate concerns’ tends to legitimise the underlying racism of a lot of those marches. I would have preferred him to say something like while people have a right to peaceful protests, we are concerned about the underlying racism that was apparent in a lot of these marches. I think you can say that without saying every single person who went to the march was a racist.

Having said that, Australia is also very, very squeamish about calling out racism, and we saw that during the Voice campaign in 2022 and 2023 when on at least 2 occasions, significant public figures - in one case, Marcia Langton at the National Press Club; in another case, Laura Tingle, an ABC journalist, on I think it was a TV interview - both said that Australia was racist and the pile on afterwards in backlash to that was quite astonishing when they made those comments in the context of actually calling out specific racist statements by people. So I think what we found in the course of that campaign is that in Australia it is worse to call out racism than to actually be a racist. And I think this is a real problem.

I would like to see the government call out racism much more robustly, and I would like to see a much broader acknowledgement, not just from the government but basically from everybody in Australia that we do have a racist history, that there is a real underlying racism in Australia. There is an underlying racism against Indigenous people who suffered dispossession and arguably genocide at the hands of the early and not even that early colonial settlers. There is a history of people of colour like me saying we are Australian and being asked where we really come from.

Callum Sinclair
In terms of the history of Australian racism, I’ll try and play devil’s advocate here, but why should the government address and acknowledge this past of genocide and racist immigration policies? Why can’t the government just say that Australia is a great place to live and get on with making it a nice place to live?

Janaline Oh
I think the answer to that question is probably the same answer that an Indigenous person calling for a truth process would give, and that is, you can’t move on until you acknowledge where you are and where you are is at this point, at the end of an arc of history where certain things have happened, certain assumptions have been made. And until you acknowledge that, it is very difficult to just pretend it never happened and move on. You need to have that truth telling process and you need to have that acknowledgement.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that the experience of non-white migrants in Australia and in fact, you know, ‘non-white migrants’ has over the 20th century also included people from southern Europe, so it included Italians and Greeks.

I’m not going to say that that is the same as Aboriginal genocide, right? I’m not going to say it’s the same as having people land in your country and basically start killing your people. But there is a real underlying sense in Australia that there are Australians and there are culturally and linguistically diverse Australians. In my childhood we were called ethnics. I remember having an argument actually with a white boy when I was about 15 where he called me an ethnic and I said, ‘well you also have an ethnicity. Your ethnicity is white and Anglo.’

Callum Sinclair
Hmm. Yeah.

Janaline Oh
And he said no, I’m not an ethnic you’re an ethnic and what he meant by that was I’m normal. I’m Australian. You are not. So you have to justify why you’re here.

Callum Sinclair
Hmm.

Janaline Oh
I would say most of the people who have asked me ‘where are you really from’, expecting me to say China, Singapore, Malaysia, some Asian country, have not done so with racist intent. They have not done so because they think of me as less of a person. They have not done so because they have an animus towards Asian people. They’ve done so on the basis of an unconscious assumption that if you are not white in this country, you must have come from somewhere else.

Callum Sinclair
It’s the assumption that white is the default.

Janaline Oh
Yeah. Yes, it’s absolutely and that is the underlying assumption of most people in Australia. And I will say, including people of colour. I come from a family that is just as racist as any other family in Australia.

I am just as racist, probably more racist than other people in Australia.

And what do I mean by that? I mean that my mother has been here. She’s 88, she’s been here since age 17. She came here as a student. She has held an Australian passport for more than 50 years and she has only ever called herself Australian when she’s filled out an arrivals card coming into the country because it says ‘nationality, as in passport’. In every other context we are Chinese and people like you, Callum, are Australian.

Callum Sinclair
Hmm.

Janaline Oh
And this is the underlying assumption of certainly most of the people of, well, most of the migrants of my mother’s generation would definitely take that view. I would say of my generation, we are less willing to accept that without a fight. But I will say personally, I find it very, very difficult to just say I’m Australian and not feel a need to justify that. When I say I’m Australian, I have to fight myself not to justify it because I still have an underlying doubt that I really have the right to say that without qualifying it.

Callum Sinclair
Is what your mother does racist? Is she treating people differently on the basis of their race?

Janaline Oh
So I think this depends on your definition of racism, right? So if your definition of racism is treating people differently, thinking of them as greater or lesser because of their race, no, this is not racist.

