Fading fault lines of integration make for lucky Australia

Against the atrocities in Paris, a victory was last week secured at home.

19/11/2015: Community Hub leader Fahriye Yilmaz with Hanadi El Rayes and her 4-year-old son Ibrahim at Coolaroo South Primary School playgroup in Melbournes north . David Geraghty / The Australian

Against the atrocities in Paris, a victory was secured at home last week, when four Iraqi girls living in the Melbourne suburb of Broadmeadows convinced their parents to let them join their Grade 5 classmates in a sleepover at school.

It seems the smallest of things. Yet on such things the defence of Australian suburbs partially rests: winning the trust of parents newly arrived from the Middle East; overcoming cultural aversions to 11-year-old boys and girls bunking out together; allowing four girls be a part of things rather than made to feel apart.

“It is a big deal for us and a big deal for the families,’’ says Caroline Menassa, a teacher’s aide who had been gently lobbying parents at the culturally diverse school since the start of the year. “It is a massive step.’’

In a neighbouring suburb where more people consider themselves Muslim than any other faith, Fahriye Yilmaz runs the morning playgroup at the Coolaroo South Primary School. The young mothers are from Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Turkey.

As with Ms Menassa’s work, the playgroup is part of a Community Hub, a program embedded in schools across the country. At Cool­aroo South, they read stories, sing songs and, in a mix of Middle Eastern dialects, swap stories. With each visit, they shed a little of the social isolation that can plague new immigrants. “It is a really good way to capture the family and talk about a whole lot of other stuff,’’ Ms Yilmaz says.

The failed integration, community dysfunction, neglect and despair that provides a back­story to the Paris attacks last week was given a name: Molenbeek. For the best part of 20 years, the Brussels quarter of Molenbeek was left to swell with new arrivals and rot. Police did little. Crime thrived. Radicalism spread.

The suspected mastermind of the Paris attacks, Abdelhamid Abaaoud, and his fellow jihadists, the Abdeslam brothers Salah and Ibrahim, lived in Molenbeek, along with an arms dealer who supplied weapons for the Charlie Hedbo murders and a string of ­terrorists stretching back to the Madrid bombings in 2004. Molenbeek Mayor Francoise Schepmans describes her community as a breeding ground for violence.

Molenbeek is not a alone. Paris is ringed by banlieues; suburbs of entrenched disadvantage and high Muslim populations where police feel like an occupying force. Some are unofficially ­declared no-go zones; places too dangerous to police.

A question confronting Australia in the aftermath of Paris is whether such places could fester here. Nick Kaldas, NSW Police Acting Chief Commissioner, does not believe so. He speaks of “relentless engagement’’ with communities in Sydney’s west, where most of Australia’s half-million Muslims live. He says no-go zones would never be tolerated. “I just don’t see many of the ingredients that ­created Molenbeek happening here,’’ he tells The Australian.

Andrew Jakubowicz, professor of sociology at the University of Technology Sydney, agrees. He says the immigrant experience in nations such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand is substantially different to that seen in the great cities of Europe, both in how immigrants see their new country and how those countries see them.

“The whole way of viewing newcomers is just totally different,’’ he says. “Those old-empire heartlands have no wish or desire to have those people there. The structure is resistant, even the more liberal elements of it.’’

Australia’s social cohesion is a patchwork fabric. It is not uniform across postcodes and, if neglected, can fray. Yet those who have studied it closely are surprised by its strength, particularly in high immigrant local government areas such as Melbourne’s Greater Dandenong and Hume — an area that takes in large Islamic communities in the northern suburbs of Broadmeadows, Dallas, Jacana, Meadow Heights and Coolaroo — and Sydney’s local government area of Bankstown, where one in five residents, or nearly 35,000 people, identify as Muslim.

The Scanlon Foundation since 2007 has been testing social ­cohesion in these areas of high ­immigration and economic disadvantage. The questions asked in its surveys go the heart of how people feel about their adopted nation and their own prospects; their sense of belonging, opportunity, participation and social justice. The surveys are a way of probing fault lines of a community before they open into the kind of chasm that swallowed Molenbeek.

Muslim Australia is not on easy street. At the time of the 2011 census, Victoria’s most Islamic postcode of 3048, which takes in Coolaroo and Meadow Heights, had unemployment at 12 per cent, double the national average. Australia’s only Islam-­majority suburb of Lakemba, where 51.8 per cent of residents identity as Muslim, recorded unemployment of 11.7 per cent. In NSW and Victoria, the postcodes with the largest Muslim populations all had below- average incomes. Muslims make up 2.2 of Australia’s population but 9 per cent of the NSW prison population and 8 per cent of inmates in Victoria’s jails.

Yet even in areas where social cohesion is comparably weak, successive surveys have not produced results that would trigger alarm. “It is hard to find parts of Australia where you have got really high, atypical levels of disengagement,’’ says Monash University professor Andrew Markus, the lead researcher of the Scanlon Foundation’s social cohesion series. “People wanting to draw those European comparisons really have to do it with great caution.’’

