Of note, along with the message that antisemitism needs to be considered and addressed in the context of all discrimination, bias and hate:
The increased prominence of antisemitic incidents during the COVID pandemic may leave you wondering: has antisemitism always been part of the Australian social fabric, or are we facing a new, sinister trend?
Members of Melbourne’s Jewish community have been subjected to a surge of antisemitic abuse in recent weeks, following breaches of public health orders by ultra-Orthodox Jewish worshippers.
And Victoria’s proposed law to ban Nazi symbols — a first for any state or territory — further reinforces how antisemitism is becoming an increasingly visible problem in Australia.
Understanding the origins of modern antisemitism requires looking back at Australia’s history. Both antisemitism and right-wing extremism are linked with the rise of nationalism from the colonial era through the 20th century.
Because of this, it’s impossible to address antisemitism without also taking into account Australia’s colonial history marred with white supremacy.
How COVID conspiracies are fuelling antisemitism
We have recently seen federal and state politicians cautioning against rising rates of antisemitism, but one can’t help but wonder if these comments are merely lip service.
After all, what good is it to acknowledge antisemitism without taking meaningful action to prevent it?
Consider the following: in 2004, federal parliament expressed its
“unequivocal condemnation of antisemitism, of violence directed against Jews and Jewish religious and cultural institutions, and all forms of racial and ethnic hatred, persecution and discrimination on ethnic or religious grounds, whenever and wherever it occurs.”
The Executive Council of Australian Jewry releases a yearly report on antisemitism in Australia. In the 2020 report, it found a 10% decrease in reported antisemitic incidents compared to the previous year — likely attributable, in part, to COVID lockdowns.
At the same time, however, there was an increase in serious incidents, such as physical assaults, verbal abuse and intimidation.
These figures should be taken with caution. The report doesn’t distinguish between legitimate critiques of Israel’s occupation of Palestine and antisemitism. It also cites a problematic and contesteddefinition of antisemitism as a guiding concept.
This conspiracy theory, originating in extreme right-wing corners of the internet, has quickly become mainstream, circulating through message boards and social media. Now, antisemitic signs and behaviours are increasingly showing up at anti-lockdown and anti-vax rallies across Australia.
For instance, stickers were placed around Melbourne during “freedom” rallies last month bearing a Star of David, the numbers 911 and a QR code. When scanned, it led to a website that blamed the September 11 terror attacks on Jewish people.
An anti-vax group called White Rose, meanwhile, has plastered Jewish neighbourhoods in Melbourne with stickers bearing swastikas and the words, “No Jab, No Job.” The group has likened mandatory vaccines and lockdowns to the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany in the 1930s.
And a recent investigation by The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and 60 Minutes revealed the extent of neo-Nazi operations in Australia, including connections between COVID disinformation and conspiracies.
A brief history of Australian Jewry
The history of Australian Jewry dates to the start of white colonisation and settlement of this continent. Records in the National Archives show at least eight of the 571 convicts in the First Fleet were Jewish.
While the first waves of free Jewish settlers were largely English speaking, Anglo, and loyal to the “mother country”, subsequent Jewish migration came largely from Germany during the gold rush and as refugees from Tsarist Russia.
After that, the next large wave of Jews migrated from Europe in response to rising fascism.
The Anglo Jewish community, which had largely assimilated by the second world war, was concerned the Jewish community’s standing would be negatively affected by these Eastern European refugees who could be easily marked as “foreign” due to their language, dress and manners.
These concerns were rooted in the historical antisemitism of politicians and trade unions. As historian Malcolm J. Turnbull writes:
“sections of the labour movement promoted stereotypes of Jews as manipulative bankers, usurers and profiteers.”
And describing the experiences of early Jewish settlers, author Rodney Gouttman writes
“negative cultural connotations of the word ‘Jew’ encouraged many Jews to avoid it as a descriptive term for themselves, and ‘Hebrew congregations’ became the preferred name for their faith collectives.”
It might seem contradictory that Jews, some of whom came to Australia as part of a colonial project, experienced hatred grounded in colonial racism. However, this is part-and-parcel of the experience of the ever-foreign Jew, needing to assimilate but always seen as “other”.
Is Australia doing enough?
To address this question, we have to recognise that antisemitism cannot be disentangled from other forms of colonial and racial violence and xenophobia.
When we talk about white supremacy and antisemitism, we must talk about racism in all its forms.
In a 2017 study, one-third of respondents said they had experienced racism in the workplace.
The 2020 Mapping Social Cohesion Report, meanwhile, found 37% of respondents had a negative view towards people of the Muslim faith, compared with 9% who held a negative attitude towards Jews. This report demonstrates the urgent need to address antisemitism alongside other forms of racism
Recently, the Australian Jewish News published an opinion piece calling on the government to appoint an Australian commissioner for antisemitism.
This position would ideally be accompanied by new legislation targeting antisemitism to compensate for what the editorial called the “inadequate” protections under the Racial Discrimination Act.
But this approach segregates the plight of Jews from all other minorities facing daily violence and discrimination. As race critical scholar Alana Lentin says,
“the elevation of antisemitism as the racism above all racisms […] constrains solidarity between Jews and other racialised people, thwarting a fuller understanding of race as a colonial mechanism and a technology of power for the maintenance of white supremacy.”
So, in order to address antisemitism, we must do two things: understand the Jewish presence in Australia in relation to the country’s brutal colonial history, and understand antisemitism alongside other forms of racial violence.
In these urgent times, we must take a united approach to respond to rising rates of white supremacy and racial violence. Without serious efforts to address the problem of racism as a whole, gestures such as banning the swastika are unlikely to have much material impact.
Of note (Canadian Parliament and Senate are much more diverse than Australia):
“Stale, pale and male” has become a shorthand for the lack of diversity of all kinds across society’s institutions. Parliament has not escaped its accusations and even federal politicians have levelled the tag at it.
Labor frequently pats itself on the back for achieving near-gender parity in its caucus room but this week it has been beset by criticism it has not done enough to address other types of diversity.
But it’s not only Labor’s politicians who are overwhelmingly white.
Out of the 226 men and women who make up Federal Parliament, 23 were born overseas but only five in non-European countries to parents who weren’t Australian. Another 52 have parents who were born overseas, overwhelmingly in the UK.
Contrast this with the general population. Just under half of all Australians were either born overseas or their parents were. Nearly three times more people in the wider Australian community were born overseas than their parliamentary representatives.
However, Parliament this week hit a milestone of proportionate representation of Indigenous people. There are now seven Indigenous members after the Greens’ newest senator Dorinda Cox, a Yamatji-Noongar woman, replaced Rachel Siewert.