If you define racism as judging people because of their race, and judging different people differently because they have different racial backgrounds, then yes, it is racist. So this is not necessarily to say that people who asked me this question have a negative sense towards me. But it displays an underlying assumption, as you say, that white is the default and that if you are not white then somehow you need to kind of justify in an additional way your right to be Australian and to call yourself an Australian.

Callum Sinclair
Why should the government assume a particular definition of racism, and is that part of what the government should be doing?

Janaline Oh
I’m not sure the extent to which it’s actually a government issue. I mean, one of the things that I am doing within the Labor Party is I’m involved in multicultural Labor, which is sort of a loose caucus of people of colour within the party. I’m also a member of a multicultural subcommittee that reports to the national executive.

And our job is to look at barriers to participation, engagement and representation of multicultural communities within the Labor Party, at all levels, in party offices, in preselections, in branches, policy committees . The purpose of that is really to look at whether the party’s power structures are delivering the same pathways for all people within the party, regardless of racial background. And I’ve got to say, I think the answer to that is no, it doesn’t have the same pathways available to all people, but I think it is to the credit of the party that they are actually looking at that question. One of the things that I would like to see come out of this process is some sort of commitment to anti racism training, certainly with senior people in the party, so office holders, candidates, you know, people who have a party organising or party representational role.

And the reason for the anti racism training is not to say that you know these people are racist and therefore need to be trained out of it. It’s to say that we are all kind of racist, but we don’t want to be and so we need some training to give us the tools to recognise racism in ourselves and in other people and to give us the tools to be able to address it in a non-confrontational and constructive way, so that we start to break down those racist assumptions and racist stereotypes. So it’s not about pointing fingers. It’s not about saying you people are racist, and so therefore you need to be fixed; it’s about saying we recognise we live in a country that has a racist history, that we have a racist context and we need to give ourselves the tools to be able to deal with that and hopefully break it down. So I think that is the kind of thing that I would like to see within all organisations and in all parts of the country and I’d like to see a bit more focus on that kind of thing in schools.

I think Australian primary schools now do a really good job of celebrating diversity and celebrating that Australians come in all different shapes and sizes and colours and religions, I think that is all very positive. And when I look at my children’s experience at primary school compared to my and my sister’s experience in primary school, it makes me very, very happy that we have come a very long way, you know, in the last 35-40 years. I think that’s all very positive, but I think it is a case of continuous improvement and we need to keep working on it.

When I see the debates around the Voice where, as I said, it’s worse to call out racism than to actually be racist, and when I see some of the things that were said around those marches, particularly about Indian migrants, it makes me feel like we really have such a long way to go and I think some sort of government attention, not just from the federal government but also from state and territory governments, also from local councils - I just think every organisation in Australia should be looking at this question in a critical way.

Callum Sinclair
In terms of what you were talking a minute ago about schools and also workplaces, why can’t the government in schools just teach the history of Australian racism properly and in terms of workplaces? Why can’t the government just mandate training on these kinds of issues?

Janaline Oh
I think the answer is the government probably could and in the way that it has done for, for example, the respect at work recommendations around sexual harassment and people feeling safe in the workplace.

I think one of the impediments is, as I said, this sort of lack of recognition of our own racism. I think part of the issue is that unless you recognise that you have these unconscious assumptions, you can’t overcome them and this was an issue over gender as well. I remember one of the leadership training things I did when I came back from Hong Kong in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade was an unconscious bias test around gender and, as might be expected from someone who was brought up by a very patriarchal father, I had incredibly sexist assumptions about the roles of women and men. And that doesn’t surprise me given the way I was brought up.

Callum Sinclair
Mm-hmm.

Janaline Oh
But unless you can recognise that you have those assumptions, you can’t actually address them, right? I mean, I’m not a person who thinks that women should stay in the home and men should go out and work and have important roles and women should shut up. Clearly not, but I do have those assumptions and recognising that I have those assumptions actually helps me to identify when I’m thinking in a particular way or if I catch myself seeing someone or making an assumption or a judgement about them that arises from that unconscious bias, I can actually hold myself up and do something different.

So I think the main issue with just mandating these things, is that before you can do that, it comes back to the question about why can’t we just sort of accept we are where we are and move on. It comes to that ability to acknowledge where we are, and once we acknowledge where we are and the biases that we have, then we can move on because you can’t deal with a thing that you don’t know you have.

Callum Sinclair
So. You think that it’s an individually based issue and it’s not something that can be addressed by the government at large. And what does that mean for action on these things that we should just wait for people to get better?

