The 'unwritten rules of multiculturalism'

When I was a kid my dad used to take me on long camping trips, usually in western NSW. We’d drive for 4-500 kilometres each day, set up camp outside some tiny town, and do it all again the next day. At the time I sulked a lot because I wanted to be at home playing Runescape, but besides a loathing for Steely Dan (we listened to a lot of Steely Dan) my memories of these trips have gotten a lot fonder over time.

On one of these trips we went out to eat at the local Chinese restaurant one night. I don’t even remember where we were — Moree maybe? — but you know the kind of place. Sweet and sour pork. Salt and pepper squid. Mongolian lamb. Big lion statues out the front. A name like ‘Golden Dragon’ in wonton font. Places like that have carried regional towns on their backs since the war.

As we were waiting for our food I started eavesdropping on the people at the next table over — not eavesdropping really because they were pretty loud. They were four older people, all white, and the topic at hand was how the Chinese were taking over Australia. It went on right up until the waitress brought over their fried rice and spring rolls. Without skipping a beat, they all beamed up at her and started gushing about how much they loved Chinese food.

I thought of those people while wading through the latest outpouring of racist hysteria about Fatima Payman in Australian media outlets. I wrote about this on Friday, but over the weekend another cohort of professional opinion-havers gave themselves nightmares imagining a nonexistent Muslim-interest political party that will apparently destroy Australian multiculturalism, electoral democracy, and Western civilisation.

In the Herald, Peter Hartcher (who travelled to Israel in 2011 as a guest of the Australia Israel Chamber of Commerce) took a short break from fantasising about war with China to wonder aloud if Payman was “the Pauline Hanson of the left”. His fellow Herald columnist Parnell Palme McGuinness reduced Payman’s stand against an ongoing genocide to a display of “identity politics”. On Insiders, David Speers repeatedly asked Greens senator Mehreen Faruqi whether she believes Hamas should be dismantled. (Daanyal Saeed over at Crikey has a good wrap-up of this stuff and the harm it’s doing to Muslim journalists.)

One piece of writing in particular stood out to me. Comparing Payman to Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen and Donald Trump, The Australian’s editor-at-large Paul Kelly warned that “her role as a symbol of Muslim political power … will create new divisions in this country’s political system,” and declared that “Payman has broken the unwritten rules of multiculturalism”.

Kelly is right, though — as always — not in the way he thinks. Payman did, in fact, break the great unwritten rule of Australian multiculturalism that all non-white people are bound by: be grateful. Be grateful that we allow you to live in this country. Never stop showing us how grateful you are. Tell us over and over again that we’re the greatest multicultural society in the world.

Now that the unwritten rule has been broken, its enforcers are enacting the agreed-upon punishment: driving the offender from public life — even from the country — by any means necessary. Yassmin Abdel-Magied, Hash Tayeh, Antoinette Lattouf, Lidia Thorpe. Mehreen Faruqi, Randa Abdel-Fattah — the list of proscribed people of colour who stepped out of line is growing longer every day.

Fundamentally, there is a guilty little secret at the heart of Australia’s multicultural compact that our political and media establishment can’t admit to themselves: they want the cheap labour and the nice food and the photo ops that migration provides, but not the people themselves. They don’t want the complexity and inconvenience that comes with recognising people of different backgrounds as fully realised human beings. They certainly don’t want to hear any suggestion that the image Australia endlessly cultivates about itself as the laid-back, egalitarian success story is now wildly untrue and has been for a long time.

The idea of a “Muslim political party” — which, again, does not exist — is the worst nightmare the Peter Hartchers and Paul Kellys of the world can dream up because it imagines an alternative society in which non-European migrants are full participants. For much of Australia’s political and media class, non-European migrants are the people who landscape their gardens, pick their fruit for below minimum wage, and deliver their Menulog on rainy nights.

The thought that those people have families too — families who are being killed on an industrial scale, with arms and munitions and diplomatic cover that we are providing to their murderers — is very uncomfortable, especially if you’ve been on a trip to the occupying power that their domestic backers bankrolled.

So rather than journalism or policies that grapple with that discomfiting realisation, instead we get shit like this, which was published in The Australian on Monday:

This officially-sanctioned hate campaign is already doing what it’s supposed to. Fatima Payman is receiving death threats, multiple Christchurch-style terror attacks have either taken place or been narrowly avoided, and Zionist groups are openly collaborating with organised white supremacist and fascist agitators.

When — not if — there is more violence against people who aren’t white, the same news outlets and opinion pages will tut-tut about how terrible it all is and remind us that none of this would have happened if Fatima Payman hadn’t damaged our precious social cohesion. It’s going to be disgusting, so best we all start prepping for that now.

What I’m looking at

• The Lancet — Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential

• +972 — Only an anti-fascist front can save us from the abyss

• Crikey — Payman triggers a racist upwelling from deep in the political media psyche