Racism

Lefties and other decent folk are wetting their pants at the prospect of that beacon of excellence Barack Obama and his telegenic family visiting our shores next month.

Since coming onto the public radar, Obama has achieved pop-star status as the great hope for our shared dreams of equality.

But is this really what he represents?

Continue reading "If minorities want equality, don’t look at the Obamas" »

Everyone looks at my neck and thinks I’m a red-necked Indian-bashing racist.

The day before Australia Day, I caught the bus to work. Sitting up the back, sweltering in the heat and breathing in the sweat of the others condemned to the ride, I was tapped on the shoulder. The man behind me, breath heavy with booze, declared me a “sister of the Australian cause”. 

Confused and a little scared, I tried to ignore him. But the curious journo in me won out, and I asked him what he was talking about. Beaming and red-faced, he pointed to my neck, and THAT tattoo.

Continue reading "My Southern Cross tattoo now brands me as a racist" »

I’m sitting in my lounge room looking at the swag of contemporary political philosophy books I own, simmering with resentment at the noise the uneducated wogs downstairs are making.

My family moved to Balmain when I was a teenager and until recently I’ve mainly lived in the Inner West of Sydney. I tried the Eastern Suburbs for a while but decided it was too cashed up and pretentious for my left-wing sensibilities. So I stayed close to Glebe and Newtown, went on the right marches, studied the right subjects at uni, and voted for the right political party.

But a couple of years ago my boyfriend and I found ourselves priced out of the inner city rental market - a direct consequence, I told myself, of my lack of materialism and desire to pursue a modest creative life.

Continue reading "How I became a nasty little racist" »

As we head towards yet another Australia Day, a lot is being raised and debated about how we see ourselves as a nation, as a people, and as a part of a global community. Tensions have arisen of late regarding topics of border security and the safety of foreigners on our shores.

But perhaps, most intriguingly, as an aside to these debates, there has been a strong suggestion that the Bogan identity, which has plagued Australians for decades, is no longer being worn as a badge of honour, but rather, and rightfully, as one of shame.

Could we finally be seeing the end to our redneck wonderland? Are Australians favouring intellect over yobbism, manners over crassness, compassion over blind patriotism? When articulated in these straightforward binaries, one can only wonder - why it has taken so long?

Continue reading "Alas poor bogan I knew him well" »

We should cut the coppers some slack as they grapple with the public handling of the attacks on Indian students in Melbourne.

Policing has long been a closed culture. Less than a generation ago the only way police reporters could get stories was to spend months or even years hanging around the Police Club, drinking with detectives and slowly building enough trust to get the inside running on big stories. These days, whenever a cat gets stuck up a tree there’s an expectation that an all-in press conference will follow within the hour to discuss its breed, name, and how the pesky little varmint got up there in the first place. 

There is no point in police complaining about this. It’s a reflection of the public’s legitimate conviction that information should flow freely from every arm of government. People have a right to know what is happening in their community and, these days, it is the job of the police to tell them.

Continue reading "Police credibility decamps in a northerly direction" »

DAVID Penberthy is spot on with his piece on Australia Day - and I’m not saying that because I’m some boss-schmoozing suck up or because I’m protecting some fat paycheck (I’m seriously not).

The day’s been bastardised by bogans and for a while now has been descending into a celebration of banal racism.

But Penbo does not go far enough when he says we need to transform the day into a celebration of belonging to this country.

Continue reading "Our national flag has been highjacked by hillbillies" »

Amid the so-far unfounded speculation over whether the murder of 21-year-old student Nitin Garg in Melbourne was racially motivated, it’s worth remembering what we do know: a brutal killer is at large in Melbourne.

According to his housemates who spoke to a doctor at the hospital hours after their friend was killed last weekend, the young man was slashed from the abdomen up to the heart.

“Whoever did this knows how to kill,” Sandeep Sandeep, who lived with Garg, told The Age.

Continue reading "Crying wolf on racism" »

What really defines these three aspects of our society: Its race or colour? Peace or violence? Street crime or racial crime?

You might have thought that race, peace and street crime are more commonly seen in our society. People generally do. But take a second to think about your answers. 

To my mind, every person who lives in Australia should be given a ‘fair go’, an ideal that many Australians aim to hold. Australia was built by immigrants, and the influence of immigrants stretches broadly throughout society.

Continue reading "We need to face up to the reality of race based crime" »

Yesterday The Punch went to Footscray in Melbourne’s West to talk to its people about crime and racism following the stabbing death of a young Indian student in their suburb.