Tim Soutphommasane, a professor at the University of Sydney and a former race discrimination commissioner, says Parliament “fails dismally” on cultural diversity.
“It doesn’t look remotely like today’s multicultural Australia. It might make some uncomfortable, but our political class looks like it’s stuck in the White Australia era,” he says.
“If you don’t have cultural diversity in our politics, you don’t have a politics that’s representative. That’s a pretty basic problem.”
Dr Blair Williams from the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at ANU says while an exact representation of the community isn’t possible, “it just needs to be a bit more focused on being less of a white boys’ club from a certain background”.
There has been a strong focus for some time now on increasing the number of women elected, but Williams says there also should have been thought put into improving cultural diversity. She’d also like to see more young people, people with disabilities and those from different class backgrounds.
The problem is self-perpetuating, says Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan. If people don’t see anyone like them in Parliament, they’re less likely to get involved in the political process.
“The lack of diverse and inclusive parliaments means certain groups are poorly represented and their interests are not well spoken for,” he says.
“Even aside from the importance of involving diverse voices in the legislative process, Parliament provides a tremendous platform for engaging in public debate. We have often seen that when politicians from diverse backgrounds enter Parliament, they achieve great outcomes by focusing attention on issues that might otherwise be overlooked.”
Soutphommasane points to the agitation in some quarters for abolishing section 18C of the Race Discrimination Act, which protects against hate speech, saying the lack of diversity can contribute to a distorted political debate.
“A monochrome political class will have some blind spots,” he says.
The question of how to fix the problem is not easy, nor will it happen quickly. Those who advocate a quota arrangement point to Labor’s gains in gender diversity.
It has taken the party more than 30 years from its first quota to reach equal representation. Former cabinet minister and deputy leader Jenny Macklin says quotas are still contested and there continues to be male resistance.
Emily’s List, an organisation that backs progressive women running for Parliament, published a paper in 2019 that recommended Labor introduce “tandem quotas” for women and cultural diversity with different targets for safe seats, marginal seats and the party executive.
Williams says these types of tandem quotas benefit culturally diverse women but are less good for “majority men and majority women”. An alternative could be a kind of reverse quota.
“So you only have a certain amount of white men in Parliament and when you hit that number, then you have to diversify,” Williams says.
“If you do look at other styles of quotas, like the tandem quotas … you do run the risk of having, say, 30 per cent of people preselected who are women and culturally diverse, that still means that the other 70 per cent can be white men.”
Labor MP Peter Khalil, whose parents migrated from Egypt to Australia in the 1970s, said this week MPs with diverse backgrounds “should not be token or just be making up the numbers”. Rather, parties had to show a real commitment.
His colleague Anne Aly, who was herself born in Egypt, also called on her party to do more than just pay lip service to multiculturalism.
Other MPs also called for action, with Ed Husic saying Labor had to do a stocktake of its membership and have a serious conversation about how to reflect the community, and senator Jenny McAllister saying it was time for “bold actions”.
But not everyone thinks quotas are the answer.
Osmond Chiu, an ALP member and research fellow at the Per Capita think tank, says the party needs to work out the extent of its problem with diversity before it can address it.
Any talk of quotas to improve cultural diversity or candidates “is putting the cart before the horse” when change throughout the whole party organisation is needed.
“A lot of the focus has been on Fowler because it’s symptomatic, it symbolises this wider systemic problem that exists, that Australia has become a much more diverse country … but our institutions, such as Parliament, haven’t really kept up,” he says.
Liberal MP Dave Sharma says there’s no doubt all parties including his own have to more actively recruit people with different backgrounds instead of continuing the “pretty laissez-faire attitude” they have now.
Since his election – replacing Labor’s Lisa Singh as the only person of Indian heritage in Parliament – he has often heard from people in the Indian Australian community asking how they can become involved in politics.
He doesn’t believe in quotas but points to the work of the Conservatives in the UK to transform from a “very stuffy, traditional party” to the more diverse outfit after the party machinery actively sought “people from outside the usual breeding grounds of politics”.
It is as much as smart politics as the right thing to do.
“People are much more inclined to vote and support for, empathise with or have a connection with people that have a similar life experience,” Sharma says.
“That doesn’t just mean ethnically, it can be religiously, it can be professionally, it can be if you’ve got a disability, all those sorts of things … help your political brand strength.”
Tan says this is why parties must look beyond candidate preselection and make sure there are people from diverse backgrounds welcomed and involved at grassroots and administrative levels too.
“Parties stand to gain from this by broadening their base, widening their gaze, and attracting the additional talents that exist within diverse communities,” he says.
“I think this would in turn lead to more diverse candidates being preselected.”
Changing the face of Parliament will require hard calls from political leaders, Soutphommasane says.
“You can’t conjure up more diversity in your parliamentary ranks simply by saying you like multiculturalism. Or by saying that it’ll come next election.”
Will be interesting to see how the training works in practice and possible lessons learned for Canada:
University students will be trained to spot foreign interference threats on campus and report them to authorities under proposed new rules aimed at significantly beefing up universities’ responsibilities for countering Chinese government influence on campuses.
Academics and students involved in research collaborations with overseas institutions will also get specific training on how to “recognise, mitigate and handle concerns of foreign interference”, following security agencies’ concerns about critical research being stolen.
The measures are contained in new draft foreign interference guidelines for universities, which are being furiously debated among university leaders and government officials. The federal government has already been forced to review a key element of the guidelines, which would have required all academics to disclose their membership of foreign political parties over the past decade, following a fierce backlash from university chiefs.
Following growing concerns from Australia’s security agencies about the risk of research theft by China and other foreign actors, the guidelines state that students and staff are to “receive training on, and have access to information about how foreign interference can manifest on campus and how to raise concerns in the university or with appropriate authorities”.
The measures are also aimed at addressing reports of students and academics being harassed by pro-Beijing groups on campuses. They propose that orientation programs should be used to “promote to all staff and students ways to report within their university concerns of foreign interference, intimidation and harassment that can lead to self-censorship”. Universities will also be required to have policies that set out how reported “concerns are tracked, resolved and recorded and shared” internally and when they should be reported to outside authorities.
To oversee these measures, the guidelines state that universities must have an “accountable authority” – either a senior executive or executive body – that will have responsibility for research collaborations with overseas institutions, and reviewing security risks and communicating them with the government.
The guidelines have been drafted by the Universities Foreign Interference Taskforce (UFIT), a collaborative body that includes university vice-chancellors and government officials. The final version will replace existing guidelines, which are far less prescriptive. The proposal has prompted considerable concern among academic leaders about the mandatory language underpinning the new requirements, and what consequences, if any, universities will face from government if they fail to implement them.
