Adventures in Correspondentland (41 page)

Never in Australia have I seen anything quite so stirring as the sight of Indigenous Australians turning up at parliament dressed in T-shirts emblazoned with the word ‘Sorry' and leaving in new tops printed with ‘Thanks'. Interviewing members of the Stolen Generations on the lawn outside parliament, where raucous big-screen cheers had greeted Kevin Rudd's speech, I lost count of the number who cried openly on air. But the guest I remember most vividly was Senator Barnaby Joyce, whom we had lined up to speak on behalf of the Sorry sceptics.

He, too, arrived with reddened eyes, having been overcome himself by the immense emotion of the day. While all of us knew that a sorry should never be mistaken for a solution, that two-syllable word, uttered thrice, had signalled a definitive break with the past. By tackling this piece of unfinished business, Kevin Rudd also performed a much-needed repair job to his country's international reputation. After all, in assumed Australia the whitefellas had always treated the blackfellas with cruelty and indifference.

When it came to racism in Australia, the story I found myself wanting to write was at odds with the story I ended up reporting.
Probably the reality lay somewhere in between. In a country so easily stereotyped as a redneck nation, where racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia lurked so close to the surface, could not the case also be made for Australian tolerance? After all, the comparative success of its multicultural experiment suggested that nobler impulses were also at work.

Just after the war, over 90 per cent of the 7.5 million people living in Australia were Anglo-Celtic. Since then, the population had tripled, with 44 per cent of Australians either born overseas or having at least one parent from a foreign country. Given the strength of nativism in the early history of modern Australia and the durability of the White Australia policy until the late-1960s, surely it was remarkable that such massive demographic changes had not unleashed an angrier backlash? I thought so.

Part of the reason why the Cronulla riot was so very jolting, and caused so much national introspection, was because these kinds of racist eruptions were so exceptional. To turn their white trash-talk back on them, could not the rioters themselves, with Aussie flags clasped tight around their shoulders and the Southern Cross inked into their skin, be described as un-Australian in their violent rejection of newcomers?

Like Cronulla, the rise of Pauline Hanson, that blow-dried Bogan Boadicea, appeared to confirm to international audiences that everything we thought about Australian intolerance was true. Yet Hansonism proved a short-lived phenomenon, and its onetime figurehead was now a figure of fun. She had even become a contestant on
Dancing with the Stars
, offering cast-iron proof of her has-been status.

But it was also impossible to ignore the evidence of intolerance. Not all of the attacks against Indian students in Melbourne and
Sydney were racially motivated, but we interviewed enough of the victims to know that the kicks and punches were usually accompanied by racist abuse. Not all of the opposition to the construction of an Islamic school in the rural town of Camden, New South Wales, was based on raw Islamophobia. Yet it was hard to do the story complete justice without quoting the local Pauline Hanson-clone who feared her children might grow up speaking ‘Islamic'.

When first I arrived here, I was surprised to hear the word ‘Abo' so frequently used, not least by well-remunerated and supposedly well-educated Australians who should have known better, and no doubt did. The word ‘Lebo' was also modish at the time, and hinted at the creeping Islamophobia in the aftermath of 9/11 and Bali. ‘Paki' was another word that was unacceptable elsewhere but fairly commonplace here. Also perplexing for a new arrival was the use of the word ‘wog'. To utter it in my homeland, of course, would be to immediately identify oneself as a thuggish racist, which I knew not to be the case in Australia. But was it not dispiriting that newly arrived immigrants adopted a slur as an ethnic badge in order to assimilate more quickly? Again, I thought so.

For all that, much of what would be identified in other countries as racial intolerance could more accurately be characterised in Australia as racial insensitivity. It was a product not necessarily of dark-hearted malevolence but flippancy, tactlessness and the occasionally misdirected Aussie sense of humour. A patronising ignorance, if you like, rather than a sinister xenophobia. But whereas in other countries much of this kind of racial playfulness would be deemed politically incorrect, socially unacceptable or plain insulting, in Australia it was commonly brushed away with a laugh or a friendly punch to the upper arm.

Racism here often came with a built-in ‘it was only meant as a joke' defence that simply would not cut it elsewhere. The Melbourne academic Waleed Aly put it well in observing that Australia had a high level of low-level racism. To borrow two unlovely terms from the world of economics, the macro story was encouraging but the micro side was a lot more ugly.

That helps explain why a controversy like the
Hey Hey It's Saturday
blackface skit, at which the US singer Harry Connick Jnr expressed such horror, caused such a storm abroad and such befuddlement here at the international response. Visiting Washington at the time, the then deputy prime minister Julia Gillard was unapologetic. Indeed, she explained that the skit where five men ‘blacked up' as minstrels was ‘meant to be humorous and would be taken in that spirit by most Australians'. What she had inadvertently admitted, however, was that Australia has a higher tolerance for intolerance than most other Western countries.

Perhaps you could call it political incorrectness gone mad. During the blackface controversy, I found myself in almost-agreement with Bill O'Reilly of Fox News, who commented on his show that the skit ‘is not representative of Australia. This is just a bad decision by stupid producers.' Then again, it
was
aired here, and it would have stirred relatively little controversy, I suspect, had not an American been on the judging panel.

Contrast this to the US and Britain, where the skit, and its antediluvian humour, would likely never have made it past the first production meeting, much less been broadcast on a mainstream channel. In Australia, it got through, not because the producers were racist or malevolent, but because they thought it was within the bounds of the funny and the acceptable. Perhaps nobody sounded the alarm beforehand because they feared being labelled
a wowser or someone who took themselves too seriously, which is arguably considered a graver national misdemeanour than some flippant, old-fashioned racial stereotyping.

