ICYMI – Australia: Spike in racism compels national strategy

2022/07/26 Leave a comment

Of note:

Spikes in anti-Asian sentiment and discrimination against Indigenous, Jewish and Muslim groups since the COVID-19 outbreak have triggered moves for a new national framework to combat racism.

Incidents targeting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, amplified by the Black Lives Matter movement, and the rise of far-right extremism have also highlighted a need for change.

With no current coordinated national strategy to curb racism, the proposed framework – uniting governments, NGOs, businesses, educators, human rights agencies and civil society – sets out legislative improvements, and upgrades data collection and discrimination protections.

While the UK and the US have systems to collect data on racist incidents, Australia has no official statistics, instead adopting ad hoc indicators, all of which point to spikes in racism since the start of the pandemic.

Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan says there is limited understanding of anti-racism and racial equality measures and their impact across Australia, increasing the need for improved data collection, evaluation and sharing.

“A National Anti-Racism Framework will provide a central reference point for actions on anti-racism to be undertaken by all sections of Australian society,” Mr Chin told AAP.

“It will identify opportunities to address racism through coordinated strategies, set measurable anti-racism targets and provide tools and resources to address racism.

“It’s not enough to simply condemn racism. We need clear goals and the means to ensure accountability to commitments if we are to make progress on tackling racism.”

Over the past year, the commission has held more than 100 consultations for the framework with about 300 organisations nationwide and received 171 submissions.

During COVID-19 restrictions right-wing extremist groups tried to further embed anti-government sentiment by portraying administrations as overreaching and “globalisation, multiculturalism and democracy as flawed and failing”, according to ASIO.

At a 2021 parliamentary inquiry into extremist movements and radicalism in Australia, the national security agency confirmed investigations into ideologically-motivated violent extremism comprised about 40 per cent of its cases, compared to 10 to 15 per cent in 2016.

Jewish communities have been documenting racist incidents since a 1989 national inquiry into racist violence, spokesman Jeremy Jones from the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council told AAP.

The inquiry was established by the then-Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission.

“Since then, every Jewish organisation and Jewish person in Australia who experiences or hears about an anti-Semitic incident sends it to a central database,” he said.

“So we have a long-term way of saying what sort of incidents are happening and where, is the situation getting better or worse in a particular year, and what is effective, or what isn’t.”

Racial incidents taken to court in three states under the federal Racial Hatred Act delivered positive outcomes with anti-Semitism decreasing in those geographic areas.

Mr Jones said telephone threats which led to abusers’ identities being divulged also reduced anti-Semitic incidences.

It’s difficult to compare exact numbers of verbal incidents originating overseas because many were online, but the global trend shows more people are getting away with hate crimes and harassment.

“Particularly during the COVID lockdown, there were horrific anti-Semitism conspiracy theories and propaganda than at any time during the post-war period,” Mr Jones said.

The Jewish community is also addressing the rise in incidents in various ways through the Australian National Dialogue of Christians, Muslims and Jews – which aims to foster respect and mutual understanding of other faiths – and by multicultural dialogue and Jewish-Indigenous relations.

Any national anti-racism framework must balance freedom of expression with state and federal laws that protect people from racism, Mr Jones said. It should also look at overseas experiences for examples of best practice.

“It’s far too early to say whether this will be a successful campaign or if it was one well-intentioned,” Mr Jones said.

Racist attacks against Asians and Asian Australians surged after the outbreak of COVID-19, as Wuhan in China was recognised as the source of the virus.

Since April 2020, the COVID-19 Coronavirus Racism Incident Report, partnering with several groups including the Asian Australian Alliance, collected more than 410 reports of virus-related Asian racism.

Most involved physical and verbal attacks.

Of those, 37 per cent were in NSW, followed by 32 per cent in Victoria and 13 per cent in Queensland, with most attacks occurring in the capital cities.

Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Councils of Australia CEO Mohammad Al-Khafaji said incidents of racism were generally under reported, “so the same goes for reporting of Islamophobia”.

Fears over anti-Muslim sentiment were exacerbated by the 2019 Christchurch mosque attack in New Zealand and reflected in an Islamophobia Register Australia report.

In collaboration with Charles Stuart University Centre for Islamic Studies and Civilisation, the latest 2018-19 report found offline cases increased four times and online cases rose 18 times two weeks after the Christchurch killings.

The report analysed 247 verified incidents from January 2018 to December 2019 and found 138 occurred in physical circumstances, while 109 occurred online.

The research aims to raise awareness of the increase and normalisation of Islamophobia and take action to counter it.

“What is disturbing … is that Islamophobia continues to occur and that many of the victims are women, distinctively wearing hijabs,” Mr Al-Khafaji said.

“What is appalling is that Islamophobia and racism, in general, seems to still be socially acceptable to some Australians.”

A revamped Human Rights Commission advertising campaign has been designed to increase awareness of racism and equip Australians the tools to respond.

Source: Spike in racism compels national strategy

Filed under Multiculturalism, Racism Tagged with , ,

Paving the way to Australian citizenship [for New Zealand]

2022/07/14 Leave a comment

Of note, a long-standing irritant being resolved:

By Anzac Day next year, New Zealanders living across the Tasman should get a better deal, after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern and her new Australian counterpart Anthony Albanese announced long-awaited changes to their rights.

It will mean an easier route to citizenship, as well as voting rights, putting them on par with Australians living here – ending more than two decades of inequality.

Under the current rules, Australians get permanent residence the moment they land in New Zealand and they automatically have the right to become citizens after five years. All they need do is pass a character test and a basic English language test, and have lived in New Zealand for at least eight months of each of those five years.

