Page 120 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS

speaking she is not a racist in the old, biological determinist sense, but a culturalist,
in the sense that her anxiety is targeted at what she sees as alien cultures. In this
sense Hanson can probably best be described as a multiracial assimilationist. As
she put it, ‘Australians are sick of imported problems be they crime, disease or
aspects of cultural difference that will never be able to accept the Australian life’
(Hanson 1997b). In drawing the line of acceptable cultural difference by using
the term ‘Asian’, however, she exemplifies what James Donald and Ali Rattansi
(1992: 2), in discussing 1980s’ Britain, have called ‘a new racism, based not on ideas
of innate biological superiority but on the supposed incompatibility of cultural
traditions’. As Professor Blainey put it bluntly in 1984: ‘Asians were people from
a variety of cultures who don’t belong to our present mainstream culture’ (quoted
in Ricklefs 1985: 40). The continuity from Blainey to Hanson indicates that in
contemporary multicultural Australia, where ‘cultural diversity’ is supposedly
accepted and even cherished, ‘race’ – as operationalized in the term ‘Asian’ – is still
effective as a marker of the limits of tolerable diversity, of what, from the point of
view of the new racists, goes beyond the acceptable boundaries of Australian
national culture and identity. In other words, it is through the rhetoric of ‘race’
that the political right has consistently challenged multiculturalism. The term
‘Asian’ stands here for unassimilable, unabsorbable difference, too different to be
integrated into the ‘Australian way of life’. But because the discourse of state
multiculturalism does not have a way of talking about ‘race’ it cannot deal with the
elements of diversity which, for Hanson, Blainey and the Howard in his earlier
incarnation, are ‘too much’ and therefore a threat to the ‘Australian community’.
Here, then, we reach the point where the discourse of multiculturalism cannot
offer an effective counter-attack. The pluralist discourse of ‘cultural diversity’, which
emphasizes the harmonious co-existence of a variety of ethnic groups, is simply not
capable of counteracting the divisive and conflict-ridden imaginary produced by
discourses of racial tension as exemplified by Hanson’s. Indeed, the discourse of
multiculturalism may be so ineffectual precisely because it glosses over experiences
of disharmony and conflict, leaving it to racial discourses as enunciated by Hanson
to capture and give meaning to those experiences. Surveying the character of
Australian racism and ethnocentrism in the 1980s, a few years after the ‘Blainey
debate’, Andrew Markus remarks:

Compared with the 1950s there is a much greater tolerance for ethnic
diversity, particularly amongst the more affluent, but this tolerance does
not entail majority support for multiculturalism. The Anglo-Australian
sense of the superiority of their culture, previously manifested in the policy
of assimilation, is disowned by governments but remains a significant
factor in the community.
(1988: 21–2)

By the late 1990s, the popularity of Pauline Hanson among some sections of Anglo-
Australians (or Anglo-Celtic Australians) testifies to the lack of change since the

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