By Maree Roberts
At a recent National Conference of Federated Ethnic Communities Councils (FECCA), Pauline Hanson and the attacks on migrants were squarely on the agenda. However, the responses of the ethnic representatives at the conference (and more generally) tell us much about the role of the organised ethnic lobby and their relationship to the ALP, the failure of the ALP's "multiculturalism" and the lobby's inability to combat the latest racist attacks.
Surprisingly, one of the most interesting speakers at the conference was the former Fraser government minister for Aboriginal affairs Robert Manne who raised some key issues, albeit from a conservative point of view.
Manne identified two versions of multiculturalism. The first, which he supports, is the "conservative" approach taken by Fraser and his then adviser, Petro Giorgio, now a government MP. The second, which he labelled the "radical" version, he explicitly identified with the ALP.
He explained the current upsurge in the race debate as follows: the ALP came to power and because of its close links with ethnic communities the "trendy" multicultural issues were given priority over the bread and butter issues of "mainstream" (read WASP) society. This resulted in the alienation of working-class supporters from the ALP, he said, and the current support for Hanson amongst WASPs is a backlash against the "radical" version of multiculturalism.
Certainly, the most vocal of Hanson's supporters have been rural as well as urban men who have voiced dissatisfaction with the priority they think has been given to issues which do not reflect their own values — Ted Drane, the pro-gun lobbyist in Victoria; the conservative mayor of Port Lincoln in South Australia, and Rodney Cooper, an anti-gay campaigner from Tasmania's bible-belt north-west, for example. None were ever likely to support the ALP, but it is safe to assume that there are many working-class men and women who share their views.
The period of Labor's multicultural agenda was also the period of the Prices and Incomes Accord. Living standards for working-class people, and for some of the middle class, declined. Labor ignored the plight of wage earners (this included many people from migrant backgrounds), and scapegoats had to be found — in this case, newly arrived Australians.
The Liberals are perpetuating Labor's fiction that it is the newly arrived who are responsible for the decline in living standards. After all, if working-class people were told who the real culprits were, (that is, if they were told about the massive shift of wealth from wages to profits that occurred during the 1980s), they might well vote for neither Labor nor Liberal.
The essential feature of class society is its ability to divide people through the profit-driven insistence on competition and individualised responses to social conditions. Thus, wage earners are divided into more and less privileged varieties. This is partly responsible for the fragmentation of the union movement, a fragmentation which has been exploited by successive governments and by business. Similarly, ethnicity has successfully been used to divide working-class people.
What then was the reality of the "radical multicultural agenda"? In essence, the ALP supported a post-modern version of multiculturalism, one far removed from a genuinely radical multiculturalism which would have challenged the very basis of the divisions within the working class.
Certain Â鶹´«Ã½ of the middle-class took to Labor's multiculturalism like ducks to water. What they were actually supporting, however, was the appropriation of culture by commercialism, sold to the middle-class through conspicuous consumption. This multiculturalism meant the ability to fill one's house with Third World or Aboriginal art, the appropriation of cultural symbols like ethnic music and food, reverence for the vestiges of culture as it was being obliterated.
It did not mean that middle-class WASPs welcomed ethnic people into their ranks in greater numbers — there are still very few ethnic professionals and they are represented in tiny numbers in the higher echelons of the Australian public service. And it did not challenge the pitting of unskilled workers against the newly arrived in the labour market.
The culture of "difference" was the essence of the ALP's multicultural agenda: to value the "other" without challenging the social relations which relegate those others to the bottom of the social heap, from where they rarely rise. While it gave tacit support to the aspirations of ethnic groups through grants programs, the ALP cut immigration intakes, tightened family reunion rules and frog-marched "illegal" refugees off to remote camps.
Left support for the multicultural agenda should be based on an appreciation of the oppression that migrants experience, not on "valuing the other".
This ALP agenda is being developed further by the Liberal government yet ethnic organisations seem to be doing little to break the political nexus. Philip Ruddock, the minister for immigration, was invited to the FECCA conference. After telling the conference that the government would probably use administrative means to implement the cut in welfare benefits for newly arrived migrants that failed to get through the senate, Ruddock was applauded on his way out! The rights of the newly arrived were sacrificed to the ethnic communities' fear of losing their grants.
Strategies which do not rely on deals with the government of the day must be developed by these communities if they are to have any chance of gaining an independent voice and successfully defending the rights of all migrants. The role of the left should be to explore and unite with those ethnic groups which are poised to fight for their rights. The ethnic lobby, which relied so heavily on its influence with the ALP, is now coming unstuck. However, the lessons are being very slowly learnt. First lesson: divided we fall.