Janaline Oh
No, no, no. I’m not saying that at all. What I’m saying is, this is manifest in the Prime Minister talking about there were good people participating in these fundamentally racist rallies because they are expressing views about economic insecurity. Perfectly legitimate to protest about economic insecurity, not perfectly legitimate to do it in a racist way.

So until we get to the point where people in positions of power are able to acknowledge the racist history and the racist context that we are in, it makes it very difficult for them to take the next step. So I’m not at all saying this is just an individual thing. It is an individual thing, but individuals clearly need to be helped to take a different view. And I guess what I’m thinking is that, as with gender, when you get important organisations starting to take these steps then that provides a demonstration effect to other organisations, and then it becomes more widespread and then it becomes more accepted. And that’s how you eventually effect that real cultural shift.

So I think it has to happen at all levels. I think there is a role for some sort of official acknowledgement and official process to have this kind of training and to have this kind of discussion and this education about our history. I think there’s definitely a role for that.

Callum Sinclair
Talking about education, I’ll come back to the question that I asked earlier, which is why can’t the government just teach the history of Australian racism, particularly around immigration policy in schools?

Janaline Oh
Yeah, I think it should. I would love to see that taught in schools. And you know, maybe that’s a little campaign that we should be running. When I was in primary school, we learned English history in Australia, like the Aboriginal people of Australia were barely a footnote. Immigration was sort of acknowledged in a sentence.

Callum Sinclair
I remember a class on the white Australia policy and but I also remember the quote unquote crossing of the Blue Mountains by the first white British settlers or colonists here without mention of the Aboriginal guides in that situation.

Janaline Oh
I find that pretty sad actually, because tell them you’re quite young, right? It’s not that long since you were at school.

My oldest is 19. When she was in primary school, she did learn some indigenous history. My youngest, who is now 15, I think in year four or five, they had different term units on Australian history from different perspectives, so they did one unit from the perspective that I learnt, the official white British colonial perspective. They did one unit from the perspective of convicts. They did one unit from the perspective of Indigenous people, and that is a thing that would have been unheard of when I was at school. So I think we have seen some advances, particularly in terms of teaching of Indigenous history and particularly in terms of just the sort of acknowledgement that we are not terra nullius.

So I reckon that is a really big step forward and I would like to see something similar in terms of teaching the history of White Australia, the migrant experience.

You know, I think kids are encouraged to look at the migrant experience in different contexts, but I think it is still very much in the context of your personal history, if you happen to come from a migrant family, I don’t know that there are units of talking about, you know, different waves of migration into Australia.

Callum Sinclair
Yeah. So what is some of the history in terms of immigration for Australia? What first kicks off the policies that you’re talking about here?

Janaline Oh
Well, I think the White Australia policy in 1901 was very much influenced by the influx of Chinese into the goldfields.

There was the California gold rush around the same time and there was a huge migration from southern China to California and then there was the Australian Gold Rush and there was a huge influx of southern Chinese.

I think there was a fair bit of tension in the gold fields with the white population; a lot of it was just plain racism. People just did not trust, did not like people who spoke a different language, looked different, ate different food, had different customs.

And I think there was a real sense at the beginnings of the Australian labour movement that Chinese workers were willing to work for less. Were willing to do things that maybe the white workers weren’t prepared to do. This is the whole thing about, you know, migrants will often do jobs that locals don’t want to do. I think there was a real sense that people coming from China would be unwelcome competition to the established white male workers. And so the early Australian Labor Party had one of its key platforms, the White Australia policy, one of its key platforms was the exclusion of particularly Chinese migrants, but also just migrants from places that weren’t what is now the United Kingdom or Ireland.

So I think it’s actually really good, particularly given that Labor had quite racist origins as a political movement and as a political party that it has now come to the point where it is actively, I think, trying to look at ways of ensuring it is more diverse and more representative of a multicultural country, and it has been much more supportive, certainly than the Liberal and National Parties in recent years, of a more multicultural Australia and a celebration of the different cultures that have come to Australia. So it makes me think that progress is possible and if it’s possible in the Labor Party which used to be so racist, then it’s got to be possible in the rest of Australia.

Callum Sinclair
That was Why Can’t They Just, and the music is called Insurrection, written by Pierre Chretien, performed by the Soul Jazz Orchestra, courtesy of Do Right music. My name is Callum Sinclair.

Janaline Oh
My name is Janaline Oh and this is Why Can’t They Just.