Most Kiwis are in Australia on a special category visa, brought in by John Howard’s government in 2001. Their path to citizenship is not so easy – they have to apply on the same basis as any other migrant, it is costly, and it is not guaranteed.

Leanne Carlin, who moved to Australia with her husband Richard and two daughters eight years ago, describes it as a “very weird thing”.

“You can come over here, you can live here as long as you like, you can work here but you’re not automatically a permanent resident,” she tells The Detail.

Kiwis, of course, pay taxes. But they cannot access unemployment benefits, student loans or disability payments, they can’t join the Australian Defence Force, police or fire service, and they cannot vote.

Carlin says they knew what they were in for when they decided to leave Whakatāne and take a chance on a new life in Brisbane in 2014.

“We didn’t expect anything from Australia. When you go to live in a foreign country, I don’t think you should expect them to take special care of you.

“But New Zealand and Australia have this trans-Tasman travel arrangement, so if you’re going to have an arrangement then make it an equal arrangement.”

When the 2001 changes came into effect, New Zealanders already living in Australia were considered permanent residents and could apply for citizenship, and they could access basic social services like welfare payments in the meantime.

Those who arrived after 2001 have had no direct pathway to citizenship.

“The Howard government was of the view that people were using New Zealand as a backdoor to Australia,” says Stuff‘s political editor Luke Malpass.

Malpass was in Sydney last week when Ardern and Albanese announced they had agreed, in principle, to end the situation where people are effectively left permanent temporary residents.

There are promises of a more “harmonised, reciprocal” regime.

Malpass explains to The Detail how relations soured between Australia and New Zealand and reached a low point in 2014 when the so-called 501 deportations started.

“The Aussies got into a habit of not really giving New Zealand anything that didn’t have any political upside,” he says.

“Even if it was bad for the relationship – they basically took the relationship for granted – they said we’ll go ahead and do it anyway.”

Last week’s announcement was a turnaround in attitudes to New Zealanders, both in the treatment of 501s and the citizenship issue, says Malpass.

Ardern has been calling for greater acknowledgement of the contribution New Zealand expats are making to Australia. She’s also pointed to the low rate of New Zealanders who become citizens compared with other nationalities.

According to the 2021 census, about one third of the 530,000 people born in New Zealand and living in Australia are citizens there. This compares to three quarters of expat Fijians being Australian citizens and the same figure for Britons.

After eight years in Australia, Carlin and her family are now on the path to citizenship through her husband Richard, who met the criteria for the skilled independent visa and was able to apply for permanent residency.

Carlin says her family has a good life in Brisbane and she’s happy to become an Australian citizen.

“It’s a means to an end,” she says.

Source: Paving the way to Australian citizenship

Filed under Citizenship Tagged with ,

Shmigel: Australia: Multiculturalism is in, and that’s a good thing

2022/07/04 Leave a comment

On the need in Australia for a conservative case for multiculturalism, learning from the Canadian experience:

According to the latest Census results, for the first time, more than half of Australians (51.2 per cent) are now either born overseas or have at least one parent born overseas.

Ethnics and migrants, dear Speccie readers, now have the numbers. Multiculturalism – broadly defined – is in the majority.

If there’s one word or concept that gets many conservatives and many libertarians ‘highly focused’ that is definitely it: multiculturalism. In some ways, that’s understandable when we consider ‘progressive’ ills rightly or wrongly associated with it.

Given the demographic facts of Australia, it may be time for people on the centre-right of Australia’s political spectrum to think anew about what’s historically been positioned by some as a necessarily bad thing.

Perhaps it is time for the conservative case for multiculturalism.

But first, let’s step back. What’s been the critique of multiculturalism in the past? These points might summarise it:

  • Multiculturalism segregates Australians into different types – the ghetto argument.
  • Multiculturalism undermines mainstream Australian values – the cultural subversion argument.
  • Multiculturalism is social engineering – the ‘collectivism is bad’ argument.

While familiar, do these arguments actually stand up against factuality? Not so much.

In the first respect, after many decades of diversity and of pro-multicultural policies, the reality is that the vast majority of everyday interactions between Australians of up to 200 different ethnic, religious, and linguistic backgrounds are entirely civil and respectful. Inter-ethnic relations are in most respects completely normal and unremarkable. They’re in fact dead-set boring 99 per cent or more of the time.

Migrant groups have always tended to both geographically and culturally assimilate more than they tend to segregate. The trend, as driven by migrants themselves, isn’t toward any ghettos or enclaves, but toward the new outer suburban and multi-ethnic residential developments that dominate our major cities’ real estate sales. (Home ownership is greatly valued by our largest and fastest growing ethnic group – Indians – in particular.)

The truth is that, regardless of settlement status or ethnic background, much more binds us than drives us apart. The number of formal complaints to various human rights bodies or government agencies, no less criminal charges via the legal system, based on internecine hatred or ethnic violence between Australians is tiny. In 2020, in a culturally diverse society of some 23 million, there were some 100 complaints about racial hatred to the Human Rights Commission of which 20 per cent were between neighbours and 30 per cent were workplace-related.

Truth be told, migrants tend to readily settle and integrate, and their non-migrant neighbours and workmates tend to readily accept them. Think of the Vietnamese migration of the 70s and the once-prevalent mythology around Cabramatta and other ‘enclaves’ that accompanied that wave. Many in that era were convinced that was the end of our culture as we know it. Those are now but distant memories. We don’t even think twice about our Vietnamese origin neighbours or our child’s schoolmate. If we do, it’s likely to consider ourselves lucky to have such respectful and hard-working neighbours and their smart kids.

