Page 132 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

But changing the style in which a nation is imagined so fundamentally without
the consent of the people, those whom the state claims to represent, is a tricky
business. Consent, here, is a profoundly cultural-political issue and should not be
defined in narrow empiricist terms, i.e. as reflected in referendums or public opinion
polls. Buci-Glucksmann (1982), in summarizing Gramsci’s theory of hegemony,
distinguishes between passive and indirect consent and active and direct consent.
While the latter involves participation and continuous engagement of the masses,
the former implies a bureaucratic repressive relation between leaders and led,
corporate integration of the led, and a reduction of democracy solely to its legal
aspect. One does not have to adhere to Gramsci’s Marxian romanticism to
recognize that popular consent to the new, multicultural and multiracial Australia
– as it has emerged since the 1970s – was much more passive than active, more
indirect than direct. Active and direct consent, after all, cannot be taken as given,
but has to be produced, created, fought for through careful ideological work,
through cultural education and persuasion. While governments have certainly
undertaken some of this work, for example, through multicultural education in
schools, the encouragement of multicultural festivals and the organization of
so-called ‘harmony days’, the social effectivity of much of this work remains
doubtful especially as they tend to overlook the everyday experiences of the white
majority.
The populist suspicion of ‘ordinary Australians’ against ‘the elites’ as expressed
by Pauline Hanson and her followers is a manifestation of the failure of strategic
leadership to engage in the production of consent, in the cultural struggle for a
re-imagining of the nation away from ‘White Australia’ and in the direction of
a multicultural/multiracial Australia. To put it differently, the ideological work
necessary to actively disarticulate racism and nationalism (where the two were
previously so firmly connected and popularly supported) and to win consent from
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the population at large for this disarticulation has remained undone. I would
suggest that this is one crucial reason why the presence of Asians in Australia
remains, for better or worse, an object of anxiety – or at least of anxious concern
– and why ‘Asians in Australia’, as a theme, can still become so easily, and so
repeatedly, a focus of white populist anger and resentment.
In One Nation’s immigration policy statement, this is how the anger is expressed.
The strategic use of statistics is of particular interest here:

70 percent of our immigration program is from Asian countries.
Consequently Australia will be 27 percent Asian within 25 years and, as
migrants congregate in our major cities, the effect of Asianisation will be
more concentrated there. This will lead to the bizarre situation of largely
Asian cities on our coast which will be culturally and racially different from
the traditional Australian nature of the rest of the country. In a democracy,
how dare our government force such changes on the Australian people
without their consent and against their often polled opinion.
(Pauline Hanson’s One Nation 1998: 11)

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