Why Australia is not a racist country.(race discrimination)

ACCORDING TO Monash University historian Marilyn Lake, the yearning for a White Australia has never died. In the midst of the violence between Lebanese and Australian youths on Sydney beaches last December, she claimed the Bulletin's old 1908 masthead, "Australia for the White Man", still echoes in the text messages and political slogans of our own time.

Just as the Pacific Islanders Labourers Act of 1901 meant the Australian nation was founded in an act of racial expulsion, she says, so the anti-Lebanese attitudes of youths at Cronulla beach revealed "an odd resonance between the exclusions that marked the first decade of the 20th century and events 100 years on". Racial exclusion, Lake asserts, is "a deep part of our heritage, as traditional an Australian value as mateship".

Lake wrote this in the Age in an article accompanied by a John Spooner cartoon depicting a surfboard rider with his head shrouded in a Ku Klux Klan hood fashioned from the Australian flag. In a profile of its cartoonists on the Age's website, Spooner assures his readers: "You do better work if you believe in what you are doing."

Earlier in 2005, the La Trobe University politics lecturer Gwenda Tavan, in her book The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, agreed that racial exclusion still had popular appeal. "Racism remains the skeleton in the closet," Tavan writes. "Its ghost rises with each new decade to haunt political debate, whether the issue is multiculturalism, asylum-seekers, Asian immigration or Indigenous affairs."

Lake and Tavan speak for the orthodox view among the academic commentariat, especially in Melbourne. Another Monash historian and the most prolific author on the topic of race relations in Australia, Andrew Markus, believes that Australian geographic insecurity still fuels a racist attitude to Asians today. "The fear of swamping by waves of non-European immigrants from the north," Markus told a conference on the White Australia policy in 2001, "remains deeply embedded in the minds of a significant number of Australians."

At the same conference, Robert Maune of La Trobe University reinforced the same point: "The cruelty of the anti-asylum seeker policy was quite clearly an expression of a subliminal or unselfconscious racism, triggered by the profound 'otherness' of the swarthy and exotic strangers from Iraq, Iran and Afghanistan."

In the wake of all this long-familiar hand-wringing, it was refreshing to find in the Quadrant edition of November 2005 the dissenting academic voice of Jeremy Sammut: "Virtually nothing is left of White Australia thinking."