Federal Education Minister Alan Tudge has declined to comment on “what is and isn’t in the draft guidelines”, but said earlier this year he was deeply concerned by a Human Rights Watch report that revealed accounts of Chinese international students being surveilled and harassed by their pro-Beijing classmates.
The report found that students were self-censoring in class out of fear comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party would be reported to authorities, with several students saying their parents in China had been hauled into police stations over their campus activities. Academics interviewed by Human Rights Watch also reported self-censorship practices, saying sensitive topics such as Taiwan had become too difficult to teach without a backlash from pro-Beijing students.
The report’s author, Sophie McNeill, said the draft guidelines indicated the government had taken the report’s findings into account.
“This focus had been missing from the previous guidelines, so it is very welcome these issues are now being recognised and addressed. It is critical the final guidelines include practical measures to safeguard academic freedom and address issues of harassment, surveillance and self-censorship faced by international students and staff,” Ms McNeill said.
Some universities have already taken steps to respond to the issues highlighted by Human Rights Watch. The University of Technology Sydney, for example, updated its orientation program for international students this semester to include guidance on acceptable behaviour and how students could report intimidation or surveillance by other students.
“We have certainly made it clear to students that what is discussed in classrooms is not something that should be reported on to the embassy,” Mr Watt, UTS deputy vice-chancellor, said.
“We’re not encouraging students to spy on each other. But rather, it’s saying: if you get doxxed or bullied or feel unable to express your views in a lecture here is the support available to you and here’s what you should do.”
The university’s misconduct rules allow for a range of penalties in response to unacceptable behaviour, including potential expulsion in serious cases.
While arguably Canada has done better than Australia in recent times, some unfortunate common elements in our early history, ranging from our anti-Indigenous policies and practices to immigration and wartime restrictions against minority groups.
And, a memory from a high school English class where we looked at utopias in literature, Thomas More “coined the word ‘utopia’ from the Greek ou-topos meaning ‘no place’ or ‘nowhere’. It was a pun – the almost identical Greek word eu-topos means ‘a good place’.”
Roman Quaedvlieg standing tall in his smart black suit — medals glistening, insignia flashing — looked every bit the man-in-uniform from central casting when he posed between then Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Immigration Minister Peter Dutton on 1 July 2015 to launch a new paramilitary unit to protect Australia’s borders.
Australian Border Force was modelled on a similar agency created in Britain two years earlier but with a distinctive accent. Its Operation Sovereign Borders had changed the culture of military, policing and customs agencies in Australia as they were pushed out of their silos with a new shared priority: stop refugees arriving by boat.
Just 14 months earlier Scott Morrison, then the Immigration Minister, had announced the formation of the new armed and uniformed force, describing it as the “reform dividend from stopping the boats”.
The 70 year-old department had gained a new role: “Border Protection”. The old tags — “Multiculturalism”, “Citizenship” and “Ethnic Affairs” — were artefacts of other ages when population growth coupled with social cohesion had been the goal. The armed Border Force that had emerged out of the chrysalis of the old customs service, complete with new uniforms, ranks and insignia, on that mid-winter day was another sign of Canberra’s increasing preoccupation with security and militarisation.
He liked to reassure people that Australia would still be taking more than its share of refugees, but the proportion of overseas-born residents fell over the early years of his prime ministership. After decades of multiculturalism the Australian ear was once again being attuned to new arrivals as threat.
Taking it to the streets
By 2015, Australia’s proportion of overseas-born residents was nudging the all-time high of 30% reached in the 1890s, but multiculturalism was still a grubby word.
Without irony, Commissioner Quaedvlieg cut to the chase, reducing the new nearly 6,000-strong agency’s role to its essence: “to protect our utopia”. Decades before, the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin had elegantly demolished the idea of utopias, suggesting they were “a fiction deliberately constructed as satires intended to shame those who control existing regimes”.
A month after the launch of Border Force, its first big public exercise, Operation Fortitude, was announced. Officers were to walk the streets of Melbourne and seek proof of the right of residence of “any individual we cross paths with”. The warning was clear: If you commit border fraud you should know it’s only a matter of time before you are caught.
The residents of the Melbourne branch of “our utopia” fought back with a dose of theatricality, to prove Berlin’s point, and the joint operation with the Victorian Police was abandoned in a flurry of protests and press releases. Prime Minister Abbott declared, “Nothing happened here except the issue of a poorly worded press release”.
Within a couple of years, the uniformed commissioner from central casting had gone. The intent, however, remained clear. Immigration might be at an all-time high, but exclusion was still the key, and national security was at the centre of Australian public life.
Ills of the past and present
Deciding who could come and the circumstances under which they could enter the country has, as we have been again reminded during COVID times, been central to the management of the Australian utopia since 1901.
[…] idea of the perfect society is a very old dream, whether because of the ills of the present which lead men to conceive what their world would be like without them … or perhaps they are social fantasies – simple exercises in the poetical imagination.
Australia at the time of Federation was awash with bad poetry by mediocre poets. So if conceiving the nation as a utopia was an exercise of the poetical imagination, it was inevitably flawed.
The first step towards the creation of Australia’s white utopia was brutal and relentless. It depended on the humiliation and elimination, by design and neglect, of the million First Nations people who in 1788 still called the continent home as they had done for countless generations, managed with an elaborate, ancient patchwork of languages, social relations, trade and lore.
Although the Australian Constitution explicitly excluded them from the census, by the time the 3.7 million new arrivals became Australians in 1901, the First Nations population had been reduced, systematically and deliberately, to about 90,000 people.
The men who debated the legislation that would shape the new nation preferred to avert their eyes. They were not, however, ignorant of what had gone before.
Even in a world shaped by race there was argument, opposition and some shame. Months after Australia became legally, unequivocally white, the parliament debated whether to recognise the survivors who preceded them.
The senate leader and future High Court justice Richard O’Connor argued that just as the right to vote was being extended to women — because in some states, they already had the franchise — the same principle should apply to Aboriginal people who had the right to vote in four of the former colonies. “It would be a monstrous thing, an unheard-of piece of savagery”, he declared, “to treat the Aboriginals whose land we were occupying to deprive them absolutely of any right to vote in their own country”.
We are told we have taken their country from them. But it seems a poor sort of justice to recompense those people for the loss of the country by giving them votes.
This argument prevailed. White women and Maori were the only exceptions: “no aboriginal native of Australia, Asia, Africa or the Islands of the Pacific” could enrol to vote. Within its first two years, the parliament had failed two moral tests.
At the heart of the Australia embraced by those who met in Melbourne in the Federation Parliament was the idea of a model society populated by men like them. Utopian dreams had played out in many ways in shaping the new nation. A decade earlier, nearly 300 colonialists sailed to Paraguay in a flawed attempt to create a more perfect, and even whiter, society called New Australia.
