Page 134 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

ASIANS IN AUSTRALIA

capable of acquiring the same status. As Lisa Lowe (1996: 6) has remarked about
the analogous situation in the United States, ‘the Asian American, even as a citizen,
continues to be located outside the cultural and racial boundaries of the nation’.
She goes on to observe that despite the relaxation of immigration laws, which has
placed Asian people within the US nation–state in the workplace and in its markets,
Asians remain stubbornly defined as ‘foreign’ and ‘outside’ the national polity
in linguistic, cultural and racial terms (Lowe 1996: 8). Such a contradiction is also
clearly at work in the Australian national imagination.
In a recent speech, Hanson restated her opposition to what she sees as the
‘Asianization’ of Australia by saying: ‘If we were to have too many of one race
coming in that weren’t assimilating and becoming Australians, it would take over
our culture, our own way of life and our own identity, and that’s what I’m
protecting’ (quoted in Sydney Morning Herald 1998). Here, Hanson exemplifies
the continuing force of the hegemonic assumption that ‘Australian’ culture/
identity and ‘Asian’ culture/identity are mutually exclusive, antagonistic categories:
the two cancel each other out, they are a contradiction in terms. One cannot, from
this point of view, be Asian and Australian at the same time. While Hanson has
always been careful to leave some space open for racially Asian people provided that
they assimilate into Australian culture, she is adamant about the incompatibility of
Asian and Australian cultures. In this sense, Hanson is a cultural racist, or ‘culturalist’
(Stratton 1998: 64). An ‘Asianization’ of Australia would therefore inevitably mean
its de-Australianization. In a clear reference to her fear of being ‘Asianized’, Hanson
once sketched a future in which Australian farmers can no longer stay in business.
She asked, ominously, ‘Will the Government then import even basic crops, perhaps
rice, to get us more used to it?’ (quoted in Wilkinson 1998: 43).

Beyond the politics of numbers
‘Too many of one race.’ We are returned here to the politics of statistics, the very
vehicle of establishing what is ‘too many’. Critics of Hanson, including Immigration
Minister Philip Ruddock, have been quick to point out that her figures are incorrect.
Thus, in response to the Hanson phenomenon Ruddock’s Department of
Immigration published several fact sheets and a brochure ‘Dispelling the myths
about immigration’ (http://www.immi.gov.au). In this brochure the minister
responds to questions such as, ‘Why do we take in people who don’t speak
English?’, ‘Why do we see so many foreign faces in Australia?’, and ‘Is Australia
being swamped by Asians?’ To the last question, Ruddock’s response is a reassuring:
‘no. Only about 5 per cent of Australia’s population were born in Asia.’ He goes
on to say that ‘if immigration levels and selection processes remain about the same,
the proportion of Asian-born people is projected to be about 7.5 per cent in 2041’.
Never mind the ‘exact’ figures; what matters here is the suggestion that we are not
being ‘Asianized’, that the number of Asians coming into this country is much
lower than Hanson claims. Thus there is, so we are implicitly told, no need to be
afraid of being ‘swamped by Asians’.

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