Page 119 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

responses to changes within the national social formation. ‘Race’, here, in Stuart
Hall’s (1998: 290) words, operates as a discursive logic which ‘gives legibility to a
social system in which it operates’, by producing, marking and fixing ‘the infinite
differences and diversities of human beings through a rigid binary coding’. The
binarism constructed here is that of ‘white’ versus ‘Asian’, and by invoking it
Hanson reintroduces precisely the marker of exclusion that was in place during the
White Australia policy. Hanson appeals to a very old discourse of racial differentia-
tion to patrol the limits of the inclusiveness of the Australian imagined community
in a time when the politics of inclusion has become part of the doxa of ‘multicultural
Australia’. As she revealingly puts it: ‘Of course, I will be called racist but, if I can
invite whom I want into my home, then I should have the right to have a say
in who comes into my country’ (Hanson 1997a). Here the Australian ‘home’ is
implicitly coded ‘white’, in full continuity with the old fantasy of a ‘White Australia’
where ‘race’ operated to mark the external boundary of the nation, not distinctions
within it.
We have to point out here that Pauline Hanson did not come out of the blue in
Australia. She has an illustrious predecessor in Geoffrey Blainey, a distinguished
Professor of History, who in 1984, hardly ten years after the formal ending of the
White Australia policy and the arrival of the first Vietnamese ‘boat people’, sparked
a heated controversy by launching a virulent attack on ‘Asian immigration’. Arguing
that immigration policies were now biased in favour of ‘Asians’ and against migrants
from Britain and Europe, Blainey stated that ‘too many Asians were undesirable
because they might endanger Australia’s social, economic and political structures’
(Ricklefs 1985: 37). Significantly, Blainey did not call for a complete stop to Asian
immigration, but for a significant reduction of it. It is also worth noting that John
Howard, too, took a stance against Asian immigration during the 1980s. In the
wake of the ‘Blainey debate’ he said in a radio interview in 1988: ‘I do believe that
if [Asian migration] is in the eyes of the community, it’s so great, it would be in
our immediate term interest and supportive of social cohesion if it were slowed
down a little, so that the capacity of the community to absorb was greater’ (quoted
in Kelly 1992: 423). This statement, which explicitly conjures up ‘race’ as a marker
for what he saw as the limits of community tolerance, caused such a furore among
the political establishment, both left and right, that Howard has since refrained from
making any such explicitly race-related comments. As the present Prime Minister,
he now uses much more cautious, coded and ambiguous language to articulate his
point of view.
A dozen years after Blainey, Hanson repeated history almost farcically by
mimicking him and Howard’s earlier incarnation, and by insisting that she is not
against Asian migrants as such, although she does want their numbers significantly
reduced to ‘restore the balance’. A close reading of her speeches makes it clear that
her main objection is against ‘Asians’ who ‘have their own culture and religion, form
ghettos and do not assimilate’, and not those who ‘have wholeheartedly embraced
the Australian way of life’. This qualification is put forward by Hanson herself as
evidence that she is not a racist (as she is not against ‘Asians’ per se). Indeed, strictly

108