Race Over

Carolyn Habib, Liberal candidate for the South Australian seat of Elder, has described this pamphlet (pictured at right) and distributed in her electorate by the ALP as filthy and racist.

I have scoured this pamphlet, and I cannot find a single suggestion of ethnicity, culture, skin colour or religion anywhere. Oddly enough, neither can Ms Habib! According to News Limited, she finds the pamphlet 

“…very very offensive and very un-Australian

“I think it is a very thinly veiled racist attack against my surname,” she said. 

“It’s a new low and a very, very filthy campaign in what has already been a dirty campaign over the past few weeks.”

Let’s think about that for a moment. Ms Habib’s only complaint is that it’s an attack against her surname? She’s not claiming that the flyer contains an untruths, any reference to her ethnic heritage or skin colour?

Does Ms Habib find her own surname to be racially offensive?

I too have an unusual surname with challenging ethnic roots, but I don’t scream for the racism police every time someone uses it as, say, on an envelope addressed to me, as part of my email address or in reference to me. It’s my name, and I’m actually proud of it, despite having called “La Cookooracha” or “Piranha” since I started school. 

If Ms Habib was serving in the Australian military, she’d be wearing a uniform with her surname on it every single day. It's not healthy to dislike your name.

There is the possibility that the intent of this pamphlet was to emphasise the surname in the hope that voters would see a middle-eastern name and perform some gold medal standard jumping to conclusions that would lead them to vote for someone else. If so, it’s racism by assumption. But we can’t know that. We can only go on the face value of the pamphlet, which is entirely free of racism.

It’s something of a moot point anyway. The name “Habib” will be printed on the ballet papers, and if voters have that much of problem with it, they won’t write 1 in the box beside the name. If the owner of the name believes it’s damaging her chances of winning the election, she needs to find a better PR team – or change it to something she believes is more palatable to Liberal voters. Smith, perhaps? 

Having said that, I’d like to sit down and chat with whoever put the pamphlet together and with the person who authorised its use. It’s poorly written, and poorly laid out and the imagery doesn’t seem to be connected to the message. I don’t understand the choice of fonts or colours. I’d hold this up as an example of mediocre campaign material, and I’d leave it out of my portfolio. The ALP needs to do better.

But it’s not supposed to be pretty, or arty. It’s the pamphlet version of an attack ad. It’s the Habib equivalent of Kevin-O-Lemon. It makes the point about rate increases during Ms Habib’s time as a councillor, although the rest of the message is a bit lost due to the poor wording. It's unlikely to have much of an impact on voting intention.

Ms Habib needs to learn to love her name, and stop whipping out the race card at every opportunity. This unreasonable charge of filthy racism is only undermining her own cause.

Random Thought: If this is a strategy to get Ms Habib out into the limelight and make her Australian identity known, it may be a masterstroke. After this, her name should not be an issue with anyone except the most ignorant and racist voters. If that's the case, well done.

Because Logan rhymes with ...

If you're sick of hearing about Andrew Laming, join the club. The Sydney Morning Herald is calling his tweet a "Twitter gaffe" - not what you'd expect from the Member of Parliament whose own Liberal Party website biography describes him as being "Australia’s most innovative user of social media in politics".

It’s the kind of tweet you should never see from an elected official.

I first became aware of Mr Laming’s “innovative” use of social media a couple of years ago when I saw that he was using Twitter to promote a competition he was running on Facebook. The concept was that he would use Twitter to attract followers, and tweet links to his Facebook page. If you followed the link, and then “Liked” his Facebook page, you’d go into the draw to win a weekend away on the Sunshine Coast.

Of course, once you’d clicked the Like button, you would then see everything that he posted to his Facebook page – Liberal Party statements and conservative comments, punctuated with pithy backhanders and sledges aimed at the ALP.

I heard on Monday night via Twitter that Andrew Laming was trending, and wondered what he had done this time. You see, this is not the first time that Andrew Laming has tweeted something controversial. It's fair to say that the majority of Mr Laming's tweets are controversial at best, ill-considered most of the time, and occasionally, downright offensive. In fairness, he's not alone is being a serial mistweeter; his colleagues Joe Hockey, Andrew Robb, Nick Sowden and Barnaby Joyce have all learned the hard way that sometimes, a mere 140 characters is plenty of space in which to make a complete twat of yourself. Mr Laming has been doing it for years.

In fact, I take an interest in what Mr Laming tweets - not because I'm a fan, but because I'm incredulous at some of the things he shares on social media. Yes, I used to mock him for his more foolish tweets, and his response was to block me so that I could no longer see his tweets.

Twitter isn’t that simple. I asked for a copy of yesterday’s “clarification” tweet, and nine different tweeters sent it to me. The only way to ensure that tweetable thoughts remain private is not to tweet them in the first place – which given Mr Laming’s history with social media, might be a good thing for the Liberal Party.

It was Andrew Laming who tweeted three days before Christmas:

“Gutless Gillard nowhere to be seen when ‘balancing the budget’ goes up in smoke”

A flock of tweeps leapt to the Prime Minister’s defence. Perhaps Mr Laming had forgotten that this would be the Gillard family’s first Christmas without their patriarch?