Prime Minister Edmund Barton, in the middle of the first year of the century, firmly grounded the new nation in the “instinct of self-preservation quickened by experience”. Optimism tempered by fear.
What became known as the White Australia policy was necessary, he said, because “we know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year’s surplus population”.
Future prime minister Billy Hughes spelt out the two steps of this dance when he candidly observed that having “killed everybody else to get it”, the inauguration of Canberra — which they considered calling Utopia — as the national capital “was unfolding without the slightest trace of the race we have banished from the face of the earth […] we should not be too proud lest we should too in time disappear. We must take steps to safeguard the foothold we now have”.
Fresh eyes
In 1923 Myra Willard — a recent graduate of the University of Sydney — paid Melbourne University Press to publish its first monograph, her book History of the White Australia Policy to 1920. She wrote with a contemporaneous eye.
The debates in the colonies before Federation were still close enough for the lines between them and the 1901 legislation to be thickly etched with detail. She grimly recounted the way each colony penalised and excluded “coolies” and “celestials”.
“The desire to guard themselves effectively against the dangers of Asiatic immigration was one of the most powerful influences which drew the Colonies together,” she wrote. She quoted with approval the now infamous speech by Attorney-General Alfred Deakin in which he described the principle of white Australia as the “universal motive power” that had dissolved colonial opposition to Federation. At heart, he declared, was “the desire that we should be one people and remain one people without the admixture of other races”.
The Australian utopia depended on a “united race”. This would be ensured by “prohibiting the intermarriage and association that could degrade”. As Deakin declaimed in September that year, “inspired by the same ideas and an aspiration towards the same ideals of a people possessing a cast of character, tone of thought … unity of race is an absolute essential to the unity of Australia”.
The legislation was finally, if somewhat reluctantly, signed by Governor General Lord Hopetoun just before Christmas 1901. London was discomfited by the determination of the new nation to exclude and proposed amendments to save face with her imperial allies in Europe and Japan. Willard wrote in 1923, “Australia’s policy does not as yet seem to be generally understood or sanctioned by world opinion”. It was, she maintained, despite the negative connotations, really a positive policy that ensured Australia would be a productive global contributor of resources and supplies.
By the time the legislation passed, those with Chinese heritage were fewer than they had been in the 19th century. It did not take long before Indian residents who had lived in Fremantle for years, as British subjects, were denied the right to return to Australia after visiting their homeland. Those of German heritage, who made up about 5% of the population at the turn of the century, soon became pariahs — wartime internment was followed by the deportation of 6,000 Australians of German heritage.
Gough Whitlam revoked the policy as one of his first acts as prime minister.
“Right up to our election in 1972”, he recalled, “there had to be, from any country outside Europe, an application for entry referred to Canberra and a confidential report on their appearance […] The photograph wasn’t enough, because by a strong light or powdering you could reduce the colour of your exposed parts. It was said that the test was in extreme cases, ‘Drop your daks’ because you can’t change the colour of your bum’.”
For Michael Wesley, now deputy vice chancellor international at the University of Melbourne, and thousands of others, this meant that his Australian-born mother could return home with her Indian husband and brown babies without fear of deportation.
The echoes still resonate. Fast forward to this year, when the average time in immigration detention rose to 627 days and the then Minister for Home Affairs, Peter Dutton, describeddeporting New Zealand-born long-term Australian residents who had been jailed as “taking the trash out”.
The suite of bills passed in that first parliament — at least as much as the Constitution — determined the social nature of Australia for much of the 20th century. As Deakin said a couple of years after the White Australia policy was adopted, “it goes down to the roots of our national existence, the roots from which the British social system has sprung”.
By the time he was prime minister, the bureaucratic method of exclusion was even clearer: “the object of the [language] test is not to allow persons to enter the Commonwealth, but to keep them out”. John Howard could not have asked for a better crib sheet than the speeches of the Federation Parliament when preparing his 2001 election campaign.
Survival against the odds
That Australia has emerged as a cohesive multicultural society, with people drawn from hundreds of different countries — and increasingly from those that were once explicitly excluded — is a remarkable achievement. That the First Nations people have survived is in many ways even more remarkable.
But the foundation story of our notional utopia is still undigested and recurs unwittingly in policy language and political rhetoric, in legal and administrative practice and personal abuse.
The brutal speed and wilful political rejection of the Uluru Statement from the Heart would have shamed even the members of the Federation Parliament; the failure to turn enquiry into action on the oldest issue in the land — treaty, truth-telling and settlement with the descendants of those who have always been here — is unconscionable.
Methods of border control are now more likely to be couched in the convoluted small print attached to visas, employment conditions and bureaucratic processes, but at some level the old order prevails — there has been no national apology to those who were humiliated by the White Australia policy, no formal truth-telling to address these sins of the past at a national level. It has taken 23 years for the compensation recommended by Stolen Children inquiry to be parsimoniously granted.
Hands are thrown up in mock astonishment when another example of institutional or official racism, discrimination or maltreatment makes the headlines. Over a decade, the cost of detaining (and breaking) those refugees who felt compelled to leave their homeland reached double-digit billions. International criticism is once again worn with bravado as a badge of honour rather than a mark of shame. It was surprisingly easy to jettison 50 years of careful relationship-building with China.
Ever since those first debates in the Federation Parliament there has been a moral deficit in Australian politics, a reluctance to go back to first principles, to meaningfully make amends. Until this is addressed there will always be an action deficit. The big public health campaigns have not extended to addressing the lingering racism that has equally pernicious consequences.
No national political leaders rose to the defence of Adam Goodes when the 2014 Australian of the Year was called “an ape” and booed off the footy field. None came to the defence of Yassmin Abdel-Magied when she sought to contribute to public life. The response to the never-ending list of Aboriginal deaths in custody is couched in mealy-mouthed administrivia.
When Prime Minister Julia Gillard was battered by misogynist hectoring, the message to other women was clear: don’t get ideas above your station. Almost every week a woman dies at the hands of her intimate partner, but overwhelmed police seem powerless to help.
Our treatment of refugees attracts a global condemnation that is dismissed as readily today as it was in 1901. Behrouz Boochani will probably never set foot in the country he described so searingly in his much awarded No Friend but the Mountains, and despite public support, the Murugappans — the Biloela family — spent nearly three years in costly detention on Christmas Island.
Yet when the government banned Australian citizens and permanent residents who happened to be in India as COVID raged from returning home under threat of fines and jail terms, the outcry was impossible to ignore.
