Laura Tingle: Who are you calling racist?
I feel sorry for Laura Tingle. She is missing the richness of this migrant country that is right under her nose.
It must be miserable being Laura Tingle. Or anyone else, for that matter, who sincerely believes Australia is a racist country. Tingle told a Sydney Writers Festival audience last weekend: “We are a racist country, let’s face it. We always have been and it’s very depressing.”
No decent person with means to leave would choose to remain in a racist country. It would be a dreadful thing. It’s too depressing.
Surely if Tingle truly believes the country is racist, she will want to leave and live in a less racist country.
She won’t find one. After her self-described “little rant”, many migrants contacted me. Who is she calling racist, they asked me? Me? You? People who vote differently to her? Channelling my inner Margaret Thatcher, I want names of these racists. At least something more specific than “we are a racist country”.
Tingle was “counselled” this week by her News boss. I’ve seen that at the ABC when I was on the board. No one took it seriously. Tingle doubled down in her statement on Tuesday, standing by her comments and complaining only that because of the panel format at which she spoke she was unable to provide the context and nuance. But it’s the casual labelling of the country that is troubling. Tingle felt no need to add any nuance at that public event.
If she means there are racists in Australia, she’s right. Every country has their share. But judging a whole country racist because there are racists in Australia is like saying Britain is a nation of serial killers because Jack the Ripper was born there. Tingle would be the first to cry Islamophobia if we attributed the bad behaviour of some Muslims to all of them.
Neither do you judge a country today by its behaviour yesterday. You judge a country by its current laws, policies and attitudes. As a journalist, Tingle is better placed than most to know the facts. The White Australia policy is many decades behind us. We are, and have been for at least half a century, a country of migrants. Not just any old country of migrants – one of the world’s most generous, open and welcoming homes to migrants of all backgrounds.
Tingle knows how to find the latest Australian Bureau of Statistics numbers. She will know we have terrific institutions devoted to nurturing our multicultural fabric, and laws that punish those who discriminate against people because of their race.
I feel sorry for Tingle. She must be missing a richness to this country right under her nose. Not just facts and figures about our history of migration but personal stories of the waves of people from different continents.
My family didn’t miss that richness. We became part of it. My family, working-class migrants from Denmark, arrived in the 1960s smack-bang in the middle of a hot Adelaide summer. Different culture, Chiko Rolls, foreign language. The men couldn’t understand why pubs closed on Sunday afternoon, but still they couldn’t get enough of the country. Integration, assimilation, whatever you want to call it. They did it.
And still my family loved soccer more than AFL. There was salami and pate, not Vegemite or gross curried egg in our lunch boxes, on rye bread, not prepacked white slices of Tip Top. Our clothes were more tailored and uncomfortable – no flip-flops in our home. I went to local public schools full of other migrant kids, Greek, Italian, German, Yugoslavs, and so on with surnames to match.
My family couldn’t wait to be Australian. Not Danish-Australian. Australian. No hyphens, thank you very much. We knew who we were – Australians who cherish this country, along with lashings of Danish culture.
I admit as a kid I hated it when, at the Adelaide market, my mother would ask the grocer for “sex apples”. Or “sex tomatoes”. “It’s six, Mum,” I would say. (Can you please just buy five apples or seven tomatoes, I would say to myself.) But being a child of these migrants was like winning life’s Lotto.
True, like every other country that took in migrants, some people could occasionally be thoughtless even cruel about new arrivals and our customs. Adjustment takes time. But adjust we all did. Not just superficially, either – while the first thing we might have liked about the Lebanese, the Vietnamese, Thais or Indians might have been their food, we soon appreciated the richness of migration, not to mention Hazem El Masri’s footy skills and Usman Khawaja’s batting.
Racism? Why uproot your life, your family, for a racist country? Every year we take in more migrants, and refugees too.
The migrants who contacted me this week were appalled by Tingle’s ignorance. Including my former editor, Alan Howe.
“What is really irritating about Laura Tingle’s nonsensical ‘rant’ is how she involved us all in it,” Howe wrote. “Well, I am a migrant to Australia and I love the place. I moved back to England for most of the 1980s … but couldn’t wait to come home.”
Howe, who is Rupert Murdoch’s longest serving editor, worked in New York for a while too. “I loved that too. But it is too cold to live there too long and, in any case, by then John Lennon had been killed. On my last weekend I went to Ellis Island. Have you been? It is fantastic – all the train stations and towering halls where your fate was decided by a clerk at a desk. Overwhelmingly in the positive; mostly, only seriously unwell arrivals were stopped.
“On the flight home I thought, ‘I know an even more welcoming place.’ Station Pier in Melbourne. Its role in the population of Australia is far greater than that of Ellis Island’s to America.”
Howe did some research, pulled together some ideas and the facts and then wrote to Victorian premier Jeff Kennett in 1994. “I explained to Jeff how we (in Victoria), and not just through the gold rushes, owned the story of the population of this continent. Australia’s Immigration Museum opened late in 1998. My parents were alive then and attended.” Howe sat on the board of that museum for a decade.
“Racist?” he wrote in his email to me. “We are the most welcoming nation on earth and don’t just claim that – we have the proof.
“Tingle is unaware of her environment,” he said. “She wants to get out of the house more. Get out of Sydney more.
“She should look at the list of Australian war dead in Vietnam. In 1988 I sought to interview every dead boy’s family and reached 252 of them, precisely half. Tingle was on the paper then. It was and remains The Australian’s biggest selling edition. There were Italian boys, Greeks, many Scots, plenty of Poms and Irish, a few Aboriginals and even two Russians. All died defending the interests of racist Australia? She is nuts.”
Big words such as racism should be used with great care and accuracy, or else they lose meaning. If the facts, our history, our current national policies and sentiment don’t support the claim the country is racist, what else is going on?
Are well-educated people like Tingle really saying they don’t much like people who hold different views to them?
Now we’re getting closer. When she said that Dutton was encouraging abuse towards migrants by speaking about housing challenges, perhaps Tingle was saying she’d like to stop debate about migration that doesn’t suit her politics. Doing that would be really dumb. Migration is most popular when we, not people-smugglers or ABC political correspondents, determine how and when it happens. We need to talk about it freely and honestly. Racism was a common epithet too during the voice campaign. How often were we told that opposition could be explained only by racism? Australians saw through that. The voice failed because it was a terrible idea. A proposal giving special rights to one group based on race divided the country – by race.
I’ll tell you what’s also depressing about Tingle’s comments. The ABC doesn’t stand a chance of reflecting the true diversity of this country – as required under its charter – if senior political correspondents, let alone more junior journalists, don’t understand that diversity must include diversity of views. Instead of this ridiculous “counselling” lark, ABC management needs to fix the problem.
The vast majority of Australians are smart, not racist. So smart they can spot the know-it-alls who label us racist if we don’t agree with them.
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