Australia is a racist country.
No, that’s not a reactionary statement. There is evidence, research papers and data everywhere, all in the freedom of an internet search.
Still, it seems some people get angry when the quiet bit is said out loud. Despite all the evidence available, some Australians just aren’t fans of facing reality. It doesn’t particularly matter who is making the point, whether it’s the media or on social media, there is a willingness to dogpile on anyone who dares make it: Australia is a racist country.
This week, senior ABC journalist Sarah Tingle came under fire for saying at a Sydney Writers Festival panel: “We are a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been and it’s very depressing”.
The subsequent backlash from conservative media in Australia was fierce. News Corp’s Australian claimed it “reveals the depth of partisan rot at the ABC”. The Advertiser described Tingle as “freelancing as a left-wing warrior”. The pile-on also included called for her to be sacked as the Political Correspondent for 7:30 and for the ABC to be defunded.
The ABC board has since said that the comment did not meet the ABC’s editorial standards and has counselled her for a “lack of supporting information”. Tingle then released a 1400 word statement on the ABC corporate website, where she says that, “I regret that when I was making these observations at the Writers’ Festival the nature of the free-flowing panel discussion means they were not surrounded by every quote substantiating them which would have – and had – been included in what I had said earlier on the ABC.”
However, the idea that referring to the reality of racism requires constant substantiation through evidence is immoderate.
Through an opinion piece in The Age and Sydney Morning Herald, Australia’s Racial Discrimination Commissioner Giridharan Sivaraman reflected that, “It is often the person who calls out racism in Australia that faces far more scrutiny than the racism itself.”
He then described how this behaviour has led to a “timidness” in Australian media and beyond, where there is a chronic lack of challenge to the status quo of not just surface-level racism but structural and institutional racism too.
Firstly, the elephant in the room is the fact our country is built on racism. Existing as a settler-state on stolen land through invasion, the denial of First Nations sovereignty and ongoing genocide – this permeates through the entire structure of Australia.
Series of policies reflect this origin, including the infamous White Australia policy, officially called the Immigration Restriction Act, to specifically limit non-British migration and create a white nation.
The evidence from Australian researchers and academics has been stacking, using stats from just the last 4 years, we can establish a firm evidence base for “Australia is racist”.
This isn’t to berate but to educate – to make a not too hard-to-find list of evidence for a claim that is constantly shot down by people in power in Australia.
Through unconscious bias testing, Australian National University, 3 out of 4 Australians have negative views of First Nations people. The study revealed that this bias existed regardless of gender, age, ethnicity, occupation, religion, education level, geography or political leanings. The researchers then theorised that this incredible level of bias would reasonably lead to widespread racism.
This can be complemented by the research relied on at the National Aboriginal Sporting Chance Academy (NASCA) found that 97% of First Nations people experience racism “often” . Then Australia’s first racism register for First Nations, run by the Jumbana Institute at UTS, reported that 4 out of 10 First Nations people experience a high level of violent and aggressive racism.
For East Asian Australians, a Western Sydney University study undertaken during the pandemic found that while around 40% experience racism that victims are hesitant to report it. Only 30%-50% of participants would report the incident, even just telling a friend about it, and only 3% would report to the Human Rights Commission. This was due to a lack of trust in authorities and a fear that their complaint would not be taken seriously.
In a press release, The United Nations’ Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent said that people of African descent in Australia are living “under a siege of racism”. They find that in all spheres of Australia, “people of African descent face racial profiling, racial slurs, abuse of authority, over-policing, under protection, targeting and violence”.
Researchers published at the University of Hawai’i reported that Pacific Island peoples in Australia face “extensive racism”, ranging from negative stereotypes to official government statements.
The Australian Human Rights Commission reports that 80% of Muslim Australians experience discrimination, which also affects the broader south-west Asian community through race and ethnicity-based discrimination.
The list goes on: from casual to structural. It’s not a purely historical issue but forever unfolding and impacting the lives of marginalised people across Australia.
It’s getting to the point where every time we acknowledge the reality of racism, we don’t need a thesis to substantiate it.
We need to treat it like what it is: a fact.
Gravity exists, the earth is round, the sun rises in the East, and Australia is a racist country.
Phoebe is McIlwraith is a Bundjalung and Worimi dubay/galbaan writer and content producer based in “Sydney”.
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