On Monday June 20 I was interviewed by Raymond Grenfell on Indymedia on RTR FM (Perth) about the assassination of Jo Cox, the far right and racism in Britain and Australia. You can listen again here. I tried to talk about how mainstream politics nurtures the environment in which Jo…
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I was asked by the Campaign to Stop the Deportation of Luqman Onikosi and Luqman himself to write an article drawing attention to his case and, crucially, to the infiltration of the border into all realms of life. Luqman is adamant that this campaign not be framed in the individualist…
Comments closedOn November 9, I published an article in The Guardian, co-written with Omar Bensaidi, on the liberal approach to racism in Australia. Racism denial is rife in Australia among white elites and those captured in the tentacles of what Jon Stratton termed ‘honorary whiteness’. The article argued that Standing back…
Comments closedA Head-to-head published in The Guardian on 29 August 2014. On 11 August an anonymous group published an open letter to two ex-members of Pussy Riot. The group called on Masha Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova to withdraw from the Festival of Dangerous Ideas taking place this weekend at the Sydney…
Comments closedAn article I co-wrote with Javed De Costa of Beyond Borders on why the Boycott of the 19th Sydney Biennale over its involvement with Transfield, the company that runs the detention centres on Manus Island and Nauru, was an important first step in the campaign to boycott and divest from…
Comments closedI’m a bit late updating the site with this article from last week in which I argued, against Antony Loewenstein, that Section 18C of the Australian Race Discrimination Act should not be repealed as proposed by the Attorney General, George Brandis. I preempted Antony’s argument, that the 18C which protects…
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Update: A modified version of this post, appeared in The Guardian Australia on July 23 2013.
Both Australia and the UK have sunk to new lows by releasing ads targeted at ‘illegal immigrants’ (UK) and ‘boat people’ (Australia) telling them to go back to where they came from. I speculate that it is David Cameron’s election advisor, Lynton Crosby, an Australia, described by The Guardian as The Lizard of Oz, who is behind this copycat action in the UK but it might be just that great (!) minds think alike.
As Kevin Rudd unveiled his decision to send asylum seekers arriving to Australian shores by boat to be processed and resettled (if found to be ‘genuine refugees) in Australia’s (former) colony, Papua Guinea, ads appeared in newspapers telling asylum seekers in no uncertain terms that ‘If you come here by boat without a visa, you won’t be settled in Australia.’ The ad campaign is costing the Australian tax payer $2.5 million in its first week.
It was accompanied by what @damonayoung on Twitter called ‘immigration porn for xenophobes’: The Department for Immigration and Citizenship posting photographs and video of the first group of Iranian asylum seekers being told that they would be transferred to PNG (see photo left).
Published on Guardian Australia on 19 July, 2013, my reaction to Australian opposition leader Scott Morrison’s speech on integration. Meanwhile, the governing Labour Party has hit asylum seekers hard by effectively making it impossible to seek refuge in Australia for those arriving by boat and resettling them in Australia’s old…
Comments closedI would have headed this ‘rich Indians’ good, because of course the point is not that all Indians will suddenly be welcomed to Britain with open arms, but I don’t get to decide about the headlines! In The End of Tolerance, Arun Kundnani argues that the ability to integrate in…
Comments closedAn article I wrote with Valerie Amiraux on the plan to take the word ‘race’ out of the French constitution. It’s become something of a commonplace to speak of the US as having entered a post-racial age. Both the right and the left have heralded the end of race, either…
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Bus Attacks: what lies behind those racist rants?
The Guardian has recently launched in Australia and I have written an article on Comment is Free on the recent spate of racist attacks on public transport. I also hope to be doing some research into the matter from within my affiliation to the Institute for Culture and Society at…