In the second respect, unlike many European countries, we actually have very little disagreement – beyond some squeaky media grabs from time to time – about our beliefs. English is uncontested as our language; in fact, it’s the legislated language in some states. We generally abide by the same norms; our settlement and citizenship system, unlike those of France or Germany for example, encourages that. People may well practice their home cultures in their homes, houses of worship, and community centres, but, if we’re honest, there’s little evidence of a substantive impact on our home-grown and common one.

In the third respect, it’s hard to deny the individual aspiration of the majority of people from migrant and ethnic backgrounds. In fact, they tend to own more small businesses than ‘non-ethnics’; they tend to succeed in higher education to a greater extent than ‘non-ethnics’, as any quick look at the annual HSC or VCE results shows.

Those on the centre-right need to consider this evidence that many people from migrant and ethnic backgrounds are about taking responsibility, working hard, and getting ahead at the individual and family levels – rather than counting on some hand-out mentality targeted at ‘groups’ or ‘victims’. Their presence, and indeed now predominance, in Australian society, is reinforcing social goods that our side values.

While there are vast differences between ethnic backgrounds – say Indian people and Chinese people – and vast differences within any given ethnic group itself, a generalisation is possible: people from migrant and ethnic backgrounds exemplify the characteristics that many of us on the centre-right see as positive and constructive. Multiculturalism is working in favour of our model of society.

For some more depth, consider the pro-business behaviours of our migrants and ethnics. In recent years, small businesses have contributed around $400 billion to Australia’s GDP (or about a third of the total economy) and employed some 40 per cent of the business workforce. Less known is that a third of small businesses are run by first or second-generation migrants, some 80 per cent of whom didn’t own a business before coming to Australia. Migrant business owners employed 1.4 million people across Australia and had an annual revenue that was 53 per cent higher than for non-migrant businesses.

If we more broadly consider ethnic connection, the numbers are even bigger: the clear majority of small businesses in Australia are owned by Australians with a non-Anglo surname.

That is a fine level of entrepreneurialism that the centre-right should embrace and admire. And, in purely political marketing terms, migrant and ethnic small business is a significant constituency to respect and work with (read: not pander to).

And, both major parties do in fact ‘get it’ in part. It’s standard practice for there to be specific election campaigning on both sides with regard to ethnic communities and the way that they communicate. Both parties are also smart enough to realise that there isn’t an ‘ethnic vote’ per se and that people, regardless of background, vote on similar issues such as the economy and social services. You can, though, certainly lose large swathes of voters if you don’t show you are respectful of people’s origins or treat them as second-class citizens.

Participation, rather than communications, will be the key going forward. Canada, for example, with a similar multicultural dynamic has for a few generations now had Ministers of significant ethnic background (putting aside Francophone politicians) from both sides of politics. While there were further changes at the last election, Australia’s parliament is yet to significantly look like its suburbs.

To get to that point, and the centre-right would be purely electorally dumb not to aspire to it, we need to drop some of our misconceptions. That starts with avoiding semantic slippage and not so automatically labelling specific policy concerns as somehow solely products of ‘multiculturalism’. That kind of generalisation has hints of a deeper institutional racism and, therefore, the centre-right would want nothing to do with it.

It might be better to think of multiculturalism not as policy or policy objective, but rather as what my old boss, Barry O’Farrell, thought of it. He said: ‘Multiculturalism is simply a way of life.’

If its strong features are pro-opportunity and pro-family, the centre-right should be welcoming that way of life.

As I was writing this piece, I walked past a theatre in western Sydney where a citizenship ceremony was taking place. There were dozens of people and family units who were clearly not ‘Anglo’ for a lack of a better term. All were impeccably dressed; all held Australian flags; all were intensely proud of this the day they became Australians. They are winners and the centre-right should back them.

Source: Multiculturalism is in, and that’s a good thing

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with ,

Census 2021 data shows Australians are less religious and more culturally diverse than ever

2022/06/29 Leave a comment

Canadian diversity data will be released this October. Religion will be included (10 year cycle in contrast to the standard 5 year cycle).

Some of the same trends occurring in Canada:

Australians are increasingly unlikely to worship a god and more likely to come from immigrant families.

The 2021 census has revealed a growing nation — more than 25 million people — that is more diverse than ever.

It also depicts a country undergoing significant cultural changes.

For the first time, fewer than half of Australians identified as Christian, though Christianity remained the nation’s most common religion (declared by 43.9 per cent of the population).

Meanwhile, the number of Australians who said they had no religion rose to 38.9 per cent (from 30.1 per cent in 2016).

The data also shows almost half of Australians had a parent born overseas, and more than a quarter were themselves born overseas.

The census — a national household questionnaire carried out every five years — took place in August last year amid the worsening COVID-19 pandemic.

The nation’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, were in lockdown and residents of regional New South Wales, Victoria and the ACT were about to join them.

Yet Australian Statistician David Gruen said the census was a success despite this challenge, with the household response rate rising to 96.1 per cent from 95.1 per cent five years earlier.

About four in five households submitted their answers online.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) will begin publishing census results today and release more data in coming months.

The information helps governments improve their services, and helps researchers and businesses better understand the community.

Beliefs and family traditions are changing

Christianity was the stated religion of about 90 per cent of Australians until 1966, when its dominance began to wane.

The ABS says migration has affected the trends since, though much of the change is due to the growth of atheist and secular beliefs.

The fastest-growing religions, according to the latest census, are Hinduism (2.7 per cent of the population) and Islam (3.2 per cent), though these worshippers remain small minorities.

