Twenty years ago, years before he became Prime Minister, John Howard talked about his fears for the ‘asianisation’ of Australia. He publicly backed away from it when accused of racism but to me there was always the lurking suspicion that not only did Howard believe it but a lot of white Australians did to.

Multi-culturalism flourished despite that although in the dying years of the Howard Government even that became a dirty word.

A new Monash University survey has brought the issue back into the headlines yet again.  It centres on Springvale where 60% of the population are foreign-born and the quaint-sounding Dingley Village nearby. In Dingley nearly 50% of residents who were Australian-born thought our immigration numbers are too high. As Mandy Rice Davies once said ‘well, they would say that wouldn’t they’.

The fact is that we take in about 130,000 migrants a year nationwide so they add one million people to our 21 million population every decade. Few are refugees. Most are skilled.

Whether it be Australia or America migrants cluster in enclaves for starters. The Greeks and Italians did. In the U.S. the blacks whose ancestors were taken to America as slaves drifted to New York and Harlem. El Barrio became the magnet for Puerto Ricans. The Irish went to Boston.

You hope we’ve come a long tolerant way since the racist White Australia  Policy and Arthur Calwell’s ‘two Wongs don’t make a white’ but as recently as the 1960s the masthead of the Packer family’s  magazine The Bulletin  unashamedly trumpeted ‘Australia for the White Man’. In the 1960s when man was going to the moon!

The one thing that niggles me is the way that even educated Australians lump all people of Oriental heritage as Asians. They are Vietnamese, and Korean, and Chinese, and Filipino and Japanese. And they are all lumped together as ‘Asians’. A short verbal jump from ‘the Yellow Peril’ of the Fifties.

There’s a stirring, patriotic e-mail doing the rounds at the moment accompanied by fluttering Australian flags and it says things like:

This idea of Australia being a multicultural community has served only to dilute our sovereignty and our national identity. As Australians, we have our own culture, our own society, our own language and our own lifestyle.

This culture has been developed over two centuries of struggles, trials and victories by millions of men and women who have sought freedom

Stirring stuff until you look at it more closely. Some patriot has merely changed the name from the United Sates to Australia and swapped the flags.

How do I know?

Well, this patriotic rallying call for real Aussies also says:

'In God We Trust' is our National Motto. This is not some Christian, right wing, political slogan. We adopted this motto because Christian men and women, on Christian principles,  founded this  nation, and this is clearly documented.

In God We Trust – E pluribus unum – is the American motto.

I thought ours was ‘a fair go’. It used to be.

Wednesday, February 6, 2008