It’s not hard to figure why Mehreen Faruqi worried about fitting in when she moved to Port Macquarie 22 years ago. The 2001 census records that 99 per cent of residents were Australian- or European-born and the Faruqi family were the only Muslims in town.
But it’s harder to comprehend why Faruqi now wants to abolish Harmony Day, given her heartening migration story of a woman who fled intolerance and prejudice to be welcomed in Australia, where she fulfilled her dream of becoming an engineer and now sits with the Greens in the Senate.
Faruqi told the Sydney Morning Herald nine years ago that moving to Port Macquarie with her husband and small children was “the best thing we did … just fantastic”.
“They say in smaller towns you need to live there for generations to be accepted as part of the community, but our experience was the exact opposite,” she said. “We probably made more friends in five years than in living in Sydney. It’s such a nice community.”
Last month Faruqi wrote to Immigration, Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs Minister Adam Giles urging him abolish Harmony Day, an initiative of the Howard government.
Harmony Day, according to the Department of Home Affairs “is about inclusiveness, respect and belonging for all Australians, regardless of cultural or linguistic background, united by a set of core Australian values”. On March 21 it was celebrated in schools and workplaces for the 24th time with displays of orange ribbons, multicultural clothing and food.
Faruqi describes it is “a superficial, self-congratulatory celebration of diversity” that “whitewashes this historic and ongoing racism in Australia”. She wants to see it replaced with International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which marks the killing of 69 people at demonstrations against apartheid in Sharpeville, South Africa in 1960. Changing the name, Faruqi claims, would send a “strong message” that Labor “recognises the serious and pervasive scourge of racism in Australia, and the urgent need to combat it”.
Harmony Day is at the frontier of the anti-racism war, caught between the old paradigm of a melodious multicultural community united by common citizenship and the jarring cacophony of a new black-and-white dogma in which race matters above everything.
The same war is raging in the debate about the voice where supporters of the Yes vote are expending more ammunition against their own side than their supposed opponents. They will continue to do so, since the two interpretations of racism and their respective ideas about its elimination are diametrically opposed.
The older paradigm of anti-racism has the advantage that it actually works, demonstrated by the experience of millions of migrants. Racial barriers can be overcome in a country where everyone enjoys the right to chase their dream no matter when they came or where they come from.
While they may encounter racist people from time to time, racism is not condoned by the government or by the vast majority of citizens. Even, apparently, in Port Macquarie. Many forms of racist behaviour are prohibited by law.
The new anti-racism doctrine asserts that racism is too entrenched to be overcome by individuals alone. To do so requires overturning an imagined hegemony built on white supremacy baked into Australia’s colonial past. This radical reinterpretation of victimhood and oppression has overtaken social class or economic inequality on the hierarchy of causes adopted by the radical left. The class war was always a false war, but at least when class was defined by income, wealth and occupation, the barriers could be overcome with learning, enterprise and determination.
Race, on the other hand, stigmatises or rewards individuals with an indelible stamp that can never be removed. No matter how successful her professional or political career, no matter how great her contribution to the community, Faruqi in her own estimation will always be a victim struggling against impossible odds. As Victor Davis Hanson writes, there is no such thing as racial upward mobility in the radical mind.
In his book, The Dying Citizen, Davis Hanson warns how destructive this idea might be in countries such as the US and Australia where our common identity is not defined by geography or biology. A multicultural nation of immigrants unites around the idea that they are citizens of an exceptional country. Whatever its faults they believe, as Faruqi once did apparently, that Australia is a better country than the one they left. By becoming an Australian citizen, they take on the responsibility to make it even better.
The politics of identity, in which common citizenship is replaced by race, gender or sexual proclivity as the primary statement of who one is, is a deeply regressive ideology pushing us back towards a pre-civilisational tribal world. “A modern reversion to race and ethnic identification in just about everything, from politics to sports to entertainment, is replacing citizenry,” writes Davis Hanson. “An entire generation of youth has grown up and been educated on the now mainstreamed premise that ethnic and / or gender identifications define who they are at the expense of their commonality as Americans.”
Identity politics reached an apotheosis with the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, which has spread rapidly and insidiously around the world. This simplistic psychodrama, as Davis Hanson calls it, pitching white against non-white, contaminated Australian civic debate just as the debate about an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voice to parliament was gathering steam.
The Prime Minister’s suggestion that retired American basketball player Shaquille O’Neal might become an ambassador for the voice was an early indication of how much damage the Black Lives Matter campaign has done. This descendant of Africans born and raised in Newark, New Jersey had almost nothing in common with Aboriginal Australians except the colour of his skin.
Yet this is the inevitable end point of a white Australia policy with a twist: this time the fair-skinned ones are the bad guys. This is no way to achieve the reconciliation Anthony Albanese says we’ll be closer to achieving if we only vote in favour of the voice. Placing it in the Constitution makes it worse, locking in the assumption that the gap can never be eliminated and that race is an abiding feature of Australia that can never be erased by our common humanity.
It is the opposite of empowering, condemning Aboriginal Australians to a state of permanent victimhood nurturing historical grievances that can never be resolved.
Nick Cater is senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre
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