The 2021 census was also the first to collect data since same-sex marriages were allowed in Australia.

Almost 24,000 of these marriages were officially recorded.

However, marriage itself is becoming less prevalent.

A generation ago (in 1991), 56.1 per cent of Australians aged over 15 were in a registered marriage. That has now dropped to 46.5 per cent.

New Australians are increasingly from India

Australia has long been one of the world’s great immigration nations, accepting more people than most other countries.

Last year, almost half of the population (48.2 per cent) were first or second-generation migrants, having at least one parent born overseas. That compares with 41.1 per cent 30 years ago.

Of the 27.6 per cent of Australians who were themselves born overseas, the most common country of birth was England.

However, India has become the second-most-common source country, overtaking China and New Zealand.

The census also asked Australians to report their “ancestry”, as opposed to their country of birth or ethnicity.

The top responses were English (33 per cent), Australian (29.9 per cent), Irish (9.5 per cent) or Scottish (8.6 per cent), with another 5.5 per cent saying Chinese.

…

Source: Census 2021 data shows Australians are less religious and more culturally diverse than ever

Filed under Multiculturalism, Religion Tagged with ,

Australia: Multicultural groups welcome federal government’s move to collect ethnicity data

2022/06/17 Leave a comment

Another long overdue step:

The federal government has announced it will begin collecting ethnicity data as part of measuring diversity in Australia, a move long called for by experts and multicultural community groups.

Key points:

  • Comparable countries like the US, Canada and New Zealand collect data about ethnicity to measure diversity
  • Experts say failure to understand the make up of multicultural Australia hindered COVID-19 responses
  • The federal government aims to collect ethnicity data at the next census

Country of birth and language spoken at home have historically been the main diversity indicators used by Australian government agencies.

But experts say this does not adequately capture the diversity of the community — not least because many Australians from diverse backgrounds are born in Australia and speak English.

“Australia does not effectively measure our diversity,” Andrew Giles, the new Minister for Immigration, Citizenship, Migrant Services and Multicultural Affairs, told a conference in Melbourne.

He said Australia’s failure to collect data on ethnicity or race — unlike the US, Canada and New Zealand — was a “fundamental barrier to understanding the issues that face multicultural Australians”.

“I looked at the sort of countries that we often compare ourselves to … and we weren’t compiling data that enables us to understand the representation of different population groups,” Mr Giles told the ABC at the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia (FECCA) conference.

“This became a much bigger issue, of course, during the pandemic, where we saw really uneven health impacts, particularly in the vaccination rollout.”

Last year, the ABC reported that while the federal government had committed to sourcing ethnicity data during COVID-19 testing and vaccination, Victoria was the only state collecting data on ethnicity.

This was despite indications that culturally and linguistically diverse communities were being harder-hit by coronavirus outbreaks, such as those in Western Sydney and public housing towers in Melbourne.

“The pandemic showed us some pretty hard truths about our society,” Mr Giles said.

“The truth someone born in the Middle East was 10 times as likely to have died during the pandemic, than someone born in Australia, is unacceptable.”

Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) data to January 2021 showed that Australian residents born in the Middle East and North Africa were over 10  times more likely to die of coronavirus than people born in Australia.

Those born in South-East Asia and southern and central Asia, meanwhile, were around twice as likely to die of COVID.

“That is the most extreme example of many about our failures to ensure that everyone was counted, and everyone was supported, through a difficult time. I don’t want that to happen again,” Mr Giles said.

A culturally and linguistically diverse data collection working group with representatives from peak multicultural bodies, along with data collection and demography experts, would be established to develop national standards for diversity data collection, Mr Giles said.

The pandemic showed there was a “gaping hole” in the data collected about the Australian population, according to FECCA chief executive Mohammad al-Khafaji.

“COVID has provided that opportunity for us to actually look seriously at the systemic barriers for us to address this issue,” he said.

Mr al-Khafaji welcomed Mr Giles’s announcement, saying he was pleased the new government recognised it as a priority.

“We’ve been calling for this for the past few years, and we’re glad that that call has been answered,” he said.

“If you’re not counted, you don’t know that you exist, and the programs and the policies won’t reflect the diversity of Australia today.”

Ahead of the 2021 census, people from Asian and Pacific Islands ethnic minority backgrounds told the ABC the Australian Bureau of Statistics was not accurately capturing their ancestry.

Mr Giles said he wanted the changes to inform the next census in 2026.

“The data set we have about this is imprecise, because place of birth doesn’t really tell us the full story about who someone is, how they identify, and that’s why we do need to get better data,” he said.

Race Commissioner wants more data on racism

Australia’s Racial Discrimination Commissioner, Chin Tan, also welcomed Mr Giles’s announcement of the shift towards collecting more detailed data on diversity, calling it a “positive move”.

“We are now looking at focusing on an area that we should have taken care of a long time ago,” Mr Tan said.

“For me it’s a positive move to get more information that will support multicultural communities and support Australia in advancing multiculturalism.”

He told the ABC the Australian Human Rights Commission wanted to see greater data collection on race issues and racism.

“While we applaud and will support initiatives toward multicultural data collection, we are also looking at data collection that will capture race and race issues in this country as well,” Mr Tan said.

He said Australia was still “lagging far behind” other countries in terms of multicultural policies and programs.

“Our multicultural future needs to be enhanced, and needs to be strengthened, and reinforced,” Mr Tan said.

“We need to have policies and programs, and funding obviously, to support that.”

