Crocodile Dundee is part of the Australian stereotype.
The media has been blamed for its part in portraying Australia as a racist nation, a leading University Academic said today.
Dr Waleed Aly from Monash University was speaking to ABC 1′s Lateline about the spate of attacks on Indian students in Australia. He claims that the media habitually stereotype Australia as an unrefined country that’s rough and irreverent and that Australian news is only seen through the prism of race.
“We make news internationally when there’s some issue to do with race, whether it’s Hansonism, or it’s the apology to the Indigenous or the Cronulla riots,” he said.
“The inherent racism of Australia is more or less assumed, and that becomes a difficult thing to erode, a very difficult perception to shift. It’s kind of a stereotype that Australia as a nation suffers from, which I think is unfair.”
Although Dr Aly then went on to deliver quite a classic oxymoron when he admitted that Australia did suffer from “a fairly high level of low level racism.” He went on to say that this low level form of racism led to socially discriminatory practices and inequalities, but these he dismissed as not being “major.”
Dr Tanveer Ahmed, a fellow academic at the Centre for Independent Studies and a columnist for the Sydney Morning Herald agreed with Dr Aly, telling Lateline that there was no evidence to suggest that institutional racism exists in Australia. Dr Ahmed went even further and claimed that migrants were often attacked by other migrant groups, rather than locals.
“I think that we have been very successful in integrating migrants, and in my experience of racial issues its often been more common within immigrants,” he said. “The Indian student example probably is testament to that, if you look in Sydney, where some of the attacks against Indian students were often by Lebanese immigrants here.”
Dr Ahmed also blames countries like India for being too quick to cry racism and cites the example of the cricket match played in the Sydney Cricket Ground last year between India and Australia, which was marred by accusations of racism relating to the umpiring decisions.ÂÂ
“I think it’s often a defensive move as well within India, and that I think goes for many other ethnic groups as well,” he stated.
What do you think? What have your experiences been so far in Australia? Let us know your views on this story by using the comments box below.
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