Page 129 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

racial discrimination in Australia’s very historical constitution as a nation–state
is now often simply discarded as belonging to the past, no longer relevant to the
present. This is the reasoning, for example, behind Prime Minister John Howard’s
refusal to express a formal apology on behalf of the (white) Australian people
to the so-called Stolen Generation of Aboriginal people: again and again, Howard
has insisted that ‘we’ cannot be held responsible for the ‘mistakes’ made by past
generations.
But the rise of the One Nation Party makes it all too painfully clear that the
legacy of the past cannot simply be done away with. Indeed, one could reasonably
speculate that the sense of guilt, shame or disgust about the country’s ‘racist’ past
is a structure of feeling confined mostly to the educated urban middle and upper-
middle classes, whose moral and cultural orientation has converged with the ‘regime
of value’ that has become dominant in the post-1960s’ international Western
world (Frow 1995). This progressivist, liberal regime of value favours equality
for all, tolerance and cosmopolitanism, it celebrates the enrichment derived
from cultural diversity, and, in general, it raises the sentiments of a universalist
humanism to the ideal standard of moral virtue. Within this regime of value, the
White Australia policy was irredeemably morally wrong – at least in principle.
However, one cannot assume that this liberal structure of feeling is shared across
the whole spectrum of the population. Indeed, the backlash against ‘political
correctness’ – uttered by both Pauline Hanson and John Howard – speaks to the
contrary.
Hanson has insisted, rather querulously, that ‘the people of Australia were never
consulted’ about Asian immigration and multiculturalism. As she said in one of
her speeches, ‘Australians are tolerant but their patience is being sorely tested by
their politicians who have never allowed a full and open debate on immigration and
multiculturalism’ (Hanson 1997a: 20). This expression of populist resentment
speaks to the great divide that has grown between ‘the cosmopolitan elites’ and
‘ordinary people’ on this issue, especially those of Anglo-Celtic background. When
Hanson argued against the ‘special treatment’ of Aboriginal people and against
immigration (especially of Asians) and multiculturalism, and at least implicitly in
favour of a return to the 1950s, when the White Australia policy was still firmly
in place and when Australians were still encouraged to feel proud and lucky about
their country’s status as a far-flung outpost of Europe, we can read her appeal
culturally as a refusal to submit to the dominant regime of value which discredits
the past and offers an alternative, progressivist national narrative from which she
and her supporters feel alienated. In Peter Cochrane’s (1996: 9) words: ‘Hanson
represents the grief that goes with the loss of cultural centrality and the loss of
identity that happens when a cosmopolished (Anglo) elite lines up with the new
ethnic forces on the block.’ In short, Hanson’s politics is a politics of resistance,
but an irrevocably reactionary one.
It is not surprising, given Hanson’s fear-driven rejection of Australia’s multiracial
future, that One Nation’s first policy document was on immigration policy. The
populist paranoia and distrust are evident in this passage:

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