So, is Australia a racist country?

The latest furore has arisen from Sol Trujillo, former CEO of giant Australian telecommunications company, Telstra Corporation. From the single-word “adios” given to him by Australian PM, Kevin Rudd, to the appellation of “Mexican bandit” from a radio host, Trujillo has now come under fire following these comments:

BBC REPORTER: I noticed reading the papers there that when you were referred to they would always point out that you were, had a Hispanic background or whatever. In other words in Britain and in America it would have been neither here nor there. In Australia it was invariably pointed out.

And the Prime Minister when asked what his parting words to you would be, he said, “Adios”. Was that racism?

…

SOL TRUJILLO: I think by definition there were even columnists that wrote stories that said it was. But you know, my point is, is that you know that does exist and it’s got to change because the world is full of a lot of people and most economies have to take advantage, including Australia, of a diverse set of people. And if there’s a belief that only certain people are acceptable versus others, that is a sad state.

LIVENEWS goes on to report that:

[Trujillo] also said working in Australia was like reverting to the bad old days of the United States.

“Well I would say Australia is very different to the US,” he said.

“In many ways it’s like stepping back in time, just simply because of some of the policies – some of the laws that are more recent.

“[For example] some of the immigration policies that weren’t changed until about 30 years ago or so – which were very restrictive.”

Of course, the rebuttals from Australia, and the words used, are illustrative in themselves: sour grapes, don’t call us backward racists…you Mexican swine!, ridiculous, and so on.

What Australia usually does at this point is to trot out its docile migrants to do battle. But I’ll get to them in a minute.

The most common objection to the charge of racism is along the lines of:

“I think there was a bit of sour grapes in them actually,” Mr Brumby [Victorian Premier] told reporters.

“He’s an example, he came here from overseas and he had a great job, he was awarded that job, there was no discrimination or prejudice against him.”

So, according to Mr. Brumby what I had to put up with on numerous occasions in my own working life, being awarded a contract and then having to also put up with comments along the lines of “chocolate bunny”, “chocolate drops”, “Asian prostitute”, etc., is not racism because — dagnabbit! — I was given an opportunity to earn a living. Thus, earning a wage overshadows any sense of racism whatsoever.

AUSSIE RACISM RULE #1: It is only racism if you’re unemployed and starving to death.

COROLLARY: It can’t be racism if it happens while you’re at work and earning money.

Now, back to the docile migrants:

Writer Alice Pung, who was born in Australia to Chinese-Cambodian migrant parents, distinguished racism, which had a “long-term adverse effect”, from casual name-calling.

So, according to Ms Pung, being called names does not result in a “long-term adverse effect”. I wonder, if someone called Ms Pung or her children “slopes”, “wogs”, “black monkeys”, “black bitch”, “Asian scum”, “chinky-eyed whore”, whether there would be any “long-term adverse effects” to it, or whether it would be classified as “casual name-calling”? What takes it from one to another? One incident? Three? Six? One year? Four years? Thirty years?

AUSSIE RACISM RULE #2: It’s not racism if an Australian coloured person says it isn’t.

COROLLARY: It’s not racism even if the person slighted feels insulted multiple times over several years.

Moral philosopher Raimond Gaita was also somewhat taken aback. He said there was a big difference between “slightly irritating condescension” displayed by Anglo-Celtic Australians to people like his Romanian-born father in the 1950s, and the racist hatred and anti-Semitism that had riven Europe last century.

AUSSIE RACISM RULE #3: If you think it’s racism, it’s because you’re not sensitive/educated enough to know the difference between “racism”, “condescension”, “patronisation”, “discrimination” and the “Aussie sense of humour”. But what do you expect from migrants, for Chrissakes? They can’t even speak English properly!

I believe Gaita is a fan of Dick Cheney who maintains to this day that “enhanced interrogation techniques” are not “torture”. Well, you’re using many more syllables for a start, aren’t you? “Racism” has 3 syllables, whereas “slightly irritating condescension” has 10. Clearly, they’re not the same thing at all.

AUSSIE RACISM RULE #4: Unless people of your ethnic group are being burnt at the stake or gassed to death, it’s not racism.

Take it from me, Australia is a racist country. Much more so than the United States. Having worked and lived in both countries, I can clearly attest to that. I was only victim to one profiling incident at LAX many years ago while on a vacation, whereas I was subjected to systemic bigotry in Australia from the time I started primary school to the time we left the country, decades later. The only place I was “Australian” was outside Australia. Inside, I was constantly being asked “where are you really from?”. A so-called friend even told me once that I’m not a Real Australian™, despite the fact that I had citizenship for longer than he’d been alive. J, a white-skinned European, faced the same kind of issues, being told to his face that he was taking jobs away “from Real Australians™”. Ah, gotta love those Real Australians™.

When I try to talk about this to Anglo-Australians, they get defensive and ask me: “Why did you stick around for so long then? Why not leave Australia earlier?” (Which is an interesting response in itself, don’t you think? If you want to criticise anything, get out!) And the answer is, because you think the whole world is like that, until you experience things differently. All the years I was travelling on vacation, I discarded the open friendliness of the various locals because I’m well aware that what you experience as a tourist is not always what you experience as a resident. Because Australia is a truly beautiful country (and it is), I kept coming back, thinking that I was feeling hurt only because Australians have a rough sense of humour and, besides, there must come a time when they start becoming more inclusive.

I was wrong. Children change everything. And when I had ones of my own, I wondered whether I could — in clear conscience — bring them up in an environment that had not moved forward in three decades. I couldn’t. Neither could J. So we left.

But I do have a caveat to the pronouncement on Australia’s racist environment, and I’ll cover it in my next blog.

POSTSCRIPT: There’s more from a Brisbane-based independent journalist, Derek Barry, at his Woolly Days blog, which also gives an extremely succinct and honest summary of Trujillo’s time at Telstra’s helm.