An Epistle to Traditional Australia... (1) Please Hold...

By Denis McCormack
Volume 16, Number 3 (Spring 2006)
Issue theme: "Nation building / Nation bashing: nations change radically through mass immigration"

The precipitating �new normal' violence happened the previous weekend when a couple of Cronulla's volunteer surf lifeguards were set upon and bashed by a gang of young Lebanese Muslims.

It should have been better, but it could have been worse. So goes traditional Australia's view of both �The Sydney Race Riots' (a.k.a. the Cronulla Community DIY Policing Initiative) before Christmas, and P.M. John Winston Howard's decade in office which ticked over on 2nd March.

Much has been written and spoken about both of these events. Not much of it has honestly explored the interrelated tensions which bind both events to each other. JWH is running all-time high immigration, the majority of which is non-European (2), mostly Asian, and about 10% of it from West Asia i.e. the Middle East. While it is fair to say that this troublesome trend started well before his decade at the wheel, it is also true that his acceleration of majority non-European immigration poses a more clear and present danger to traditional Australia's survival than did Cronulla's gentle warriors with Aussie flags rainbowed in their eyes and cries for help in their hearts be happy that vital signs are still detectable!

Sydney's December 11 day of disquiet was squeezed into an already crowded international rioting calendar. As a pre-Christmas late entry fill-in, it came after the Paris riots and before the New Year's Cartooniac Riots.

Life's busy, and with only 14 shopping days to Christmas, the whole event may well have been a fizzer if not for the generous pre-publicity and mustering incitement which flowed freely from many an important MSM orifice in Sydney. The resultant turnout of 5 to 6 thousand turned in a mostly restrained and good natured performance given the long years of accumulated, documented, and deeply anguishing provocations endured by traditional Australia from this ethno-religious national group in particular. A TV chopper showed us from on high, big lines in Cronulla beach sand saying "100% AUSSIE PRIDE" ...nice one!

DIY Sunday wasn't huge, nor was it too small. Most didn't riot. Most were content to talk, with lots of Aussie flags flying. There was very little blood, few bruises, no serious injury or deaths, and little damage. It must be said however that we're talking summer in the city here, and whilst our riots were pretty small beer by horrifying international standards, a few too many small beers consumed on the day may well have been a factor influencing the behavior of some. Granted no one should hit others with bottles, or otherwise thoughtlessly dispose of them. But we do read daily of far worse things in the papers usually done to us, by them. So, in deference to the bigger picture lets not obsess about the irresponsible few who so transgressed. That Sunday night however, a convoy of 50 to 60 cars led by one flying the Lebanese flag unleashed far more serious smash, bash and stab raids, with more to follow the next night.

Baseball bats were applied to Cronulla's parked cars and shopfront windows, along with anything or anyone else nearby ... un tres ugly night a la Paris, non? Needless to say the TV news footage stunned us around the country but it wasn't a complete surprise to most of traditional Australia.

In understandably high anxiety, locked down residents at the Paris end of Cronulla and environs, along with many startled viewers elsewhere, hit the phones. They sought reassurance, reinforcements and advice from all manner of Local, State, and Federal policing, security and defense agencies. Some even tried to call George Bush's honored friend he dubbed our "man of steel" in Canberra. Listening to ring tone impatiently, they'd long suspected that government outsourcing of key domestic administration and industry sectors together with foreign policy formulation was becoming problematical. Imagine their amazement when, eventually patched through, they all heard the following recorded message from HQ:

"Hello!...and thank you for calling Houston... All our operators are in either meltdown or denial right now, but we do know we have a problem. If you are on local call rates, press 1 to sample apologies from a long list of well known political leaders, academics, think tankers, professional ethnics, libertarian thought police, progressive artists and performers, and sundry other famed media nitwits who have for so many years so egregiously censored, slandered, and misrepresented your common sense concerns about the cumulative detrimental effects of inappropriate mass immigration which, through a spattering of congealed egg and blood on their faces, they now see more clearly. Please hold..."

But seriously folks, no doubt JWH remembers an earlier occasion when traditional Australia really did melt the Sydney metro phone system. On the 16th of August 1988, Rupert Murdoch's Adelaide �News' ran a front page story reporting on a TV current affairs telephone poll which produced not only Sydney's communications chaos, but also heavy call traffic trunked in from around the rest of Australia's metro areas: "The overload blocked suburban exchanges ... more than 80% want a cut in Asian immigration..." Way back then that meltdown was partly our JWH's handywork. Traditional Australia imagined (mistakenly as we know now) that we'd found a champion who might well follow through on immigration reform should we elect him Prime Minister in future, and he has used that lingering folk echo as a key to our collective sub-conscious ever since.