The brutality of the old ways still lives in the memory. A colleague recalled her traumatic fear, during the family’s first trip to India with their Pakistani-born father, that the White Australia policy would be reintroduced and they would be denied re-entry. It had happened to those returning to Fremantle Harbour a century earlier — and, astonishingly, again in 2021.
Utopia out of step
Public sentiment is at odds with that of those who are most committed to the old status quo. Survey after survey shows a populace willing to embrace change that means people are treated better. But there are few leaders willing to make the case, fearful of an imagined backlash, rather than embracing the need for big tough conversation. Transformation is left to the slow accretion of a new normal.
Tens of thousands turned up at the football waving “I stand with Adam” banners years before the AFL officially apologised to Goodes.
Those affronted by official treatment of refugees engage in endless protest campaigns, travel to detention centres, provide support and lobby. The Black Lives Matter movement has galvanised some of the biggest demonstrations seen in the country, despite COVID, and the calls for action on the unfinished business of the 33-old Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody and the other inquiries are becoming impossible to ignore.
There is much to be learnt from First Nations people. Their survival and generosity is an inspiration that needs to be taken seriously and acted upon. Without righting this foundational wrong, this country will be forever stuck on a political treadmill, running but going nowhere.
Art speaks volumes
It is striking that one of the most important Aboriginal artists to have captivated the world came from a place called Utopia. Hers was the land of the Alyawarr people for millennia before its brief life as a cattle station. It is a place as impoverished as any of the remote settlements in northern Australia, returned to their traditional owners with only grudging support from the state. But the semi-arid country is the source of dreaming and a culture that speaks to the world when brought to life on canvas. Emily Kame Kngwarreye’s paintings are displayed in galleries, palaces and private collections around the world.
They are more than great works of art. It is what Australian art always aspired to be. In the words of the influential Aboriginal scholar and advocate Marcia Langton, Emily’s paintings
[…] fulfil the primary historical function of Australian art by showing the settler Australian audience, caught ambiguously between old and new lands, a new way to belong in this place rather than another […]
Creating a utopia, or at least an aspiration to do better, requires more imagination and courage than our current system of professional politics permits.
It needs more art and better faith. Politics, like everything else, is now in thrall to corporate modes of organisation and communication.
The emphasis is on the mission (to get elected) and KPIs (to deliver on promises). The headline of every corporate plan is the “vision”. It is always the hardest thing to define. But without a vision, any plan is meaningless. Our utopia needs a new vision, one not tinged by shame. The old ones have failed the test of time.
This is an edited extract of Facing foundational wrongs — careful what you wish for, republished with permission from GriffithReview73: Hey Utopia!, edited by Ashley Hay.
According to tradition, in 16th century BC, Cecrops, the mythical first king of Athens, conducted a census of his subjects. Each Athenian was compelled to provide a single stone and when these were counted, it was determined that the city contained 20,000 inhabitants.
The 2021 Australian Census is much more complicated in that it asks questions about income, qualifications, education, hours worked, hours assisting those with a disability, hours expended looking after children and significantly, considering the purported multicultural nature of Australian society, questions as to ancestry and language.
It is these latter two questions that give rise to concern. Firstly, there appears to be no question as to ethnic and/or cultural identity on the Census. There is an apparent lack of understanding by those conducting or commissioning the Census that ethnic identity is an issue separate, though ancillary to that of ancestry. For instance, one can be of diverse ancestry and yet identify ethnically in a different manner altogether, according to religious, cultural, linguistic or political factors.
Even if one accepts this lack of appreciation as to the importance of ethnic identity in understanding the Australian population, and its incorrect conflation with ancestry, the ancestry question on the Census provides cause for grave disquiet. In scrolling down the various ancestries listed, ranging from the Anglo-Celtic, to Chinese, Italian and beyond, I was interested to note this time, the omission of Greek. While it is not expedient for a government to list every ancestral group on a census form, it would be interesting to know the reason for the omission of the Greeks, being one of the oldest, historically and numerically significant communities in this country. It may well be that demographic change has seen our numbers (as counted by a census which usually is conducted during a month when significant members of our community are traditionally holidaying in the motherland en masse) diminish. To diminish our prominence and importance is quite another matter altogether, a cursory tale about the use and misuse of statistics in interpreting our multifaceted nature.
There is something deeply disquieting about being compelled to participate in a Census in a multicultural country that involves scrolling down the prescribed list of ancestries and then having to choose a box labelled “Other.” Reinforcing to people of diverse ancestry that they are “Other,” tacitly conveys to them the message that they are considered to be not truly an organic part of this nation’s society, regardless of their citizenship status or place of birth. It would be infinitely more respectful then, if in future censuses, either all known ancestral groups were listed, or better still, that participants, rather than choose from government sanctioned ancestries, are permitted to merely record their ancestral affiliations themselves, instead of being officially termed outsiders and thus by implication, subversive.
Conversely, in permitting the free expression of ancestry under the option “Other,” the government is allowing for a Pandora’s Box of affiliations to emerge. With a debate raging in certain sections of our community with regards to expressing our ancestry as “Hellenic” rather than “Greek,” which is considered by some to be a western imposed term, a course of action that is not recommended given that it will mystify the statisticians of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, who presumably do not have training in cultural anthropology and hinder a true depiction of our numbers, the option “Other,” is also giving rise to a debate about the constituent parts of what it means to be Greek. Some people I have spoken to feel passionately about their Arvanite, Pontian or Vlach ancestry and wonder whether they should record this aspect of their “Greekness” in the census. How are we to interpret the ancestry of someone who claims that they are Cypriot? Do we not need to understand whether they interpret this as being part of the Turkish, Greek, Maronite or Armenian cultural world? Do we consider this as evidence of an emerging identity that contains all, or none of these components? This is precisely the reason why culture and ancestry must be addressed separately in the Census, and why not doing so is problematic, to say the least.
Scrolling down the Census
While I was scrolling down the Census form, seeking to record my Greek ancestry, I noted mentally, the entries for English, Scottish and Irish (but not Welsh), the main ancestries for the dominant group within Australian society. I also noted the term Aboriginal and found this too, disturbing, in that the dominant group appears to be attempting to pigeonhole and compartmentalise a vast and intricately diverse number of cultural and ethnic groups under one blanket term that does nothing to highlight their own uniqueness and if anything, serves to obfuscate their existence. Whether intentional or not, this is a form of racism that should not have any place in any sector of modern Australia, let alone its governing institutions.