But back to Mr Laming’s tweet this week: the main question on social media has been around whether or not the initial tweet was racist.

I’d say yes, it is a mildly racist comment…although that’s not the most obvious source of offense in his tweet. Logan – which all too conveniently rhymes with Bogan – is one of the most multicultural areas in Australia, with about one in four residents being born overseas, and since the tweet was sent on Monday night, we’ve learned that the feud which lead to the violence is actually between two families who happen to be from two ethnic groups which often clash: Aborigines and Samoans.

That wasn’t what Mr Laming was getting at, though; his tweet was a direct insult to the people of Logan, challenging the sophistication of the population. We all know that in Logan, the demographic is a little different, and that expedient rhyme just makes it easier for people to associate Logan with poorer, less educated, less employable, less mannered people. Aside from the immigrant population, Logan has a 7.2% unemployment rate, which is high. Similarly, the median total personal income is up to $300 per week less than in Brisbane.

So why did Andrew Laming tweet about Logan anyway? By Monday night, it was common knowledge that the violence was occurring in Woodridge, a suburb of Logan. Despite Twitter limiting tweets to 140 characters, there were plenty left, so Mr Laming could have said Woodridge but chose not to. He chose to use the name Logan to ensure that we all understood that he was referring to a set of anti-social behaviours which are associated with Logan.

And if by chance he didn’t think of the connection and the whole thing was an accident, it’s still unacceptable. Mr Laming is an elected representative and should display far more care and maturity and less innovation when using social media.

What Does It Mean To Be Australian

In the midst of all the Budget palaver, the rumours of Peter Costello wanting to return to politics, the Craig Thomson/HSU fiasco, and Barack Obama’s public support for same-sex marriage, it would be easy to lose track of a story in this week’s news media.

Here’s one that almost got away:

Bob Katter says in ten years, Aussies will be a vanishing race as baby boomers die off. To ensure this doesn’t happen, he wants the Government to pay $7000 for every child for every year they’re legally children. Apparently it’s important to ensure that Australian babies are really Australians, and not migrants.

If you’re talking purity of race, you probably mean the Aboriginals – but only the pure ones, with none of that dirty whitefella influence.

No, then perhaps you’re of the view that the ‘real’ Australians – all 859 of them -  that arrived on the First Fleet, and those that came later, from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales; convicts and free settlers who left the Mother Country to make a new life on the other side of the world. Some of my ancestors would be amongst the free settlers who arrived in the middle of the 19^th century.

That’s the ‘real’ Australian, the way it was taught in schools in for most of the twentieth century. Australians were of Anglo-Saxon descent, Christian, with a government based on the Westminster System. We adopted and continued their language, their values, their sports.

The fact that a population of First Nations with a rich cultural heritage blanketed the continent for 40 thousand years before the ‘real’ Australians arrived was barely mentioned.

That doesn’t seem likely though, as Katter himself is of mixed Irish and Lebanese descent. Either he is denying his own Lebanese heritage, or he includes some migrants in his definition of “Australian.”

On the other hand, if he is including Lebanese in his version of what makes an authentic Australian, it would be logical to include the rest of the nationalities that come from the Middle East as well.

So far, we have Anglo Saxon, and Middle Eastern in the mix. Left out: the rest of Europe, most of Africa, all of the Americas, both North and South, South East Asians, North Asians, Indians, Pacific Islanders Inuit, Scandinavian.

Perhaps Mr Katter thinks we should just exclude everyone who was born overseas. The most recent Census statistics available, from 2006, indicate that 24% of the population was born outside Australia. What does Mr Katter suggest we do with them to protect the ”Australian race”? Deport them? Lock them up in mandatory detention centres in the middle of the Great Sandy Desert? Sterilise them?

This isn’t funny. This is about as unfunny as you can be, in the midst of such multiculturalism. From my perspective*, it’s divisive and ignorant, and I invite Mr Katter to sit down with me and have a coffee and talk about what makes an Australian.

He may not like our multicultural Australia, but it’s here, and we couldn’t stop it now, even if the majority wanted to. Even a return to our murky past via the White Australia Policy is impossible, and thank for your deity of choice for that!

Luckily for us, Mr Katter has a solution.  Throw money at it: $7000 per child per year to encourage parents (racially acceptable parents, that is) to have more kids, and lower the rates of suicide and homelessness.

In today’s money, that’s $98,000 in handouts to raise a child from newborn to fourteen years old. Obviously the payments would be indexed. On the basis of the 2006 Census figures, we can project a population of about 4.42milliom in that age bracket (0-14) in 2012. If we were to roll out this proposal right now, for the approximately 4.5 million kids between newborn and fourteen, we’d need about $31 billion dollars for one year. Our budget surplus of $1.5b would over about 5% of this payment. Mr Katter has suggested $2.1b, which would barely cover the newborns for a calendar year. Financially, we could not consider such a payment, even if it was sane.