Source: Multicultural groups welcome federal government’s move to collect ethnicity data

Filed under Multiculturalism Tagged with , ,

Australia: Man suspected of joining Islamic State wins High Court challenge against government decision to strip him of his citizenship

2022/06/09 Leave a comment

Of note, significant curb on Ministerial discretion:

A key plank of the federal government’s foreign fighter laws has been struck down by the High Court, with the nation’s top judges ruling that suspected terrorists cannot be stripped of their citizenship by the Home Affairs Minister.

The case before the court involved Delil Alexander, who was jailed in Syria after allegedly joining Islamic State.

He claimed he could not be released from jail because he had nowhere to go, after the Australian government stripped him of his citizenship in July 2021.

Mr Alexander left Australia for Turkey, where he also holds citizenship, in 2013.

He told his family he was going to arrange a marriage and would return, but travelled to Syria where he is thought to have joined Islamic State.

The High Court noted an assessment by intelligence agency ASIO at the time found he was reported to have travelled to Syria with a group being helped by a known Australian Islamic State member.

In November 2017, Mr Alexander was arrested by a Kurdish militia and in 2019 was jailed for 15 years by a Syrian court.

He has since been pardoned by the Syrian government but has remained in jail because he cannot go back to Turkey, and Australia cancelled his citizenship.

No one, including Mr Alexander’s family and his lawyers, has heard from him since July last year.

Only judges can decide to strip citizenship if person hasn’t faced trial in Australia, court rules

The main issue in the case was whether the law allowing the Home Affairs Minister to strip him of his citizenship was valid under the Constitution.

“That sanction by the parliament may be imposed only upon satisfaction of the minister that Mr Alexander engaged in conduct that is so reprehensible as to be deserving of the dire consequence of deprivation of citizenship and the rights, privileges, immunities and duties associated with it,” the lead judgement in the decision said.

“The power to determine the facts which enliven the power to impose such a punishment is one which, in accordance with [Chapter 3] of the Constitution, is exercisable exclusively by a court that is a part of the federal judicature.”

Effectively the High Court ruled that while the government of the day could pass laws relating to citizenship, the consequence of stripping someone’s legislation without them facing trial on Australian soil was so serious it should only be handled by a judge.

Six of the seven justices agreed, with only Justice Simon Steward dissenting.

The new federal Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus and Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neil said they were still assessing the impact of the ruling.

But the pair played down the significance it may have for other foreign fighters who may pose a risk to Australia if they returned, arguing other measures, including Temporary Exclusion Orders, could prohibit people from returning to Australia for up to two years.

Government sources have told the ABC there are only two people who have had their Australian citizenship cancelled under the specific part of the Citizenship Act, which has now been struck down.

Mr Alexander, and the other individual, are both in jail.

It does not affect people such as Abdul Nacer Benbrika, who had his citizenship cancelled after being convicted of terrorism offences by an Australian court.

Mr Alexander’s lawyer disputes he had been involved with Islamic State

Mr Alexander’s lawyer, Osman Samin, said his client should never have had his citizenship stripped by the government and disputed the assessment by intelligence agencies that Mr Alexander had been involved with Islamic State.

He argued the evidence Syrian authorities relied upon to initially convict him was deeply flawed.

“We potentially have a person who was arrested in a part of Syria, which is not a declared area,” he told the ABC.

“Other than these purported admissions made by Mr Alexander under extreme torture, there is no other evidence that suggests he in any way participated in any terrorism-type conduct.

Mr Samin said there could have been far-reaching consequences if the legislation had not been struck out by the High Court.

“The concept in the legislation was that citizenship may be repudiated by disloyal conduct,” he said.

“Now, importantly, what constitutes disloyal conduct amounting to repudiation can be defined by parliament — so, therefore, while the laws were initially limited predominantly to terrorism-type conduct, if the law was deemed valid there is really no limitation on what the government in future could define as ‘disloyal conduct’.

Mr Samin said Mr Alexander’s sister, who was running the case on his behalf, was “extraordinarily relieved” but “equally anxious” about the circumstances her brother found himself in, languishing in a jail in Damascus.

“There are so many stories of foreign prisoners being killed in this particular prison that, of course, the family at the moment are only concerned with his welfare, and simply want to know whether he’s still alive essentially.”

Source: Man suspected of joining Islamic State wins High Court challenge against government decision to strip him of his citizenship

Filed under Citizenship, Revocation Tagged with , ,

Australia: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

2022/06/06 Leave a comment

Remains to be seen:

If the euphoria and back-patting over the federal election results are anything to go by, Australia is a vastly different country from the one Yassmin Abdel-Magied left five years ago.

A new cohort of confident, competent, successful and ethnically diverse parliamentarians are about to enter public life. They have been widely celebrated as a sign that the country is getting multiculturalism right.

I am sceptical of these good vibes. History teaches us to be worried about how they will be treated over the next few years.

If recent history is anything to go by, at least some of them will be in for a rough ride. The ones most likely to attract negative attention will be those who are unlucky enough to have the deadly combination of confidence and “difference” due to wearing a hijab, having dark skin or non-Anglo features.

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism

Australia’s tall poppy syndrome goes into overdrive when it comes to people who aren’t white and have the audacity to criticise Australian racism. Lest we forget, two years before Abdel-Magied was relentlessly abused and trolled for a six word Facebook post that sought to remind Australians of the plight of people affected by war and living in horrendous conditions at Manus and Nauru, Adam Goodes was subjected to appalling, career-ending bullying by footy fans in stadia across Australia.

Like Abdel-Magied, Goodes’ “mistake” was that he was both brilliant and uncompromising in his rejection of racism.

