A 3:00 EVENTO DE EXPRESIÓN DEL ESPÍRITU

While on the surface, Australians appear sanguine about multiculturalism, each new group has endured various degrees of prejudice and antagonism directed toward them as Other. In the 1970s, the advent of the first group of Asian migrants tested the capacity of Australians’ tolerance of difference to the limit, and engendered many heated discussions about migration policy and population control (in the 1980s, Geoffrey Blainey’s attack on Asian migration was pivotal to the debate). In recent times, there has been much

discussion about the advent of a Muslim other, in the form of asylum seekers from Iraq and Afghanistan, which has reflected deep anxieties about potential threats to the Good Australia as a Christian nation. Peter Manning (2004), in his analysis of reportage concerning Arabic and Muslim people in Sydney newspapers, concluded that the simplistic representations of these groups amounted to a new kind of racism, whereby: “All Arabs are Muslims, all Muslims are violent, all violent Muslims are against the interests of the west and personally a threat to our women.”

In December, 2005, headlines including “Race Hate: A shameful day for our nation” (Lawrence & McIlveen, 2005, December 12, Herald/Sun, pp. 1; 4) and “Racist furor as mobs riot” (Kennedy & Murphy, 2005, December 12, The Age, p. 1), ran above articles describing events in the Northern Sydney beachside suburbs of Cronulla and Brighton le Sands that led up to physical attacks on anyone who happened to be “of Middle Eastern appearance”. The following quotation is an excerpt from the story which appeared on the front page of the Melbourne Age:

The violence followed a week of simmering tension following an attack the previous Sunday on two lifesavers. Appeals by text message for “Aussies” to descend on the beach to reclaim it drew a crowd estimated at 5000 people, but a carnival atmosphere in the morning gave way to an ugly mood as the day wore on … As the crowd moved along the beach and foreshore area, a man on the back of a utility began to shout “No more Lebs”, a chant picked up by the group around him. Members of the mob set about their prey with fists, flags and beer bottles. Two paramedics were injured as they tried to get the victims out of the North Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club, where they had fled to escape the rioters. The crowd broke the windows of the ambulance and kicked its doors as the officers attempted to get the group out. Police, who used capsicum spray and batons in their battle to quell the rioters, were also pelted with beer bottles, and in some cases their cars were swamped and stomped on as they tried to move from one violent flare-up to the next. They sometimes appeared powerless to keep up with the moving mob. The mob wore varied uniforms. A few sported black swastika sweatshirts, but most the emblem of the Australian flag, the Eureka Stockade flag, or with hand-written graffiti on their bodies such as “save nulla, f… Allah”

Although racism is perennial, mass violence of this type is relatively rare in Australia. Nevertheless, such displays of “mob rule” should not surprise us. Allingham (1987, p. 53) has argued that, for such unconscious regression to infantile mechanisms in a group to occur, the individuals in the group must first believe that the group exists – a belief which can then become self-fulfilling when the individuals who comprise the “group” regress as a whole. Psychodynamic models of group behaviour, such as that offered by Allingham, suggest that the group is formed when its members unconsciously share some “basic assumption” about the group, and it is this self-fulfilling belief which gives the group a life of its own. At Cronulla, an otherwise disparate group of individuals were joined together by a mutual identification as “Aussies”, on the singular and superficial basis of their supposed difference from “Lebs” (Lebanese Australians).

The leader of the group has an important function in the containment or escalation of potential violence in groups where a basic assumption is predominant, because groups only cohere around a leader with whom group members unconsciously identify. It is therefore through identification with the leader that group members indirectly identify with one another and the group as a whole (Scheidlinger, 1952). In novel situations which demand a response of one form or another, the leader, in the place of the big Other, directs the group’s perceptions about whether or not a threat exists, and, through his or her own reactions, provides a model to the group about how best to respond.

Judith Brett26 _{(2005, p. 44) described the way that recent Government policy has been}

driven by anxiety about “border protection” since the fall of the twin towers of the World

Trade Centre in New York, on September 11, 2001. Brett noted that the advent of asylum seekers from the Middle East just prior to “9/11” provided Prime Minister John Howard with a ready-made opportunity to show strong leadership during the 2001 election campaign, a campaign which, according to Brett, exploited the public’s anxieties about the threat of terrorism: “From champion of the nation’s centre he [Howard] became the defender of its borders”, and appealed to the public with unequivocal statements like: “We decide who comes here and the circumstances in which they come.” The basic assumption here can be traced back to what Rutherford (2000) referred to as the Good Australia as being-all-the-same. In this context, it is instructive to compare the humanist response of the Fraser coalition government to Indochinese refugees 30 years ago with the response of the current national leadership to asylum seekers from the Middle East.

The Fraser administration’s humanitarian response to the first wave of Indochinese refugees (the so called “boat people”) in the mid 1970s asked “What can we do for them?” whereas the response of the current Government with respect to the latest wave of boat people has been to defensively question “What do they want to take from us?” This question, which mimics almost exactly Pauline Hanson’s One Nation response to the question of land rights for Aboriginal people, has been accompanied by debates about what constitutes the legitimate claims of refugees versus the illegitimate claims of illegal immigrants, or “queue jumpers”. The use of this form of terminology has highlighted, once again, the role of language as a mechanism of exclusion in pursuit of a supposed egalitarian ideal, but which at the same time actively undermines that ideal.

Robert Manne27 (2005) has argued that the success of multiculturalism in Australia has been due to strong leadership and public policies which have favoured inclusion while recognizing and respecting cultural difference. Manne has suggested that the question “What can we do for them?”, in relation to Indochinese refugees fleeing totalitarian regimes in Vietnam and Cambodia, depended upon the then government’s capacity to empathize with the boat people as “people like us” through enacting what Martin Buber (1923/1970) described as an I-Thou relation. The I-Thou relationship, as posited by Buber, is a domain where subjective identification of one’s own position in the social and natural world is set aside, or suspended, in order to enter into what Buber has described as a true “meeting” with the Other. In this situation, the Other and the self are in a relation that requires neither fusion nor separation, but rather exist in a dialogue of “consummate reciprocity” (Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1962, p. 196).