By Peter Walsh (Finance Minister in the Hawke government)
Courier Mail, 10th September 1998
On August 3rd, the ABC's PM Programme revealed the existence of "Racewatch" - a nationwide network of informers who will report parties and candidates advocating or condoning racist policies.
The definition of racist policy, though somewhat fuzzy and subjective, seems focussed on immigration and specifically includes "policies which are assimilationist, that is expecting one cultural group to suborn their interests to a dominant group".
Informers will be suborned to report all transgressors. This tittle tattling will be adjudicated by a panel comprising usual suspects. Federal Court judge Marcus Einfeld, former race discrimination commissioner Irene Moss and a wild card former taxation Commissioner Trevor Boucher. Offenders will then be outed to the media by Racewatch.
The political cleansing is jointly sponsored by Community Aid Abroad and the multinational Jewish organisation B'nai B'rith. Could one be forgiven for suggesting the latter's attention might be more appropriately directed to the Isreali Government's immigration policy and practice? Community Aid Abroad seeks, and gets, funds from the Australian Government and from the private citizens who, like AM interviewer Camille Fannel, "always thought (CAA) was about raising money for communities abroad".
CAA boss Jeremy Hobbs said no "a lot of poverty and distress and misery in many of the countries we work in is directly as a result of racism". True, but would not CAA efforts be more appropriately directed to those countries rather than Australian election processes?
Hobbs added that "despite (emphasis added) our name we've actually had an indigenous programme in this country for 30 years". Indeed they have. That programme was used to provide camping facilities, adjacent to Perth's old Swan Brewery, to help Robert Bropho's group of protesters more easily obstruct redevelopment of the building.
People from outside Western Australia probably do not know how closely the Hindmarsh island hoax followed the Swan Brewery precedent. Both were approved by State Labor governments. Protests by some Aborigines, egged on by greenies, NIMBYS and white lawyers, were cranked up in a subsequent period of state Liberal government. Approved works were stymied for years by legal and political opportunism and by physical obstruction.
CAA also takes domestic political disputes overseas, In mid-June 1997, Hobbs and others published a letter in the London Times urging British Prime Minister Tony Blair to castigate John Howard over his intentions to restrict Aboriginal claims on pastoral leases, which the High Court had recently discovered. Blair - having more respect for Australian sovereignty than Hobbs and Co - did no such thing.
If individuals, knowing CAA spends its donations intervening in domestic political disputes, decided to continue their funding, that is their choice. But most of them don't know. At the very least, CAA should come clean and change its name.
And the Federal Government should reconsider funding of a group which "despite" - to use Hobbs word - its name is a partisan dabbler in, and a funder of, fashionable political campaigns. CAA's 1996-97 annual report shows it spent Au$270,000 on indigenous programmes, received Au$13 million in government grants and spent Au$9 million on fund raising, promotion and administration in the past two years.
Not to be pipped in the scramble for moral purity, four former Prime Ministers jointly urged voters to put "racists" - shorthand presumably for One Nation - candidates last. Given that all of them are actively disliked or even hated by at least a substantial number of Australians, whether their incursion will help or handicap One Nation is a moot point.
Some years ago, one of them adviser Bob Katter snr, told an MHR, to "get back on your camel". Though Katter was unlikely to be seriously offended, such derogatory race-based stereotyping if repeated now would undoubtedly invite retaliation from the thought police led by Race Discrimination Commissioner Zita Antonious.
Antonious was reported (West Australian July 9) to have "told foreign journalists that racial discrimination and human rights abuse had become a real threat. The answer was that whether or not Australia was a racist country was on the line." Presumably, mouthing such massive distortions of truth feeds Antonious's delusions of grandeur and moral infallibility. But why should government continue paying her a fat salary to badmouth and talk down Australia to an audience of probably ignorant and possible malevolent foreign journalists?