For both personalities, public vilification followed soaring success. Goodes had been Australian of the Year, and Abdel-Magied had a string of high-profile engagements including a television program on the ABC.

And yet, as Ketan Joshi has calculated, in the year following the Anzac Day post, over 200,000 words were written about her in the Australian media, with 97% of those words appearing in News Corp.

The pile-on included Peter Dutton who, from the lofty height of his position as immigration minister, welcomed her sacking by gloating “One down, many to go” and called for more ABC journalists to be fired.

Imagine that? How is it fair dinkum for a 26-year-old naturalised Australian citizen who posted on her personal Facebook account to be personally targeted by the minister for immigration?

The pile-on fuelled by wealthy and unhinged News Corp presenters created an environment in which Abdel-Magied endured real-life attacks. A pig’s head was dumped at the Islamic primary school she attended and posters were put up in a Sydney neighbourhood by a white nationalist group that racially stereotyped Abdel-Magied and journalist Waleed Aly – another overachieving brown migrant who has been the subject of sustained abuse.

Thankfully, the campaign to silence Abdel-Magied has not worked, just as the efforts to silence Goodes have not killed his spirit nor dimmed his capacity to be a positive influence on the lives of members of his community.

Still, their treatment creates a chilling effect. They are not alone of course. There is ongoing racial abuse hurled at other footy players, and racist commentary follows virtually every appearance of high-profile African Australian Nyadol Nyuon. Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi wrote in the Guardian last year that she has been called “a maggot, a cockroach, a whore and a cow”.

I haven’t copped it as bad, but each time I have appeared on Q+A the memory of Abdel-Magied’s treatment has loomed large. Indeed, before my first appearance I was warned they shouldn’t “Yassmin me”. Each time, I worried about appearing too strident lest I spark a frenzy based on a comment I didn’t see coming.

While nerves are part of the deal when you appear on television, being afraid to speak your mind is not. Being overly concerned about making factual observations about racism and sexism is a function of living in a society that has a track record of bullying Black people with a public profile. As Yumi Stynes found out, it can be easier to minimise and ignore racism, even when it is staring you in the face live on television. The consequences of calling it out, or even observing it, can be catastrophic.

This sort of silencing has the cumulative effect of diminishing the quality of the national conversation about racism. We should be able to have honest, mature discussions about racism. Instead, we are held hostage by the thin-skinned bullies at News Corp, the lily-livered bosses at the ABC and the worst instincts of their audiences.

To be sure, the record numbers of public representatives voted into office from non-European backgrounds is a cause for celebration. In a proud editorial, the West Australian noted that WA Labor senator Fatima Payman, who came to Australia as a refugee at the age of nine, represents “modern Australia, for now and the future”. The paper is right.

Unfortunately it is also the case that if Payman dares to point out systemic race-based obstacles that prevent the success of people from her communities, the army of hateful people who bullied Abdel-Magied will almost certainly come after her.

Diversity in parliament isn’t just about new faces, it’s also about accepting hard truths. The class of 2022 is inspiring because, against all odds, its members have made it into politics.

But if Australians want parliament itself to become a site of inspiration too, we will all need to move beyond the good stories and learn how to celebrate those who refuse to sugarcoat the truth.

If Abdel-Magied’s assured refusal to hang her head in shame for being herself teaches us anything, it is that there is no expiry date on the truth.

  • Sisonke Msimang is a Guardian Australia columnist and the author of Always Another Country: A Memoir of Exile and Home (2017) and The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018)

Source: Will the hateful army who bullied Yassmin Abdel-Magied come after Australia’s diverse new parliamentarians?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Australia: How did Labor get it so wrong in Fowler?

2022/05/26 Leave a comment

One of the more interesting vignettes in Australia’s election, when parachuting a “white” candidate backfired spectacularly:

“Dai! Dai!” they cry from across the street, followed by a burst of Vietnamese.

As their new federal member walks through the Cabramatta mall in a pink suit, people run across to shake her hand and hug her. In Gough Whitlam Place, Dai Le is mobbed by fans and poses for photos.

After a lacklustre election, the electorate feels, well, alive.

There’s shock and amazement that a once seven-year-old girl who fled Vietnam by boat will be heading off to Canberra to represent them. Who would have thought?

“We are the little people,” one man said. “But this time we raised our voice.”

“Kristina Keneally sucks!” a tradesman in fluro added.

It’s all a wild dream, according to Ms Le, who spoke to 7.30 a day after Labor’s parachute candidate Kristina Keneally conceded defeat.

On Saturday night, as the results trickled in from booths across Fowler in Sydney’s south-west, the veteran local councillor’s pleasant surprise turned to shock and disbelief.

The very safe Labor seat of Fowler hadn’t changed hands since its creation in 1984, and it had been held by retiring incumbent Chris Hayes on a margin of 14 per cent. Ms Le won narrowly but enjoyed a 16 per cent swing towards her. A political miracle.

“I sat there in my lounge room and I literally looked back at that time when I was on a boat in the middle of the ocean with my mum and two younger sisters and I remember how fearful that moment was for me because we thought we were going to die,” she said.

If the 2022 election was about flipping the bird to the major parties, then the result in Fowler speaks volumes.

Questions over Labor’s multicultural legacy

Gough Whitlam is known as the father of multiculturalism and used to live in Cabramatta. There’s a monument to his legacy in the heart of the mall. It sits in front of a cafe where old men gather around tables to play traditional games.

So how did Labor, the purported party of multiculturalism and the working class — the people of Fowler are both — get it so wrong?