Finally, let’s just take a look at the Australian population as it stands. It is multicultural, with almost one in four Aussies being born overseas. While we tend of think in terms of stereotypical ethnic ghettos, that model isn’t absolute. Even if there was an Australian racial identity 200 years ago, and a completely different one prior to that, there isn’t now. The racial makeup of Australian society is so magnificently inclusive, there is simply no single racial signature that captures what we are.

Multiculturalism, by it’s very nature, places Katter’s call for a financial solution to what he sees as a ‘racial’ problem in the basket marked Crazy-Talk. I’m sure I’m not the only Australian who is both affronted by this overt xenophobia, and amused by the impractical solution he’s proposed.

*My perspective: My maternal family roots are deep in English and Scottish soil, and my paternal family is Pakistani (see photo above). I was born in Australia, but is that enough for Bob Katter? My partner is of Scottish descent, but his first wife is 5^th generation Australian of Thai descent. His children are beautiful Eurasian girls who were born here. Are they Australian?

Mr Katter, in terms of race, how do you define “Australian”?

Andrew Bolt's Race to the Bottom

There’s another racism ‘scandal’ occurring in Australia, and once more, columnist and serial conservative Pied Piper and kaaskop Andrew Bolt had to contribute. He just couldn’t help himself. It’s a good thing that he has such a popular column; an opinion like his needs to be heard, if only as a way for the rest of us to gauge our sanity relative to his.

Apparently, Andrew Bolt is feeling “censored” as a result of being found guilty of offences under the Racial Discrimination Act. He thinks the rest of us should be feeling censored too, because Random House has allegedly deleted 200 posts, and the ABC has deleted thread posts as well.


Before we talk about Australian censorship, it’s important to remember that Andrew Bolt has a blog, but there are conditions for commenting on his blog. (see below.)

This is the bit where I get to prove just how free we Aussies are. Mr Bolt and I have very different opinions on most things, yet we both have blogs. I don’t suppress my opinions here any more than Mr Bolt suppresses his. I choose to tweet, and Andrew Bolt could too. He has a national column in News Limited papers, a national television programme, and until recently, a Melbourne radio gig as well.


Andrew Bolt has more opportunities to be heard than most Australians, and as long as he doesn’t use his words as weapons, he won’t be censored.


And therein lies the challenge for Mr Bolt. He deliberately chooses his words to be inflammatory. That is his skill, and the reason for his fame and the purpose of his job. His column exists to be controversial. In the case for which he was convicted last year, in the pursuit of controversy, he stepped over a line defined by the Racial Hatred Act, which is part of the Racial Discrimination Act.


The RHA covers public acts which are committed because of the race, colour, or origin of a person or group, and which are likely to offend, intimidate or humiliate that person of group. It’s a really simple law: don’t be mean.


Now, there are a few exceptions .If you are reporting on what happened during an incident involving racial concerns, you’re okay. If you are a genuine racist, you’re not a good person, but you’re allowed to say express your racism, “reasonably and in good faith.” But you’re not allowed to deliberately set out to offend, intimidate or humiliate.


Mr Bolt was deliberately provocative, and he admitted it during his trial. Mate, if you set out to piss someone off, and as a result, they get pissed off and sue you, don’t expect the law to be on your side.


One more time for the stubborn folk: Don’t be mean. The rest of us learned this rule in kindergarten. Be careful how you use your words.

I have a perspective on race and racism, but you know, it wasn’t until I was much older, probably in my 30s, that I became aware that the “half-caste” isn’t a nice out-loud word. It was a word I grew up with, I used it to describe myself. Mentally, I still do, but apparently it’s offensive. These days, to avoid offending others, I use the term “caramel baby”.

I don’t find it offensive. I find it objectively descriptive. I am the child of two parents who weren’t the same colour as each other. Back in the 60s, you could’ve called that a miracle! It wasn’t until two years after I was born that the US Supreme Court overturned 300-year-old laws that prohibited inter-racial marriage. Inter-racial marriage was legal in the UK in 1964, yet it was legal to display “No Blacks” signs in your business for another five years.


Anyway, if you call me a half-caste, I won’t be offended. Now that I know others find it offensive, I’ll wonder why you chose that term, and probably feel a bit sad. But no, I won’t be offended.

For the record, terms I will not accept include Abo, Boong, Nigger, Camel Jockey, Muzzie, Towel-Head and Stupid.


As the fair-haired child of Dutch immigrants, I wonder if Andrew Bolt was subjected to any kind of discrimination. Actually, I couldn’t think of any derogatory terms for dutch people, so I turned to the interwebz for help. I found there 40-odd racial slurs for black people, 10 for East Asians, 2 for southern Asians, 18 for Europeans, and 29 miscellaneous listings.

Of course it’s not really about name-calling. It’s about respect versus disrespect. I respect myself and have no problem with being called a Half-Caste. Anita Heiss and the other eight petitioners who sued Andrew Bolt have self-respect, but Mr Bolt has no respect for them. That’s his problem, not theirs, and certainly not mine.

The bottom line, at least for me, is that it shouldn’t matter, and before much longer, it won't. We’ll all be Coffee-Coloured anyway.