In France, the jails are said to be up to 70 per cent Muslim. It is an estimate only, as is France’s Muslim population, due to a 19th-­century law prohibiting the collection of statistics based on religion. France’s former minister for the interior, Claude Gueant, estimated in 2010 there were between five and six million Muslims living in France. The US-based Pew ­Research Centre put the figure at 4.7 million, which represents 7.5 per cent of France’s population. The same survey put Belgium’s Muslim population at 630,000, nearly 6 per cent of the population.

One contrast between the ­European and Australian experience is public attitudes towards immigration and multiculturalism. In this year’s Scanlon Foundation survey, two-thirds of respondents agree that accepting immigrants from many different countries makes Australia strong and 86 per cent of respondents agree that multiculturalism has been good for Australia. In the Scanlon Foundation’s most ­recent local area survey, a higher percentage of Muslim respondents expressed a positive sense of belonging than Christian respondents.

This is the accord of Australian immigration; arrivals wanting to embrace a new lifestyle and culture and Australian citizens willing to accept that our culture will be shaped and reshaped by the influence of new immigrant groups. Like all agreements, however, it is subject to review. A Newspoll published this week shows the effect of the Paris attacks, with four in 10 Australians questioning the size of our planned intake of refugees displaced by the Syrian conflict.

Another contrast between ­Europe and Australia is social ­mobility. There are Muslim enclaves in Australia, just as the Sydney suburb of Cabramatta is 50 per cent Buddhist and Melbourne’s bagel-belt suburb of Caulfield South is nearly 20 per cent Jewish. This does not make them ghettos. Drive down the streets of Sydney’s Greenacre, a 100-year-old housing estate in the heart of Sydney’s west, and you’ll find fibro shacks neighbouring freshly rendered McMansions. People are moving up without necessary moving out.

“The social mobility is enormous,’’ Professor Jakubowicz says. “There is a significant participation among young Muslims in tertiary education. It doesn’t mean there aren’t wedges of unemployed people and people who are involved in criminal activity, but, in a sense, that is an aspect of what the Australian working-class environment has always looked like.’’

In Lakemba, 14.2 per cent of residents have gone to university or completed other tertiary studies, a figure in line with the ­national average.

The consistent finding of the Scanlon Foundation surveys is that Australia is a strongly cohesive society. It is here that Professor Markus adds an essential caveat: “You can have the most cohesive society in the world and a couple of lunatics arrive and set off a bomb and kill a huge number of people. A mistake people make is drawing a straight line between levels of alienation and violent ­extremism.’’

To view the seeds of radicalisation solely in socio-economic terms is to ignore the case of Melbourne teenager Jake Bilardi and other would-be jihadists who grew up in middle-class surrounds. Abaaoud, the son of a Moroccan shopkeeper, was enrolled at an exclusive Catholic school before he was expelled and turned to crime.

Deakin University professor and counter-terrorism expert Greg Barton says the story of Australian jihad is less to do with Molenbeek-style enclaves than family groups and criminal networks. He stresses that when it comes to blunting the appeal of extremism, good schools can be as effective as diligent police. This idea is being embraced by the NSW government, which this month announced a further $47 million in schools funding to prevent violent extremism. In Victoria, Multicultural Affairs Minister Robin Scott also emphasises the importance of early intervention.

“We want to do all we can to encourage communities to be ­resilient, cohesive and stand ­together in the face of any extremism,’’ Mr Scott says. “We need initiatives led by the community, supported by government, to reach out and provide a supportive voice to at-risk youths to divert them away from trouble.’’

The Community Hub program was established by the Scanlon Foundation to address problem areas identified by its surveys. It runs 42 centres costing $60,000 per hub, of which the federal government provides $30,000 and the schools $20,000. Anna Boland, the co-ordinator for a dozen hubs run out of primary schools in the Hume area, says the main goal is to connect people newly arrived in Australia with their adopted communities. “It is one of the most important things in breaking down that sense of isolation, anger and not belonging,’’ she says.

One of the women at Coolaroo South playgroup is Raeida Oraha, a mother of four whose life journey has taken her from Iraq to Syria to Wellington, New Zealand, and now the northern suburbs of Melbourne. She used to talk to the other mums about the conflict in Syria but now, with no resolution in sight, they prefer to swap recipes and talk about food. “It is beautiful, to be honest,’’ she says of the playgroup.

Australia isn’t France, a nation that has endured but never embraced its reverse colonisation by North African Muslims. Nor is it Belgium, a nation divided into separate language groups and governed by separate parliaments. Nick Kaldas says everything must be done to keep it that way. “What do we need to do to make sure we don’t get a Molenbeek here? I think we are doing everything we possibly can. Everything we do is prevention, preparedness, response or recovery. My argument is if you pour everything into prevention you may never have to worry about the other three.’’