Footscray is not a particularly nice place. That’s not to say it’s a bad place, but there’s a reason the yuppies in the “run rabbit run” Melbourne tourism ads didn’t play hide and seek around Footscray station.

Footscray is the kind of suburb that is pretty typical of outer urban suburbs throughout the world: a working class suburb close enough to the city that becomes a cheap base for brand new arrivals to live and set up shop. The suburb’s density and multicultural population means it often described in terms like “cultural melting pot” by people who see it as a great source of authentic Pho soup.
It’s also the suburb where 21-year-old Nitin Garg was stabbed to death on his way to work at the local Hungry Jacks.

Continue reading "Talking crime, violence and racism with Footscray" »

Recently on ABC’s Q&A panellist Todd Sampson (from The Gruen Transfer and CEO of ad agency Leo Burnett) insisted that if we do not regard racism as a serious issue in Australia “we have stuffed our heads up our butts”.

Not only are such proclamations damaging to our national spirit, they are fundamentally false. If anything, the opposite is true.

Try this experiment - something I’ve done consistently over the past decade - ask Australians from a minority background what racism they have experienced.

Continue reading "We’re not as racist as people think" »

Imagine our disgust the other night when we went to the Marconi Italian Club only to discover the joint has been overrun by wogs.

“Table for four, signore?” the lippy waiter asked incomprehensibly, so I shot back: “Don’t signore me champ, this is Australia and I didn’t come here to be insulted with your jibber-jabber.”

Speaking slowly and a little bit more loudly to help him understand, I explained that all we wanted was a quick tea - nuggets and chips for the kids, a steak for me and a bowl of spaghetti bolognese for my lady wife.

Continue reading "Speak English and just bring us the damned gelati" »

The Sydney broadcaster, Alan Jones, interviewed me recently on his morning radio program. During a conversation about my contention that we should have a national discussion about our future population, Jones asked me about Muslim immigration to Australia. Let me quote from the transcript:

Jones: ….you’re saying that any migration program should be in the national interest. You further say that, basically, in all of these issues we should be taking the public with us. Right, should we therefore be worried about the growth of the Muslim population just as people are concerned in Europe, you’re not allowed to talk about this?

Andrews: Well firstly I think you should be able to talk about it Alan. It is ridiculous if you can’t talk about any subject and in fact what happens when a subject becomes politically incorrect to talk about, then it ends up with a backlash. I think part of the Hanson movement, back in the early 1990s, was because some subjects were simply said to be off the table, they couldn’t be discussed and a lot of Australians wanted to discuss them.

Continue reading "This isn’t racism, it’s called democracy" »

Twenty years ago myself and five friends painted our faces black and performed the Jackson Jive skit on Hey Hey It’s Saturday to great acclaim.

Two nights ago we did exactly the same skit and we’ve been pilloried for it.

It’s no defence to say that we didn’t think it wouldn’t have caused offence, because we’re all grown men now, not uni students, and we should have known better.

Continue reading "Hey Hey’s Jackson Jive explain: why we did it" »

7.30pm That’s a wrap. The online polls from news.com.au and other sites today show decisively that most people didn’t find the Jackson Jive skit offensive. You can follow how the reaction unfolded in the post below.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think it should have aired. It was one of the most offensively racist things I’ve seen on television in years. But there wasn’t any malice in it. The doctors seem like good blokes. Going blackface was a mistake.

6.33pm: Blast from the past but he’s still around - Australia’s original blackface artist Louis Beers, also known as King Billy Cokebottle, is still around. His rather rudimentary website is here (may offend).

6.21pm Global report Associated Press has filed an extensive story from its Adelaide bureau. It zeros in on the fact that the performers were in blackface, explaining:

Continue reading "How reaction to the Jackson Jive skit unfolded" »

Have we grown up as a nation at all in the past 20 years? There’s never been an event more perfectly designed to answer that question than last night’s Hey Hey it’s Saturday reunion special.

The Jackson Jive skit that sent Australian conversations into melt-down from about 10.30 last night is like a smelly time capsule that’s been opened up, in front of 2.6 million of us, and a guest no less.

And in case there was any doubt about it, the guest’s face immediately give away what a stinker it was. The Hey Hey reunion specials should now be put reburied for good.

Continue reading "Hey Hey BOOM!" »

Update 11.30am: Click here for the latest reaction on this story from Australia and around the world.

Update 10.50pm: Daryl Somers just apologised to Harry Connick for the skit. Connick said if he’d known it was going to be on he would never have agreed to be a part of the show.

