The images, beamed around the globe in the past few days, of hordes of drunken young European-Australians in Sydney attacking their Arab-Australian fellow citizens have again exposed the racist underbelly of this island continent of 20 million people. The attacks began on Sunday when a crowd of about 5,000 descended on Sydney's southern beaches and surrounding suburbs, assaulting men and women of Middle Eastern appearance. Many of these young men and women were retaliating for assaults on lifeguards, which they say were carried out by people of Lebanese background. Prime Minister John Howard has sought to play down the significance of these events: 'Violence, thuggery, loutish behaviour, smashing people's property, intimidating people - all of those things are breaches of the law,' he said. 'I don't think the actions should be given some kind of special status because they occur against the background of this or that.' Australians can be intolerant and xenophobic, although one in four of them was born overseas. As Peter Maher, a media analyst, said in 2001, there is a prevailing attitude among many Australians of 'the more Muslims we have in this country the more problems we're going to get'. The history of this former British colony is littered with examples of racial prejudice and the politics of fear. In the 1860s, Chinese miners were killed in riots and, until 1966, Australian governments adopted a White Australia Policy, which prevented non-European migrants from entering the country. One of the most shameful political traditions in Australia is for political leaders to play on xenophobic fears about 'hordes' of people descending on Australia's uninhabited northern borders. The bloodshed and violence this week has to be seen in this context of a them-versus-us mentality, which plays on the cultural differences involved. The current hostility towards Islamic and Arab-Australians is being fuelled in part by the media and the major political parties - Mr Howard's conservative coalition government and the Labor Party (ALP), which holds power in every Australian state. The New South Wales government's Anti-Discrimination Board released a report in 2003 on media prejudice against Islamic and Middle Eastern Australians. It found that a climate of 'moral panic' had been created by the combination of the September 11 attacks, the global war on terror, the Howard government's campaign to strengthen Australia's borders against asylum seekers, and high-profile cases in Sydney against Lebanese youths convicted of rape. Elements of the Australian media, the report found, are using race as 'the reference point, the cause or the catalyst for change or problems'. It highlighted cases where right-wing media commentators sought to link terrorist attacks by al-Qaeda to Australian Muslim communities, without a shred of evidence. Meanwhile, the Howard government, supported by the ALP, has passed tough new anti-terror laws. Last month officials clamoured to take credit for the arrests of a dozen Arab-Australians allegedly plotting terrorist attacks in Sydney and Melbourne. Such rhetoric inevitably reinforces community suspicion and hostility towards Arab-Australians. That impact could have been mitigated if, as one ethnic leader put it this week, Australian political leaders had 'run a national anti-racist campaign alongside the anti-terror campaign, to make it clear that Australia and its government does not seek to stigmatise a whole group of people because of the actions of a few'. Hopefully it's not too late to calm the waters. Greg Barns is a political commentator in Australia and a former Australian government adviser
