The silence of the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard for close to two months to condemn the speech by independent Australian Member of Parliament Pauline Hanson and allowing racist outbursts against Asian migrants has caused considerable damage to the work of previous Australian Prime Ministers from both parties in the past three decades to build trust and respect from Asian governments, leaders and peoples.
The issue in Asia is not Pauline Hanson’s anti-Asian speech in the Australian Parliament on September 10, where she raised the spectre of Australia being “swamped by Asians” and called for the abolition of multiculturalism, but Prime Minister John Howard’s personal position, as he had campaigned on an anti-Asian immigration platform in 1987.
All Asians must be concerned about the rise in incidents of racial abuse and sharp increase in official complaints of racism to the human rights commission in Australia, the latest being incidents of harassment involving some of the 1,000-strong Singaporean troops training in Australia, some of whom have been subjected to robbery, assault and racial abuse.
The joint parliamentary motion in Australian Parliament yesterday condemning racism and pledging tolerance, with John Howard making a general statement “to the nations of the region that we are a tolerant society, we are a compassionate society” is too little and too late.
Asians expect John Howard to take immediate, firm and positive action to show that the Australian government under him had not turned its back on Asia or multiculturalism, by denouncing Hanson’s views and put an effective check to the outbreak in xenophonia in Australia before all the goodwill built up by previous Australian Prime Ministers in Australian-Asian relationships are dissipated away.
(31/10/96)