In his 20 March 2003 address to the nation outlining the reasons our forces were joining America's War in Iraq, he said: �Australia is a western country with western values. Nothing will or should change that,' and �Australians of Arab background or of the Islamic faith are a treasured part of our community.' We know what's wrong with this picture. So puzzled patriots here are entitled to ask themselves �who is this masked man this haute Machiavellian, their deeply conflicted and dissembling leader previously known to them as �honest John'?. In 1988 he spoke to our history and our hearts about our �Future Directions' as "One nation rather than a nation of many nations" or more recently in 1996 "you can argue a racist position without necessarily being a racist".

In 1996 we dispatched his Labor party predecessor P.M. Paul Keating's despised and aggressive pro-Asianisation, pro-flag changing, pro republican agenda. JWH swept into office on the promise of making us again feel "relaxed and comfortable" about ourselves and our place in the world, but now it is his immigration policy that pushes traditional Australia ever faster towards demographic minority status and palliative care, from which recovery can prove difficult. However, the first law of holes does apply here: �if you find yourself in a grave and deepening hole with a shovel in your hands stop digging so furiously' and activate Plan C for cutting immigration (3) and rebalancing of its anti-white bias.

It's not widely appreciated how early JWH saw himself as a future man of affairs. After some years of young conservative political activism here, he took his first trip overseas in 1964 to help out on the British Conservatives' election campaign, with a side trip to Israel. He didn't enter our Parliament until 1974, but then rose through the ranks quite quickly.

By mid 1988 then opposition leader JWH already knew that as a political strategy, critical remarks about Asian immigration levels worked. In 1979 he'd watched his UK conservative heroine Margaret Thatcher's ride to victory after poaching the anti-immigration vote with "enough is enough" and her commentary about the understandable fear of "being swamped by Asians." In contrast to her however, he had recently led his colleagues to a demoralizing electoral loss in July 1987 so although he'd argued the anti-Asianization case with skill and to much public acclaim, he didn't have an electoral cycle handy on which to ride this winner across the line. In the meantime the controversy was being quietly strangled by all the usual suspects.

Some months later in 1989 his party's hard men dumped him as a result of this miscalculation and other accumulated reasons. He found himself rejected, bruised, and bleeding, with his political teeth kicked so far down his throat that he had to employ innovative and painful ways to clean what remained of them. He got on with life sidelined in the political sin bin until late 1994. Then the hard men who, having installed three failed leaders since JWH's humiliation, re-approached our self-titled �Lazarus with a triple bypass' who by this time had undergone a mental and dental makeover as befits the last man standing with leadership potential.

He heard clearly from his party's pharisees that if he wished to again grasp for the elusive holy grail, he'd best consider: "Adopting policies and rhetoric which would overcome the perception that Mr Howard had been anti-Asian immigration during his last stint as opposition leader, including possibly increasing the immigration intake ... sources said he indicated that he had no problem with the groups points" ...And so it came to pass and to press, on the front page of �The Australian' 6 December 1994 �MPs offer Howard leadership deal' ...Asianization must continue or else, regardless of traditional Australia's known wishes.

The unhappy result of JWH signing a separate peace back then is that: "Howard and Ruddock are relieved that the recent announcement of an expanded program won little negative publicity. They describe their approach as managed gradualism...Ruddock can justify his claim that �border protection is about retaining public confidence in immigration'." (The Australian, 3/4 August 2002 "Restocking the nation"). But I digress...

Meanwhile back in Cronulla, as an army of glaziers worked overtime making good the damage, the PM, in his customary simple but soothing secular vernacular implored us to "calm down" and "take a few deep breaths." He refused to castigate those who dared wave or wear the Aussie flag at the beach party. He insisted that the law would be enforced (4) and beseeched the fourth estate not to embark on the predictable orgy of "self-flagellation" which these months later hasn't yet quite stopped.

JWH tells us that he still relishes being "in perpetual conversation with the Australian people." This after 10 years we know too well, but there are others to whom he could usefully respond on our behalf, and he chooses not to.

That other great communicator, Bill Clinton, graced our shores in late February to pick up big bucks for a series of quick managerial pep-talks. Local celeb handler Max Markson set Clinton on stage to the tune of his retro 70's theme song "Don't stop thinking about tomorrow." Those who attended had their egos massaged with his expensive low-fat low-fact snake oil. Press reports had some of us wanting to �kill Bill'. In �the gospel according to Clinton' (5) he said that Australia should double its population and build on its multicultural links...blah, blah, blah. When JWH caught him by the cigar for a reportedly quiet chat at the airport as they crossed flight paths, did our fearless leader recite to Bill the more insightful countervailing scripture from the gospel according to the Bishop of Birmingham: "A nation that sets before itself the ambition to increase its population largely is a bad partner to the Commonwealth of Mankind." (6) ...probably not!