Some blame Labor’s Sussex Street headquarters, but Prime Minister Anthony Albanese played his part by backing Kristina Keneally over young lawyer Tu Le.

Ms Keneally would have lost her Senate spot had she stayed there, and needed a safe Labor seat to return to parliament.

Mr Albanese described Ms Keneally — a white American-born woman from the northern beaches, who did not grow up in south-west Sydney — as a great migrant success story.

Ms Keneally was unavailable for an interview.

“Fowler shows that people will see through cynical ploys,” Per Capita research fellow and Labor member Osmond Chiu told 7.30.

“They don’t want to be taken for granted, and when they feel like you’re taking them for granted they’re more than willing to punish you.”

The Keneally decision sparked an outcry among some Labor MPs at the time, but the increase in cultural diversity among Labor ranks in this parliament is likely to neutralise the anger.

Either way, the end result is the first Vietnamese Australian to enter federal parliament, just not on the Labor side.

‘I’m not a teal’, Dai Le declares

If blue seats turned teal this election, then Dai Le’s Fowler turned from red to pink. The politics are slightly the same, the shade is a little different.

The disparity between Fowler and the wealthy teal electorates in Sydney and Melbourne is stark.

In Fowler, most voters are labourers and tradespeople, clerical and administrative workers, machinery operators and drivers, and community service workers.

According to the 2016 Census, 60 per cent were born overseas while more than 80 per cent have parents born overseas. Vietnamese is the top ancestry.

The rise of the independents in Australia is as uneven as our country.

Dai Le is quick to say she’s not a teal even though she’s happy to sit down and “have a cup of tea” with them.

How she votes in the parliament remains to be seen.

When 7.30 asked her how she would vote on climate change, Ms Le seemed to echo Scott Morrison who told 7.30 last week that some parts of the country were more insulated to such issues.

“The teal independents are very much affluent,” Ms Le said. “They have other things they can worry about. Whereas my electorate, we actually have to worry about food on the table.

“The climate change issue, the federal ICAC issue, I mean it is important to us, but for me it’s our health system.

“For me, the priority would be how to make sure there is affordable and cheap electricity prices.”

As she embarks on a life in the Canberra bubble, Ms Le is promising to be her same, genuine self, and on the streets of Fowler, voters are proud that one of their own will be in parliament.

“Menzies, years ago, talked about the forgotten people,” said Than Nguyen, a former Vietnamese community leader.

“We are the real forgotten people.”

Politicians be warned. If you forget the voters, they’ll remember.

Source: How did Labor get it so wrong in Fowler?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , ,

Soutphommasane: We’re about to have Australia’s most diverse parliament yet – but there’s still a long way to go

2022/05/26 Leave a comment

Still less than 10 percent (Canada is just under 16 percent):

The message from Saturday’s election result was clear: Australians want a political reset. And not just about issues such as government integrity and climate change.

While much attention has been directed at the teal wave of independents, another change is taking place to the composition of parliament.

This Australian parliament is shaping to be the most diverse yet in its ethnic and cultural background. Capital Hill is about to see a substantial injection of colour.

A fitting result

Newly elected members Sally Sitou, Michelle Ananda-Rajah, Sam Lim, Zaneta Mascarenhas, Cassandra Fernando and Dai Le will bolster the non-European representation of the House of Representatives.

The Indigenous ranks of parliament are also set to swell, with the additions of Marion Scrymgour and Gordon Reid in the House, and Jacinta Price in the Senate.

In many ways, it is a fitting result to an election that had its share of controversies about representation.

Labor caused consternation when it parachuted former Senator (and ex-NSW Premier) Kristina Keneally into its then safe southwest Sydney electorate of Fowler, cruelling the prospects of local Vietnamese-Australian lawyer Tu Le.

A second captain’s pick from Anthony Albanese, millionaire former political adviser Andrew Charlton, ran in the western Sydney seat of Parramatta, to the chagrin of local aspirants from multicultural backgrounds.

Such picks left many asking, with good reason: if worthy candidates from non-European backgrounds can’t get preselected in multicultural electorates like Fowler and Parramatta, how can we get more diversity into parliament?

It’s a question that lingers, notwithstanding what this election has delivered.

Still a long way to go

If it feels like a surge of diversity will flow through the parliament, it’s only because there was so little to begin with.

While those from a non-European background make up an estimated 21% of the Australian population, they made up just a tiny fraction of the 46th parliament.

The 47th parliament could feature up to 13 parliamentarians with a non-European, non-Indigenous background, along with nine or ten (depending on final results) parliamentarians of Indigenous background.

That may sound like a strong result – it’s certainly an improvement, and better than how many other major institutions in Australian society perform – but we should put it in perspective.

It would still mean just a tiny fraction of the parliament (no more than 10%) having a non-European or Indigenous background – far less than what you’d see if the parliament actually reflected our society accurately. Australia lags significantly behind the US, UK and Canada and New Zealand.

It’s not all about numbers, of course. We can’t judge the calibre of our parliament solely on whether it’s proportionately representative.

Yet when sections of society can’t see themselves within our public institutions, it is a problem. The very legitimacy, and quality, of those institutions can suffer

A new phase?

For a long time, calls for greater multicultural diversity in politics have been typically greeted with indifference. It wasn’t an urgent problem. Gender diversity was a higher priority. Political parties didn’t feel the pressure from those supposedly excluded from the system.

That now has changed. Labor has been brutally punished for its Fowler move. A swing of more than 16% saw the seat fall to independent (and former Liberal) Dai Le.

Clearly, being from a non-European background isn’t the electoral handicap political parties have sometimes feared.