Harry Connick looked like he wanted the ground to open up and swallow him tonight when as a judge on Red Faces on the Hey Hey it’s Saturday reunion he was confronted with a troop of black and white minstrels taking the piss out of the Jackson Five.

The American crooner, possibly sensing a backlash back home, gave the Jackson Jive act a big fat zero, and said if the show was on air in the US it would be off air again immediately, “Hey Hey No Show”.

The Jackson Jive, complete with cheap afro wigs and boot polished faces had been on Red Faces 20 years ago. The joke might have been funny then, but have things changed?

Continue reading "Did Hey Hey undo all its good work in two minutes?" »

Has anyone else noticed there was something missing from the reaction to last week’s failed terrorism plot to stage a Last Stand at Holsworthy?

I pricked up my ears and sniffed the air but try as I might I could no longer detect a dog whistle, that barely audible call to channel justified fear into something altogether more ugly.

In a sign that the Howard era is finally over, both the Prime Minister and the besieged Opposition Leader exhibited a fundamental decency in playing the men and not the race.

Continue reading "Down boy - no more whistling to tune of terror" »

Violence against Indians in Australia is now so out of control that Indians have started attacking each other.

Not that you would know this from reading the hysterical coverage in the Indian press, because the latest case has been deliberately shorn of one key fact so that the white clique which runs this country can be held to account for an Indian bloke beating up an Indian woman journalist.

The ABC did a very thorough job on its AM program this morning documenting the extent to which sections of the Indian media has gone to maintain this beat-up about being beaten up.

Continue reading "Now even Indians are attacking Indians" »

Ed’s note: Stephen is the BBC reporter who asked former Telstra CEO Sol Trujillo whether Australians are racist. Here he explains why he asked the question.

G’day, mate! Strewth. Did you hear what Kevin said about that Mexican and his amigos. Gave it to him straight, cobber, like a true blue Aussie. Senor Sol won’t be going walkabout near our billabong any time soon.

Offensive, isn’t it? And it’s offensive because it’s patronising. It’s a tired cliché that portrays Australians falsely as hicks and provincials and so distorts and devalues a modern country.

Which is presumably exactly what all those sombreros and cheap Mexican tunes and words like “adios” were meant to do. Rather than take Sol Trujillo on his merits, it was his background that was the salient point about him.

Continue reading "Is Australia too immature to examine its racism?" »

From the Chk Chk Boom girl to the anti-Indian ratbags in Melbourne, Australians are racist. I’ve come to this conclusion not because I’ve got three university degrees but because I’ve spent the past four decades being asked if I’m a curry-muncher.

Not in a rude or insulting or abusive way, well, generally not. But in that genial, good-natured, piss-takey Australian way.

Which is still racist, and which explains why so many foreigners – to use a popular and racist Australian term for non-Australians – regard us as such.

Continue reading "Are we racists? Chk Chk Chk boom we’re racists" »

Update: The Times of India is running this as its second lead story, after the Air France crash, under the headline “Australian police punch, stomp on peaceful protestors”. It also reports local travel agents saying people are cancelling planned holidays to Australia. Screenshots below.

You’d hope that only time you’d see this photo would be in, oh, 2017 when Rudd’s been in power far too long, and half a dozen students who think he doesn’t stand for their generation stage a tired protest ahead of a campus visit where the PM is due to declare victory in the education revolution.

But no. It was New Delhi. Yesterday.

This doesn’t need to be a long recap of the alleged racist attacks on Indians in Melbourne. You can read about it here and here. I’ve included some links to how the Indian press is reporting it.

But I think the comments below might be a good place to voice condemnation of any race-related violence against Indians or anyone else. Over to you…

Continue reading "This race row with India is getting out of hand" »

Two Fridays ago we were all blissfully unaware of the impending doom about to be unleashed by those damn Mexicans and their unusual domestic arrangements with pigs. By Monday April 27 we were in the brace position – suspiciously eyeing anyone who appeared to be of Latin origin – and being warned not to cause a run on the national supply of Tamiflu.

By midnight that night all pilots in charge of flights coming from affected countries were ordered to report any passengers with flu-like symptoms, while TV news bulletins led with the installation of thermal imaging scanners at the airports. The NSW Government rushed through emergency powers to detain people with suspected cases in their homes. But swine flu jokes were already rampant as the death toll from suspected cases in Mexico climbed to the low hundreds.

Then the unthinkable happened – a 23-month-old became the first person to die of suspected H1N1 in the United States. The UNITED STATES!

Continue reading "The racism in our response to the swine flu outbreak" »