To my utmost perplexity, below the entry for Torres Strait Islander, I discovered the term “Australian.” Given the previous entries for “Aboriginals” and “Torres Strait Islanders” what are we to understand from this term? Is it suggesting that our native peoples are not
“Australian?” Considering that all of us except for our native peoples draw their ancestry from outside the Australian continent, the inexplicable inclusion of this contentious term merely serves to highlight the dispossession of our native peoples and the appropriation of their sovereignty and affiliation to the land. Further, it again subtly reminds those who do not share the same ancestry as the members of the dominant group, that they are not “Australian.” The dysphoria and sense of alienation created by such a clumsy rendering of terms again reinforces the need for cultural identity to be distinguished from ancestry on future Census forms and raises questions about the manner in which our governments view our communities.
As was the case in the 2016 Census, in its current iteration, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has made no provision in the question regarding which languages other than English the population speaks, for the possibility that some Australian citizens are multilingual and use a number of languages on a daily basis. Instead, participants may only choose to list one language other than English. This obscures and restricts the gleaning of a true picture of the linguistic heterogeneity of this country. For example, on any given day, my children will be speaking to each other and to me, in Greek. As they move from the kitchen down the hallway towards my wife, they call to her in Assyrian. My wife, on the phone to her mother, will be speaking to her in Arabic, so that the children will not understand a conversation relating to their grandfather’s declining health. Through the telephone, my wife will hear my father-in-law address my mother-in-law in Kurdish, so that in turn, my wife won’t understand what he is saying. Back on the other side of the house, I will be speaking to a client in Mandarin Chinese. Linguistic polyphonies of this nature form part and parcel of the polyglot reality of Multiculturalism and the reason as to why there is an official attempt not to capture this statistically is at best, incomprehensible. Furthermore, there is no follow up question as to the level of one’s proficiency in the language claimed to be spoken or indeed, as to which language is the primary language in use. These are both important aspects in interpreting the linguistic demography in this country. For example, while someone may be fluent in English, which language do they use more often and when? How proficient is someone in the language they claim to speak, especially if this is the language of an important political or trading partner? Questions of these nature, vital for the creation of coherent language policy, are completely ignored, suggesting that despite the rhetoric, officials see themselves as presiding over a benign, monolingual monoculture.
Ultimately, the Census says just as much about those who fashion it, as those who participate in it. It is difficult not to conclude that the carefully calibrated narrowness of the questions referring to culture, ancestry and linguistic identity, seem calculated to reinforce a narrative imposed and perpetuated by the ruling echelons of the dominant class. As such, we can be justified in harbouring a lack of confidence in the 2021 Census’ ability to provide us with an accurate depiction of the intricate complexities of our social make up and in being concerned as to the use made of any such flawed statistics, by legislators.
Australia’s state parliaments are lagging behind in racial and cultural diversity compared with the populations they represent, according to a new analysis.
While approximately 21% of Australians have non-European ancestry, according to a 2018 report from the Australian Human Rights Commission, only 10% of Victorian state MPs and 9% of NSW MPs have non-European ancestry, not including Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander ancestry.
This is far lower than comparable state or sub-national parliaments in the UK or Canada, according to Osmond Chiu, a research fellow at the Per Capita thinktank.
In Canada, 23% of MPs in the Ontario parliament – the country’s most populous province – are of a visible minority, and 18.3% in the British Columbia parliament. This is compared with 29.3% of Ontario’s general population having non-European ancestry, and 30.3% in British Columbia.
Grassroots members in NSW Labor have argued that the party must increase the diversity among its MPs or lose electoral ground. A cross-factional group propose inserting a clause into the party’s platform at the upcoming NSW state conference, recognising the under-representation.
The motion argues that a lack of representation is an electoral issue for Labor as the Coalition has made significant ground campaigning in more diverse communities, especially in western Sydney.
Chiu told Guardian Australia that previously-safe Labor seats in Sydney had been won by Liberal MPs in recent years as part of a concerted strategy from the Coalition.
“There is a belt of multicultural marginal seats in Sydney that will determine government at a state and federal level,” he said. “They were once Labor-held seats but were lost to the Liberals who spent more than a decade focusing on culturally diverse voters in these seats.
“As Australia becomes more diverse, other seats will be at risk if Labor does not take the growing cultural diversity of the electorate seriously when the Liberals clearly do.”
Chiu said that under-representation was also an issue for the Liberal, National and other parties, not just Labor.
“However, there’s been an assumption that Labor does better because of its historic support for multiculturalism,” he said. “The reality is in some ways the Liberals are ahead of Labor. For example, there currently are two state and territory Liberal leaders, Gladys Berejiklian and Elizabeth Lee, with non-European ancestry versus none for Labor.”
In the United Kingdom, the London Assembly is 32% BAME (Black, Asian and minority ethnic) compared with 40.6% of London. Scotland and Wales’s populations are far less diverse than Australia, but their parliaments are comparatively more diverse than Australia’s parliaments, according to the Per Capita research.
In Scotland, 4.5% of MSPs are BAME compared with 5% of the population. In Wales, 5% of MSs are BAME compared with 5.6% of the population.
The change to be tabled at the NSW Labor conference states that the party “recognises the ongoing under-representation of culturally and linguistically diverse people in senior leadership positions across business, politics, government and higher education”.
It adds that NSW Labor should be “committed to improving the representation of culturally and linguistically diverse people across all organisations and institutions, including within the party”.
Nearly 50 party units across NSW have endorsed the change to the party platform, with more than 300 party members signing a petition, according to Chiu.
Of interest. Some similar policy fallacies such as favouring GDP growth over per capita GDP growth as in Canada:
Nades and Priya Murugappan made a fundamental mistake when they separately fled to Australia from Sri Lanka almost a decade ago.
The pair, who met at the meatworks in Biloela on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast and now have two children, lived in the town for four years.
They were on temporary protection visas before they were detained and sent to Christmas Island awaiting deportation.
Since 2019, they’ve existed in a guarded compound under 24-hour surveillance with daughters Kopika and Tharnicaa in an operation that has cost taxpayers more than $6 million.
Rather than flee their home country by boat, they instead should have applied for a skilled worker or student visa. It’s a pretty certain bet they would have received one.
A quick flick through the Skilled Occupation List for workers from abroad shows everything from carpenters to chief executives, chefs and composers, clothing trade workers. And that’s just the Cs.
And even if your chosen occupation is removed, never fear.
“Pending nomination and/or visa applications will not be adversely impacted by the subsequent removal of any occupation from the skilled occupation list,” the Home Affairs department website says.
For decades, our politicians have batted up their tough border control credentials with threats to turn back boats and a promise of imprisonment.
In reality, the tough measures have been meted out to those with the least ability to defend themselves: a handful of the poorest and weakest, who now have become pawns in a macabre game of political brinkmanship.
At the same time as we’ve been tough on refugees, Australia has thrown open the doors, with one of the largest per capita immigration programs in the developed world.