Something generational is at play. Australia may once have comfortably accepted that newer arrivals were expected to play the role of the grateful supplicant in their “host society”.

But the children and grandchildren of yesterday’s migrants don’t see themselves as guests in their own country. They aren’t happy refugees or cheerful migrants who are content to know their place. They’re taking their lead less from the Anh Dos of the world and more from the AOCs (Democrat politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) of US politics.

Demands about access and equity for non-English speaking background people have been replaced with calls for the equal treatment of “people of colour” and for attention to “intersectionality”.

We could be seeing a new phase in the evolution of Australia’s multicultural project.

While a triumph in many respects, Australian multiculturalism has to date fallen short on several counts. A celebration of cultural diversity has never been accompanied by a sharing of Anglo-Celtic institutional power. Or, for that matter, by a full reckoning with racial inequality and injustice.

That’s why it will be interesting to observe this new parliament. The very presence of this new ethnic and cultural diversity will, in subtle and not so subtle ways, be felt in Canberra and beyond.

Critical mass matters. It is hard, for example, to imagine a more diverse parliament trying to wind back racial hatred laws (as parliament has done on more than one occasion with respect to the Racial Discrimination Act).

Or to imagine a diverse parliament indulging other periodic bouts of race politics (think of the scaremongering over African gangs in Melbourne or the McCarthyist targeting of Chinese-Australians).

All such excesses become much harder when the people debating such matters have skin in the game.

So don’t mistake the wave of multicultural politicians for being a mere symbolic adornment in Canberra – like the political equivalent of having exotic foods and festivals.

It may feel like a subplot for now, but this could end up being just be as significant as the teal revolution.

Source: We’re about to have Australia’s most diverse parliament yet – but there’s still a long way to go

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , , ,

Australia election: Why is Australia’s parliament so white?

2022/05/21 Leave a comment

More on the lack of diversity among Australian politiciants:

Australia is one of the most multicultural nations in the world, but it’s a different story in the country’s politics, where 96% of federal lawmakers are white.

With this year’s election, political parties did have a window to slightly improve this. But they chose not to in most cases, critics say.

Tu Le grew up the child of Vietnamese refugees in Fowler, a south-west Sydney electorate far from the city’s beaches, and one of the poorest urban areas in the country.

The 30-year-old works as a community lawyer for refugees and migrants newly arrived to the area.

Last year, she was pre-selected by the Labor Party to run in the nation’s most multicultural seat. But then party bosses side-lined her for a white woman.

It would take Kristina Kenneally four hours on public transport – ferry, train, bus, and another bus – to get to Fowler from her home in Sydney’s Northern Beaches, where she lived on an island.

Furious locals questioned what ties she had to the area, but as one of Labor’s most prominent politicians, she was granted the traditionally Labor-voting seat.

Ms Le only learned she’d been replaced on the night newspapers went to print with the story.

“I was conveniently left off the invitation to the party meeting the next day,” she told the BBC.

Despite backlash – including a Facebook group where locals campaigned to stop Ms Kenneally’s appointment – Labor pushed through the deal.

“If this scenario had played out in Britain or the United States, it would not be acceptable,” says Dr Tim Soutphomassane, director of the Sydney Policy Lab and Australia’s former Race Discrimination Commissioner.

“But in Australia, there is a sense that you can still maintain the status quo with very limited social and political consequences.”

An insiders’ game

At least one in five Australians have a non-European background and speak a language at home other than English, according to the last census in 2016.

Some 49% of the population was born or has a parent who was born overseas. In the past 20 years, migrants from Australia’s Asian neighbours have eclipsed those from the UK.

But the parliament looks almost as white as it did in the days of the “White Australia” policy – when from 1901 to the 1970s, the nation banned non-white immigrants.

“We simply do not see our multicultural character represented in anything remotely close to proportionate form in our political institutions,” says Dr Soutphomassane.

Compared to other Western multicultural democracies, Australia also lags far behind.

The numbers below include Indigenous Australians, who did not gain suffrage until the 1960s, and only saw their first lower house MP elected in 2010. Non-white candidates often acknowledge that any progress was first made by Aboriginal Australians.

Racial representation: parliament v population. . .

Two decades ago, Australia and the UK had comparably low representation. But UK political parties – responding to campaigns from diverse members – pledged to act on the problem.

“The British Conservative Party is currently light years ahead of either of the major Australian political parties when it comes to race and representation,” says Dr Soutphomassane.

Progress in diverse political representation. . .

So why hasn’t Australia changed?

Observers say Australia’s political system is more closed-door than other democracies. Nearly all candidates chosen by the major parties tend to be members who’ve risen through the ranks. Often they’ve worked as staffers to existing MPs.

Ms Le said she’d have no way into the political class if she hadn’t been sponsored by Fowler’s retiring MP – a white, older male.

Labor has taken small structural steps recently – passing commitments in a state caucus last year, and selecting two Chinese-Australian candidates for winnable seats in Sydney.

But it was “one step forward and two steps back”, says party member and activist Osmond Chiu, when just weeks after the backlash to Ms Le’s case, Labor “parachuted in” another white candidate to a multicultural heartland.

Andrew Charlton, a former adviser to ex-PM Kevin Rudd, lived in a harbour mansion in Sydney’s east where he ran a consultancy.

His selection scuppered the anticipated races of at least three diverse candidates from the area which has large Indian and Chinese diasporas.

Source: Australia election: Why is Australia’s parliament so white?

Filed under Multiculturalism, Politics Tagged with , ,

← Older posts

Newer posts →