ArticleI’m an Australian Christian Tamil with a Caucasian wife and mixed-race kids. I’ve been Australian for 98% of my life. Unsurprisingly, I found much of the extremism on display at the August 31st competing immigration protests offensive. Chants of ‘send them back’ didn’t strike me as a friendly invitation to the city. What would all this mean for my family?
If we ‘sent them back’ my wife would get to stay here, but I would be thrown out, and my kids would be dropped off where they were born (one in the UK, two in Singapore).
Conversely – and equally ridiculously – calling for the compulsory acquisition of land and for first fleeters to go back where they came from – would probably see me lose my home, and my wife given her marching orders. It’s time to call out the nonsense. My kids deserve better than a forced choice between their white mother or their brown father as the cause of Australia’s problems.
The protests reflected our deteriorating public conversation. We are reaching peak polarisation. Our social fabric is dying the death of a thousand stereotypes. When concerned Australians of goodwill feel they have no choice but to join a protest characterised by neo-Nazi symbols, we have a problem. Things aren’t much better across the aisle. Counter rallies have sported antisemitic chants, Hamas symbols, calls for an end to the ‘colony’ of Australia, and the assaulting of police.
An Aboriginal man in Melbourne – concerned about immigration levels – was abused when he took his Aboriginal flag to a ‘March for Australia’ rally. A Chinese Australian was pictured at another rally, standing near organisers who had circulated material openly stigmatising Chinese Australians. An Indian Australian attended an anti-immigration march and was abused by his fellow protesters. This isn’t just weird. It’s disjointed. And it’s characterised by mindless extremism.
Filmmaker Albert Maysles said, “Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
I struggled to find any depth of insight on our streets last weekend. Clearly, we need more nuance. Independent Senator David Pocock commented that “there is a real lack of appetite from the parliament to actually have a debate about this in a sensible way.” I agree.
The militant zealotry we heard on the weekend needs to be called out. But dismissing concerns about housing, infrastructure and immigration as racist – merely nudges the reasonable towards the fringe. As the Prime Minister put it: casting all people concerned about immigration as extremists would only “push them further down that rabbit hole.” We need a grown-up conversation about population, identity and civilisational values – one of which is the Judeo-Christian call to love our neighbours, even if they’re different from us. And we need to do all this without sledging each other as either racist or anti-Australian. Every single Australian I know is neither. For too long we’ve put up with nonsense from clowns to the left of us and jokers to the right.
I’m an immigrant, but I don’t believe in an open-door immigration policy. I’m a brown Australian but I’m married to a white Australian. I believe in cultural diversity, but I think we need a more shared national identity. I understand the challenges that immigrants face but claims of universal white privilege are often unfair and usually unhelpful. I understand that ethnic differences can be confronting, but I don’t think that’s a sufficient reason to ‘send us back to where we came from.’ And in all of this, I’m pretty sure I’m not alone.
My family and I had lunch with friends that weekend. There were at least six ethnic backgrounds represented across five families, all of us Australian.
In addition to other more trivial things, we talked about immigration and our national identity. Opinions varied, but we all shared a strong aversion to the simplistic extremism that characterised both sides of Sunday’s protests.
Having a long lunch around a table while our kids played was our own form of protest (and the wine was far more inviting than racist chants). It was a declaration that we refuse to choose between cultural diversity, patriotism, and connection. As Australians, we can have all three. We can do better than B-grade duelling rallies characterised by sectarianism. The sensible centre can – and must – rise again. As Martin Luther King put it, “we may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.”
Max Jeganathan is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. He and his family came to Australia as refugees during Sri Lanka’s civil war. He served as a political and social policy adviser in the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, and is undertaking a PhD in law on human dignity.