In the news

  Outgoing Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane pop rivets the current state of play to the outhouse wall in his article Race politics is back…… from Monday’s ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’. Racism is alive and well in the lucky country and its tenacity can be measured in the new and exciting ways that it manifests itself. Soutphommasane reflects: Five years ago, when I began my term as Race Discrimination Commissioner, I wouldn’t have said it was likely that we would see the resurgence of far-right politics. I wouldn’t have expected that the biggest threats to racial harmony would come from within our parliaments and media. I reckon that the legislators and the Murdochs are only part of the problem. By articulating ‘fear’ and ‘division’, they seek to engage punters in the twin processes of marginalisation and, with increasing frequency, vilification. Hordes of African gangs roaming around built landscapes, welfare-sucking Aborigines who refuse to ‘get...

It has always seemed quite odd that Australia Day is billed as a celebration that draws us all together and yet it commemorates an event that can only be described as a gross example of cultural imperialism and appropriation.   It's now over 25 years since the High Court's ruling on the 'Mabo v Queensland (Number 2)' case and yet we're still fucking around with this Australia Day thing.   Given the facts that the First Settlement occurred due to the a priori assumption that a terra nullius condition existed here in Oz in 1788, and that such a condition was found to be legally baseless in 1992, doesn't that wound the 26 January date mortally?   It really doesn’t matter how many boats are performing a beautiful ballet on Sydney harbour or who can ‘enjoy’ the biggest cut of ‘traditional’ lamb. Surely, the status of any national day is compromised when the ceremonial ousting of some two hundred nations’ original inhabitants is still recognised...

Tim Soutphommasane’s attached article ‘The year’s creeping tide of racism’ ( Sydney Morning Herald , 30 December 2017) chronicles many of the events and movements from 2017 that have racism (or ‘alleged’ racism) as their defining component. The Race Discrimination Commissioner’s analysis of both the domestic and international scenes makes for sombre reading. However, I guess a commissioner’s brief must include a positive take somewhere and Soutphommasane does produce the counterweight that Aussies, in general, accept multiculturalism as a feature of our broad continent and that this should be recognised and celebrated. Whether he’s wearing rose-coloured glasses or not remains to be seen. But there are deeper considerations here which a six hundred word newspaper piece can’t effectively enunciate. They call into question some fairly basic assumptions and beliefs that underpin life in Oz. They challenge the notion that racism is disappearing and, in fact, assert that the disadv...