It has enticed around 4,000 new arrivals a week, mostly into the two biggest cities, Sydney and Melbourne.
But even now, after decades of mass immigration, it appears we still are suffering critical “skills shortages”.
Fruit pickers, waiters and baristas are in short supply. Almost daily, there are calls to throw caution to the wind when it comes to COVID-19 and start importing workers again.
Low wages growth is hurting our economy
It has taken quite a while. But Reserve Bank governor Phil Lowe set himself on a collision course last week with big business and sections of the federal government by stating the bleeding obvious.
And that is, Australia has used immigration as a means for keeping the cost of labour subdued. Not that Dr Lowe put it so bluntly. But he made the point repeatedly that adding to the supply of workers keeps wages low.
It’s pretty basic economics, really.
For years now, one of the key factors undermining our economic performance has been low wages growth.
Economists love to call it anything but what it is. They’ll talk about underutilisation or excess capacity. But the graph below says it all.
In the past 12 months, there’s been almost universal agreement that stagnating wages pose one of the greatest dangers to derailing our recovery, particularly given our eye-watering levels of household debt.
But whenever wages start to rise, the calls to bring in more workers start immediately.
Interestingly, those making the most noise now are the ones who have benefitted the most from a constant influx of tourists, students and temporary workers.
The flood of overseas workers, particularly in hospitality, has left many with barely enough work upon which to survive. And it has opened the door to exploitation and wages theft on a grand scale.
Here is another graph, presented by Dr Lowe last week, showing data from the Reserve Bank of Australia and the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
GDP growth doesn’t mean our lives are better
Australia has prospered greatly from immigration, particularly in the post-war period. It has enriched the nation in ways far more than can be measured by money.
Somewhere along the way, however, canny politicians figured out the great immigration con job: that by adding ever greater numbers of people, you automatically get GDP growth.
That’s because GDP is a crude yardstick. It simply measures the amount of stuff you produce. The more people you’ve got, the more you consume, and the more you produce.
Big business loves it too.
Not only does the influx of workers keep wages low, but all those extra people also end up consumers of your products. You sell more, your profits rise and so do your bonuses.
What GDP doesn’t measure is whether or not we all are better off as individuals.
As it turns out, we haven’t performed anywhere near as well as we’ve been told. Once you divide GDP by the number of people — to get a like for like comparison — the picture looks very different.
Remember how we were the “miracle economy” with 30 years or so without a recession?
The green bars below point out at least three recessions and quite a number of near misses.
You’ve no doubt heard the grand visions: “This government will create a million new jobs over the next five years.”
And, bingo, just like that, it happens.
The thing is, when you are adding a million people over five years, you need to have a million extra jobs just to keep your head above water.
And the problem is that many of the new arrivals end up working part-time, in lower-paid jobs and in occupations that require far fewer skills than they possess. Doctors and engineers end up as Uber drivers.
Foreign workers are greatest victims of wage theft
The list is too long to compile. For years, revelations of wage theft within major Australian corporations became a blight on the nation.
But big, public organisations that are open to scrutiny are only a small part of the problem.
With such a huge influx, foreign workers, many of them desperate for employment and unaware of their rights, have been routinely exploited.
Students and temporary visa holders are the most vulnerable. But permanent arrivals share similar experiences.
Story after story of exploitation and sexual assault have littered newspapers, websites and current affairs programs.
Among other things, it concluded that temporary visa holders comprised around 10 per cent of the workforce and that the 457 visa program was impacting university graduates and depressing wages. But it was the title that said it all.
The Fair Work Ombudsman has conducted raids, issued fines and published reports on deliberate underpayment and exploitation, particularly within the hospitality industry.
But for months now, almost every day brings forth a new claim of “skills shortages” and the need to start importing workers because firms have to pay more.
Nearly two decades ago, when the New Zealand highway authority was planning the Waikato Expressway, people from the Māori tribe Ngāti Naho objected. The highway would encroach on an area that, in Māori tradition, was governed by a water-dwelling creature, a taniwha.
The authorities took those concerns into account and rerouted the road to circumvent the area in question. As a result, a year later, when the area was hit by a major flood, the road was unharmed.
“I’m still waiting for the headline, ‘Mythical Creature Saves the Taxpayer Millions,’” said Dan Hikuroa, a senior lecturer in Māori studies at the University of Auckland and member of the Ngāti Maniapoto tribe. He has often wondered if, once the flood hit, the technical team later said, “Why didn’t you just say it’s a flood risk area?”
Like many Indigenous peoples around the world, the Māori have developed their understanding of their environment through close observation of the landscape and its behaviors over the course of many generations. Now the New Zealand Environmental Protection Agency regularly looks for ways to integrate traditional Māori knowledge, or mātauranga, into its decision-making. Mr. Hikuroa has been appointed the culture commissioner for UNESCO New Zealand, a role he said is centered on integrating Māori knowledge into UNESCO’s work.
Western-trained researchers and governments are increasingly recognizing the wealth of knowledge that Indigenous communities have amassed to coexist with and protect their environments over hundreds or even thousands of years. Peer-reviewed scientific journals have published studies demonstrating that around the world, Indigenous-managed lands have far more biodiversity intact than other lands, even those set aside for conservation.
Embracing Indigenous knowledge, as New Zealand is trying to do, can improve how federal governments manage ecosystems and natural resources. It can also deepen Western scientists’ understanding of their own research, potentially, by providing alternative perspectives and approaches to understanding their field of work. This is ever more urgent, particularly as the climate crisis unfolds. “It is Indigenous resilience and worldview that every government, country and community can learn from, so that we manage our lands, waters and resources not just across budget years, but across generations,” U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland, a citizen of the Laguna Pueblo in New Mexico and America’s first Native American cabinet secretary, said in remarks to the United Nations.
Indigenous scholars warn, though, that while traditional knowledge can be used to benefit the world, it can also be mishandled or exploited. Dominique David Chavez, a descendant of the Arawak Taíno in the Caribbean, and a research fellow at the Native Nations Institute at the University of Arizona and the National Science Foundation, says that, as Western scientists, “we are trained to go into communities, get that knowledge and go back to our institutions and disseminate it in academic journals.” That can be disruptive to traditional knowledge sharing, from one generation to another, she says, which should be the priority — ensuring that Indigenous knowledge systems are preserved in and supportive of the communities that developed them. In Puerto Rico, known by its Indigenous people as Borikén, Ms. Chavez is studying ways to restore the connections and traditional knowledge transmission patterns between elders and youth.
Bridging Indigenous and Western science also means respecting the ecosystem of values in which the knowledge systems are embedded. For instance, the practice of planting a diversity of crops and building healthy soil for water retention — today known as “regenerative agriculture” — has existed in Indigenous communities around the world throughout history. Yet the growing push to adopt regenerative agriculture practices elsewhere is often selective, using industrial pesticides, for example, or leaving out the well-being of people who farm the land.
