Page 218 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NOTES

5 MULTICULTURALISM IN CRISIS
1 The Liberal Party and the Labor Party are the two main political parties in Australia.
The conservative Liberal Party, which draws its support mainly from the cities, is in
an ongoing coalition with the much smaller National Party, which mainly represents
the interests of farmers, graziers, and the ‘bush’ more generally.
2 Full texts of Pauline Hanson’s parliamentary speeches can be browsed at http://
www.gwb.com.au/onenation/ Her early speeches, including her infamous Maiden
Speech, were reprinted in a book which included material by some of her supporters
but published under her name, entitled The Truth (Hanson, 1997a).
3 At the height of her popularity in the first half of 1997, Hanson and her newly
established political party, One Nation, could attract more than 10% of national
support, according to one opinion poll, while another poll suggested that one in four
voters were prepared to back the new party (see Rothwell 1997). In the 1998 election
Hanson lost her parliamentary seat, but remained the highly visible President and
charismatic leader of her party. One Nation went on to attract significant support
during a number of state elections, especially in her home state Queensland. By 2001
the One Nation party looks set to have become a more or less permanent minor force
in Australian politics, representing the small people who feel left out by the rapid social
transformations elicited by globalization.
4 We owe the phrase ‘white panic’ to Meaghan Morris (1998a).
5 Howard has persistently argued that it is better to ignore Pauline Hanson than to
pay attention to her and comment on her views. This politics of evasion has generally
been criticized as weak leadership on Howard’s part, not suitable for someone holding
the powerful position of Prime Minister. A more important reason why Howard has
found it so difficult to distance himself from Hanson, however, is that he shares some
of Hanson’s sentiments about the state of Australia in the 1990s, if not the political
remedies she proposes.
6 A look at Howard’s personal views and attitudes, however, clearly reveals his unease
with the growing ethnic and cultural diversification of Australia in the past few
decades. In interviews he has repeatedly expressed his fond memories of his young life
in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, where everybody was supposedly ‘the same’. For an
astute analysis see Fiona Allon (1997).
7 One reason for the confusion around what ‘multiculturalism’ actually means is the
lack of discussion about it in the public sphere. While there has been considerable
intellectual and theoretical engagement with multiculturalism at policy level, where
it has evolved from being discussed in liberal terms of representation (Ten 1993)
to ethical terms of social justice (Theophanous 1995), and while there has generally
been a shift from emphasizing diversity to emphasizing the common values which
enable that diversity to be practised, lay people’s understanding of multiculturalism
is confined simply to a mere recognition of ethnic difference and its superficial cultural
expression (e.g. food, language, customs).
8 This issue has been the object of major political and moral soul-searching in the late
1990s. One of the main recommendations of the National Inquiry into the Separation
of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families (1997) was that
the government issue a national apology to the victims of this policy, which some have
equated with a case of ‘genocide’. Significantly, Prime Minister John Howard has
always refused to express such a formal apology on behalf of the nation.
9 It should be pointed out that Australia was one of the last Western nations to scrap
racially discriminatory immigration laws. In both Canada and the United States this
change took place in the 1960s.
10 For example, prior to the early 1970s liberal intellectuals, such as members of the

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