Much has been written and said in the Australian and overseas media about what appears to be a "new" wave of racism in Australia. Incidents have been reported of insults hurled at Black visitors from South Africa, Pakistan and Jamaica, and of graffiti appearing on public buildings in Perth, which insult and threaten Aboriginal and Asian Australians.(1) It is suggested by various commentators that there is a resurgence of the infamous National Action group which was so destructive in the mid 1980's during the "Blainey debate".

Geoffrey Blainey is a Professor of History at Melbourne University who spoke in March 1984 to a group of Rotarians at Warrnambool, Victoria, about his concerns regarding Asian immigration to Australia. He legitimised his concerns in his talk and later publications by a need to protect the dominant Anglo-Celtic Australian culture from the alien and often unacceptable habits and beliefs of other nations and cultures. In other words, Blainey and his supporters no longer based their objections to immigration from Asia on an ideology of the superiority/inferiority of phenotypical characteristics such as skin pigmentation, hair texture or shape of nose, but on different "cultural" characteristics". It was thought to be "natural" to protect one's own customs, values and institutions from the unacceptable customs and values of people from different ethnic groups. Blainey spoke in his many writings and interviews of unacceptable living standards, cooking methods, employment expectations which posed a threat to "the Australian way of life", and the population increases which caused unemployment, conflicts and division.

This was a more sophisticated and insidious expression of the stereotypical assumptions of 'vulgar' racists. Blainey's concerns were presumably not based on biology but on culture. This was dubbed the 'new racism' (Barker, 1981) and was used in England by Enoch Powell and in Australia by Geoffrey Blainey to inflame fears of unemployment and economic recession which were simplistically and causally related to Asian immigration. In Western Australia, members of the Australian Nationalist Movement expressed their fears by burning Chinese restaurants and harassing Asian business people. Some of the extremist leaders of the movement who were convicted of serious offences in the late 1980s are still serving their prison sentences today.

The present day "Pauline Hanson phenomenon" is a resurgence of the "free" expression of racist views during a period of economic recession. Pauline Hanson is an independent conservative politician ("independent" because she was expelled by the Liberal Party ) elected in 1996 by the majority of the people of Oxley, Queensland to represent them in the Commonwealth Parliament. She used her election and maiden speeches to repeat well worn urban myths about the "special" advantages enjoyed by Aboriginal Australians and Asian migrants to the detriment of "ordinary" Australians. She spoke of the "swamping" of Australia by people from Asia, the consequent unemployment of "Aussie battlers" and complained that none of these "battlers" had participated in national policies on immigration, social security or welfare expenditure. It is easy to refute her statements about 'Aboriginal advantage' by pointing to the depressed state of Aboriginal health, housing, education and employment or by repeating the shocking rates of Aboriginal imprisonment and deaths in custody. It is easy to demonstrate her ignorance by pointing to Australian Bureau of Statistics figures (1996) which show that immigrants from Asia represent 4-5% of the Australian population, and to show that there are obvious problems with the notion that immigration is the cause of unemployment, or that in a democracy, the ordinary people have no say in the policy-making of their elected government.(2)

The negative effect on social relations in Australia of the "Pauline Hanson phenomenon" has been exacerbated by the failure of the Prime Minister to rebut her populist statements and simplistic, often erroneous, conclusions. Mr. Howard's silence is officially based on the need to promote "free speech" and to eschew "political correctness" but one suspects that he is in fact using Pauline Hansons's outrageous statements to gain support for stricter immigration controls and further cuts of expenditure in areas of social security, health, welfare and education.

There is nothing "new" about the current resurgence of racism in Australia. The establishment of a British colony in 1788 was justified by a racist ideology later expressed by the "Terra Nullius" concept. British invaders justified the dispossession, extermination and alienation of indigenous Australians by pointing to their "failure" to cultivate the land, their "heathen" ways, their less materialistic culture. Clearly the European invaders were more "civilised" because they wore clothes, built houses, tilled the soil and professed Christian beliefs, while at the same time they poisoned flour and water-holes and shot nomadic trespassers, forced Aboriginal people into reserves and later stole their children and punished them for using their own language.

During the nineteenth century, indentured labourers from the Pacific islands were exploited and Chinese labourers were killed during and after the Gold Rushes. Later waves of immigration from Southern and Central Europe initiated by post World War II Australian governments for the purposes of defence and development, the more recent arrival of refugees from the Middle, South and Far Eastern regions of Asia have all demonstrated that immigration and refugee policies are complex and often contradictory. While elements of tolerance and compassion are present, the main motivations are the expansion of capital and the exploitation of cheap labour, especially during times of economic recession and unemployment. The urban myths peddled by racists ignore the incontrovertible evidence that immigrants bring their expertise, their ideas, energy and labour as well as their capital to this country and contribute to its physical, social and economic development as well as making it culturally interesing, diverse and creative.

It is important to counter the misinformation propagated by racists, whether "old" or "new", by presenting factual historical information about the effect of colonisation on Aboriginal people and about the hardships faced by later immigrants from Europe, Asia and the Pacific and the positive contributions they have made and continue to make to Australian society. It is also important to ensure that overdue legislative innovations relating to native title and against racial vilification are implemented as soon as possible.

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