On immigration, I understood the social compact whereby Australians were prepared to countenance large waves of authorised immigration so long as the country's borders were stoutly defended against unauthorised offshore arrivals. But, again, how could one report on the boat-people debate without reference to the paranoiac media reaction of the tabloids and current-affairs shows to the arrival of each new boat, or the cynicism of the nation's political leaders, with their xenophobic insinuations? The asylum-seeker debate was conducted as if the refugees heading for Australia's shores were an abstraction, with the term ‘boat people' almost shorn of its human meaning.

‘INVASION' was the front-page headline of Sydney's
Daily Telegraph
midway through 2010, in response to a surge in the number of boat arrivals, which was arrant nonsense. There had been a rise in the numbers for sure, but, according to the UNHCR, Australia ranks 47th in the global list of refugee-hosting countries, which is 68th on a per-capita basis or 91st in terms of national wealth.

How could the legacy of John Howard be assessed without reference to his refusal to condemn Pauline Hanson at the height of her popularity, or the dog-whistle excesses of the Tampa 2001 election? How could one cover the first major speech of the new prime minister Julia Gillard, in July 2010, which tellingly was devoted to the question of asylum seekers, without reporting its most quotable line: that the debate ‘should not be constrained by self-censorship or political correctness', which read like a barely coded invitation to the redneck fringe?

That speech, delivered at the Lowy Institute in Sydney, in which Gillard also tried to elucidate the boat-people question and to appeal to Australia's better angels, served as a useful historical text. She was attempting to elevate the immigration debate while at the same time recognising that baser instincts often prevailed, to which she also wanted to appeal. It was a schizophrenic speech for a schizophrenic nation. The Liberal politician Scott Morrison also personified this strained dichotomy. Tough on immigration, prior to entering politics he had been the head of Tourism Australia.

Just as I struggled to fully describe the true character of Australian xenophobia and racism, I found it hard to make complete sense of its politics, and, in particular, the startling popularity of Kevin Rudd. A few weeks after arriving in Australia in 2006, I had met Rudd in Canberra, where I was chairing a panel discussion. He was then the shadow foreign-affairs spokesman and, from first handshake to parting thanks, I found him to be the most singularly charmless of men: unpleasant, intellectually superior and seemingly devoid of lightness or humour.

New to Australian politics, I rhapsodised afterwards about Rudd's fellow panellist that afternoon, Lindsay Tanner, the then shadow finance minister, and asked if great things were expected of him. But everyone thought I must have been a complete dunce, since Rudd was so obviously the coming man.

Three months later, when Rudd became the leader of the Labor Party, after his predecessor Kim Beazley had mixed up the television presenter Rove McManus with our old friend Karl Rove, I did not even bother breaking off from watching the second Test in Adelaide to file a report back to London.

In late 2006, so complete was John Howard's domination of Australian politics, and so robust the Australian economy, that a fifth term beckoned. Certainly, on the basis of our first meeting, I did not think that Rudd posed a major threat; and, in any case, on that fourth day at the Adelaide Oval England had Australia reeling and looked poised to level the series, 1–1. In the cricket, the turnaround was instantaneous, with Shane Warne performing his usual fifth-day party trick of making England's middle order disappear. In Canberra, Kevin Rudd, another kind of spin king, was about to do much the same to John Winston Howard.

What made Rudd's rise all the more riveting and relevant to a global audience was the extent to which it showed how the politics of 9/11 had shifted. In the November 2001 federal election, John Howard had, of course, benefited enormously from the attacks of 11 September. As Australia signed up to the Bush administration's war on terror, he appeared before the electorate as a strong national leader and tapped – and heightened – fears about outsiders during the Tampa crisis. It helped, too, that he had been in Washington that morning and seen the smoke billow from the Pentagon.

By 2007, however, the politics of 9/11 had boomeranged, with Howard receiving much the same clobbering as Tony Blair, who was about to leave Downing Street, and George W. Bush, as he limped to the end of his lame-duck second term. Whether it was Iraq, his ‘deputy sheriff' tag, David Hicks or his refusal to ratify Kyoto, Howard's closeness to Bush had contaminated his prime ministership with a lethal virus. What made Howard even more vulnerable was that, unlike his great heroine Margaret Thatcher, he had not managed after ten years in power to tame the labour movement. Now, the unions mobilised against him over unpopular
workplace laws that, in the eyes of many, had violated Australia's unwritten fairness doctrine.

To see this, and to film it, we headed to the annual Granny Smith Apple Festival held in John Howard's suburban Sydney constituency, Bennelong, in the run-up to election day. From a viewing stand that he shared with a man dressed as a fruit, Howard had to endure a rowdy parade that appeared before him like a cavalcade of disgruntled ghosts. A middle-aged man with military medals hanging from his chest heckled the prime minister for sending diggers to Iraq. A placard-waving member of the Australian Greens protested the Howard government's refusal to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. There was a group of gay-rights activists, spinning rainbow-coloured umbrellas between their fingers, and Indigenous-rights campaigners holding aloft the gold, black and red colours of the Aboriginal flag.

Even the marchers who did not directly assail Mr Howard confronted him with reminders of his troubles. The Chinese dragons swerving from one side of the road to the other brought to mind the ethnic changes that had overtaken this corner of suburban Sydney. So, too, did the Korean marching bands parading in stricter formation. For many of the 33 years that he had represented the seat, Bennelong was a largely white-bread constituency, but nowadays its polyglot population made it as colourful and multiracial as the procession passing before him.