Page 125 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

Let’s put this in a broader historical frame. The issue of ‘Asians in Australia’
must be seen as an intense site of symbolic contestation in contemporary Australia,
which points to larger issues pertaining to the changing role, status and viability of
the nation–state as we enter the twenty-first century. Of course, each nation–state
has to deal with the myriad sociological complexities which have inevitably arisen
with the entry of thousands of new migrants with unfamiliar cultural practices,
experiences and values. Some of these issues are discussed in the two edited
collections I have referred to above in relation to Asian immigration into Australia.
My focus here, however, will not be on the actual social reality of Asians in Australia
today, but on what ‘Asians in Australia’ stands for, symbolically, for the present and
future of the Australian nation as an ‘imagined community’ in transition, struggling
to adapt to the changing environment and requirements of a globalizing world. Lisa
Lowe (1996) and David Palimbo-Liu (1999) have made similar assessments about
the positioning of peoples of Asian background in the United States.
What the so-called Hanson phenomenon has highlighted is the profound unease
experienced by a significant part of the population with the far-reaching social and
cultural changes of the past few decades. These changes were effected not just by
the liberalization of immigration policies since the 1970s, which enabled many
migrants from Asian backgrounds to settle in the country, but are associated more
generally with the changing status of nation–states in an increasingly globalized
world. Globalization – the increasing interconnectedness and interdependence
of the world as a result of intensifying transnational flows of goods, capital, infor-
mation, ideas and people – has decreased the capacity of national governments to
control and maintain effective territorial sovereignty. It is a process which has had
a deep impact in Australia where governments since the early 1980s have been
determined, through rigorous neo-liberal economic policies, to open the country
up to the forces of the global capitalist economy (Wiseman 1998).
The significance of Pauline Hanson, who was swept into Parliament in March
1996 but lost her seat in the 1998 election, lies not so much in her influence on
the formal political process. What made her politics acutely pertinent, as well as
infuriatingly transgressive, was her articulation of everyday, ordinary Australian
fears and anxieties, which official politics has been unable, even unwilling to address
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and represent. These fears and anxieties reveal a deep concern about the real and
perceived loss of control over the nation as globalization marches on. As Hanson
herself has warned, ‘Unless Australia rallied, all our fears will be realised, and
we will lose our country forever, and be strangers in our own land’ (quoted in
Wilkinson 1998). Hanson’s One Nation Party has been making announcements
against big business, the United Nations, cosmopolitan elites and other symbols
of globalism, but by far the most controversy has been raised by the way Hanson
has directed her fear and resentment against those she believes will rob her of her
country: Aboriginal people and Asians, and their supporters in the intellectual and
political elites. Not surprisingly, critics have routinely accused her of ‘racism’. But
the moral(istic) critique of racism doesn’t take account of the deeper, more
pervasive sense of identity panic that underlies her call for the nation to be ‘one’.

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