It's not a race war, it's a clash of cultures
Keith Windschuttle
The Australian
December 16, 2005

It was inevitable, given the prevailing mindset within government and the media, that Sydney's beachside violence this week would be called race riots. The New South Wales premier, his ministers and many newspaper headlines all used the term. However, a more ungainly but nonetheless more accurate description would have been multicultural riots. For the doctrine of multiculturalism is really to blame.

The tensions that exploded this week were defined into existence by multiculturalist policies and ideas. It wasn't the youths at Cronulla beach who decided that all Lebanese constitute an ethnic group. That was done for them by politicians, bureaucrats and academics in the name of constructing ethnic communities. Those youths can certainly be blamed for trying to beat up a few outnumbered innocents but not for responding to people as ethnics in the first place.

In earlier periods, Lebanese immigrants were not defined as an ethnic group. Lebanon is one of the oldest sources of Australian migration. People have been coming from that country since the 1880s. They were never defined as aliens under the old White Australia Policy and their numbers gradually grew from 601 in 1891 to 2670 in 1933. Until 1975, almost all were Maronites or Christian Lebanese. They prospered here, married out into the local community and, within two generations, became largely indistinguishable from the Australian mainstream. One of their offspring, Nick Shehadie, a former Lord Mayor of Sydney and husband of the New South Wales governor Marie Bashir, captained the Wallabies in three of 30 Tests for his country. How Australian can you get?

After 1975, the onset of civil war brought Lebanese Muslims here on grounds of humanitarian resettlement. At the same time, the policy of multiculturalism was initiated by the Whitlam government and entrenched under Malcolm Fraser. Multiculturalism began, and until recently was regarded by most Australians, as a civilized concept to ease immigrants into their new environment.

But it became corrupted by partisan politics. As former Labor government minister Barry Jones has admitted, immigration became "a tremendously important element" in building up a long-term, non-English speaking political constituency for his party. In the 1980s immigration policy switched from national interest to ethnic preference, from demographic and labour market need to family reunion. In the name of cultural diversity, the bureaucrats in charge used welfare and housing policy to promote ethnic community building. This concentrated non-English speaking immigrants in western and south-western Sydney.

Most affected were the post-1975 Lebanese Muslims. By 2001, some 73 per cent of all Lebanese in Australia were living in these Sydney suburbs.

Multicultural policy was always justified by the assumption that the xenophobia of old Australia was the problem. This presumption still reverberates in the voices of politicians and journalists who responded to this week's events as if Australian youth were the real culprits. Hypocritically, they denounce racial stereotyping of ethnic groups but freely typecast Anglo Australia.

Multiculturalism is also at odds with the core tenets of liberal democracy where rights inhere in the individual not the collective, and where people's representatives are elected politicians not self-appointed ethnic spokesmen or godfathers. Multiculturalism is a reversion to tribalism that is anachronistic in modern, liberal, urban society.

In Sydney it has been plain for at least a decade that, instead of ethnic communities living happily in the diversity of social pluralism, multiculturalism bred ethnic ghettos characterized by high levels of unemployment, welfare dependency, welfare abuse, crime and violence. The social engineers responsible should have been well aware of the likely outcome, especially for young men.

All the evidence from the numerous studies of similar ethnic ghettos in North America and Europe show they produce much the same result, whatever the colour or ethnicity of their inhabitants. Ghetto culture for young males everywhere is characterized by interpersonal violence, sexual irresponsibility, incomplete education, substandard speech, a hypersensitivity about being disrespected, and a feckless attitude towards work.

The Lebanese assaults on the Cronulla lifesavers that led to this week's mass retaliation were nothing new.

This behaviour has been with us for more than a decade. When the former principal of Punchbowl Boys High, a school dominated by Lebanese Muslim youth, suffered a breakdown and sued the New South Wales government, he gave an insight to the local culture.

Between 1995 and 1999 students armed with knives had threatened classmates, teachers were assaulted and gangs invaded classrooms. On one occasion, the principal had a gun held to his head by a Lebanese gang member who threatened to shoot him. One of his students was convicted of murdering a Korean schoolboy and three other students were jailed for their roles in some of Sydney's most notorious gang rapes.

In 1997, during a house fire in another Sydney ethnic ghetto at Auburn known as Little Lebanon, police and firefighters were attacked by youths hurling rocks. An ambulance had a window shot out, ensuring all future ambulance calls to the locality were accompanied by police escort. Little Lebanon was a concentration of Muslim families from the same rural district who had come to Australia first as refugees, then as chain immigrants.

At the same time as all this was going on, however, the majority of Anglo Australians were giving the lie to the stereotype of latent racism. Outside the ethnic enclaves, instead of racist or ethnocentric attitudes to newcomers, old Australians were working with, marrying and having children with them.

Studies by Monash University's Bob Birrell of the most revealing test of immigrant integration, the marriage rate, showed that by the end of the 1990s less than 10 per cent of second-generation marriages of persons of European descent were to someone from their parents' country. Much the same was true of immigrants from south and east Asia. Only 6 per cent of Indians married within their ethnic group, as did only 16 per cent of Chinese. In short, most immigrants, whatever their race, married Australians of other nationalities.

However, for the Lebanese, of whom most of marriageable age were Muslims, these figures were reversed. No less than 74 per cent of Lebanese married within their own ethnic group. Moreover, this figure was the only one to increase since the early 1990s when it was 72 per cent. This pattern might have fulfilled the community-building objective Lebanese political and religious leaders sought, but it has been a disaster for their constituents' relationship with the rest of Australia.

Put this week's beachside violence into its political and social context and the conclusion is clear. It is not race that is the problem but culture. Multiracialism has been a success in contemporary Australia but multiculturalism has been an abject failure.