“In Indigenous sciences, it’s not possible to separate the knowledge from the ethics of the responsibility for that knowledge — whereas in Western science, we do that all the time,” said Robin Wall Kimmerer, the director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment at the State University of New York in Syracuse and an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. The scientific method is designed to be indifferent to morals or values, she adds. “Indigenous knowledge puts them back in.”
Ideally, the shared use of Indigenous knowledge can help mend broken relationships between Indigenous and Western communities.
In upstate New York, Ms. Kimmerer points to sweetgrass, a native plant used for traditional basketry. She was approached by a tribe concerned about the decline of the plant and looking for a solution.
Government regulations had already restricted its harvest. “One thing people often think about is, is it being overharvested?” Ms. Kimmerer said. She helped to conduct studies that ultimately showed that harvesting sweetgrass, following Indigenous protocols, is the very thing that will help it to thrive. “If you just leave it alone, it starts to decline.”
For her, that speaks to a core flaw in Western approaches to land management: the belief that human interaction is necessarily harmful to ecosystems. “That’s one of the reasons Native people were systematically removed from what are today’s national parks, because of this idea that people and nature can’t coexist in a good way.” But Indigenous knowledge, Ms. Kimmerer said, is really all about, ‘Oh yes we can, and we cultivate practices for how that is possible,’” she said.
While combating wildfires last year, Australian authorities turned to Aboriginal practices. While researchers have connected the severity of the fires to climate change, Ms. Kimmerer added that how Australia’s land has been managed in the modern era may have also played a role. Aboriginal people had “been managing that land in a fire landscape for millenniums, ” she said. “The fact that Indigenous science has been ignored is a contributing factor to the fires there.”
As the world increasingly recognizes the accomplishments of many Indigenous communities that successfully coexist with ecosystems, there is much for Western society to learn.
“We have this notion that Western science is the pathway to truth. We don’t really even entertain the possibility that it could come from somewhere else,” said Ms. Kimmerer. “Resource managers, land managers need to understand that there are multiple ways of knowing.”
High Canadian fees being used (along with UK and USA) to help justify increase:
Australian citizenship application fees are being jacked up to recoup more of the processing costs.
The standard fee for Australian citizenship by conferral will soar from $285 to $490, an increase of 72 per cent.
People applying for citizenship by descent or under other situations will also pay significantly more.
So will those seeking to renounce, resume or apply for evidence of Australian citizenship.
Immigration Minister Alex Hawke insists the July 1 price hike will better reflect the cost of handling increasingly complex applications, which take longer to process.
Mr Hawke said it was the first change to citizenship application fees since 2016.
“Based on existing fees, the government is only recovering approximately 50 per cent of the costs of processing citizenship applications,” he said on Thursday.
“The cost of citizenship applications remains comparable with other countries.”
Mr Hawke said the cost of citizenship would still be lower than the UK, Canada and US.
The decision is guaranteed to raise eyebrows given the impact of coronavirus border closures, which have driven a wrecking ball through migration into Australia.
Another example of how the personal trumps the official narratives by highlighting inhumanity (as was the case with Alan Kurdi or the Kamloops residential school deaths):
The 3-year-old girl was born in Australia, in a tiny town called Biloela, far from the big cities of Sydney and Melbourne. But her parents were asylum seekers from Sri Lanka and living in a country that heavily discourages illegal migration, so the government sent them to a faraway island while deciding their fate.
This week the girl, Tharnicaa Murugappan, returned to mainland Australia, but not for the reason her family had hoped — she was medically evacuated to Perth, where she is now battling a blood infection in a hospital after a lengthy illness. Supporters of the family say she was given only painkillers for nearly two weeks at the remote government detention facility while her fever rose, and she now suffers from pneumonia, which led to her blood infection.
Tharnicaa and her family, often called the “Biloela family” among Australians, are the most high-profile asylum seekers in Australia. In a country that is inured to criticism from international human rights organizations over its “draconian” immigration policy, the detentions of Tharnicaa and her older sister have drawn outrage.
Tharnicaa’s illness has renewed calls for the family to be released from detention and prompted candlelight vigils and protests across Australia. Over half a million people have signed a petition demanding the family be returned to Biloela, a town of about 5,800 that is 260 miles northwest of Brisbane. Politicians from both sides have called for the family to be released from detention while maintaining support for the hard-line immigration policies that put them there. Karen Andrews, the home affairs minister, has been so inundated with calls about the case that her voicemail specifies that anyone wanting to speak to her about it should do so in writing.
The Murugappan family — mother Kokilapathmapriya Nadesalingam, father Nadesalingam Murugappan, Tharnicaa and her 6-year-old sister, Kopika — are the only people held in the Christmas Island detention center, which is 1,000 miles north of the Australian mainland. The two sisters, who both were born in Australia, are the only two children currently being held in immigration detention in Australia. Unlike the United States, Australia does not automatically grant citizenship to children born in the country, and the two girls are ineligible as the children of “unlawful maritime arrivals.”
The case is unusual in that the small rural town of Biloela, which has been leading the fight to get the family back, is a politically conservative place. But when the family was whisked away by immigration officials in 2018 after their claims for asylum were rejected and their temporary visas expired, locals weren’t thinking about politics. This case “wasn’t about politics or asylum seekers, it was about our friends,” said Simone Cameron, a Biloela local and friend of the family.
The family has been held on Christmas Island since 2019, as they fight government efforts to deport them to Sri Lanka.
Late last month, supporters of the family said, Ms. Nadesalingam and Mr. Murugappan started raising concerns with International Health and Medical Services, the private company that provides health care for the Christmas Island detention center, after Tharnicaa developed a fever on May 24. Requests for antibiotics were ignored, and the family was only given over-the-counter painkillers and a fact sheet about common flu symptoms, even as her fever increased and she started vomiting.
Tharnicaa was hospitalized on Christmas Island on June 6, according to the supporters. The next day, she was evacuated, along with her mother, to a hospital in the mainland city of Perth. She is recovering, but doctors are still trying to find the cause of the infection.
“It was the pure negligence of them not actually giving Tharnicaa antibiotics that led to her developing pneumonia,” a family friend, Angela Fredericks, said in a phone interview on Thursday. She added that the family had to “beg and fight” for Tharnicaa to be evacuated to the mainland.
In previous statements, Home Affairs Minister Karen Andrews has defended Tharnicaa’s treatment, saying she was evacuated to Perth as soon as it was recommended. International Health and Medical Services did not respond to requests for comment.
Multicultural Meanderings 