In The Australian (4 February 2004) another of John Howard's mates, an Aussie Jewish American, chimed in to reiterate traditional Australia's worst nightmare, our long known but under discussed existential threat which he put thus:

"Australia needs a long-term strategy to prepare for the prospect of an influx of migrants from Asia in coming decades, the Australian president of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, has warned. Mr Wolfensohn said the population of the world's poorer countries was expected to grow from 5 billion to 7 billion in the next 25 to 30 years, with much of the increase in Asia. 'I would have thought that if Australia has an issue now, 30 years from now it has a bigger issue to face,' he told Australian reporters in Washington. 'The numbers are inevitable. One cannot just think of today. So a longer-term strategy for Australia, and for all developed countries of the world, is going to be critical.' While he did not want to comment on the Howard government's treatment of boatpeople Mr Wolfensohn suggested the immigration dilemma was only beginning."

"'You have to ask the question, what sort of Australia is it going to be in 30 years time,' he said on the eve of a trip home that will include meetings with the Government... Mr Wolfensohn said rich countries such as Australia fail to understand the danger to their own security of the explosion in the world's poor. Over the next 30 years, an extra 2 billion poor people would be added to the 5 billion who earned less than a few dollars a day. 'If you can't give them hope, which comes from getting a job or doing something productive...these people become the basis on which terrorists can flourish.'"

So did JWH pick up the phone and say:

"Geday Jimmo... JWH here, how's things? ...yeah she's fine thanks and the kids are good... Look Jim, we're both busy so I'll cut to the chase. I just thought I should give you a quick call to clear up some questions you obviously have in your own mind, if I read you correctly in today's paper, about Australia's long term strategy to deal with the old hypothetically descending Asian hordes scenario...lol...well Jim, I don't know where you went to school... the word influx is ok too but we used to say hordes when I was a kid...lol...no, no, gravity doesn't work like that Jim, they won't just fall down here from up there...lol... but seriously though I understand the points you raise... all very unfortunate, but hardly unexpected, and I do appreciate your input, however can I say that on this occasion I think you're barking up the wrong tree mate... yeah, this dead horse has been flogged many times... I've heard all manner of mischevious and misleading stats on this from cringers and cowards in big banking, big business boardrooms, and from colleagues here on both sides of politics since the beginning of my illustrious innings back in '74... if my memory serves me correctly, their back of envelope calculations go something like this: Australia's population is about 0.3% of the world's population correct! Our landmass is about 5% of the world's landmass correct! 5% of the world's population is about 300 mill correct! But you and your friends draw false conclusions from these facts to imply that as a result of them, we are under some universalist moral obligation to trash our corner of paradise in a futile attempt to accommodate some many extra millions of the world's future excess billions... yeah... no I don't doubt your stats on the intensity of the coming demographic firestorm nor do I doubt your good and sincere motives... yeah... I'm simply saying that I'm presently captain coach of team Australia and I say the facts are as follows: Our post WWII planners were plumbing for 25-30 mill here all up. In doing so, they erred on the side of caution for good reasons as we Australians now well know, and on current projections you know I've been running immigration pretty high myself we'll be in the ballpark of 25-30 mill before we know it... we don't think we'd be doing the world or ourselves any favors by wiping out traditional Australia because global demographics are hitting the fan comprehensively elsewhere. I'm with the late Garrett Hardin on this one... you remember him, "the tragedy of the commons", "separate experiments", "there's nothing more dangerous than a shallow-thinking compassionate person"...yeah...well, its not our fault Jim, nor is it within our gift to prevent it or even ameliorate it in any meaningful way... no you're not right there Jim...we're doing the token stuff on refugees more so than most other countries, and have done for years... are they expensive? Are they ever! Do the numbers Jim, you're a bean counter of some note, $22 mill per thousand per year after year... we could do a lot with that sort of money for all those poor folk back over there who'll never get here! ...Has it solved the global refugee problem? No! ...have even the token numbers given us heartache? ... Plenty! Lots of people here think we've gone too far with the refugee thing already. If you think Australia can do much more to ease Asia's growth other than to reluctantly lock ourselves into resource milch cow mode then you're dreaming Jim! ...we understand the sensitivities one country's profitable export is another country's food and energy security... we're happy to help where we can, and we do, but we can only grow food for 60-70 mill max and that includes us, at our present numbers! ...Or would you prefer we held back a bit on food exports given the global obesity epidemic?... lol... there might be some pain in that but I can see how it might work out advantageously all round... it would necessitate some trimming of our consumerist sails domestically... lol... if you'll excuse the pun, but that would be a good thing too... on the population thing though, the UN's best advice as I read it, is that all countries should aim for population stability ASAP, and we're inclined to be more sympathetic to that view as time passes... and that's what the scientists and greenies here have been screaming for years! ...we could kickstart a sensible slowdown project here tomorrow and still not stop numbers growing inside of 10 or 20 years... in sustainability and employment terms we'd have more than enough work to do retro fitting what we've already built if we are to ourselves survive the coming era of population increase-driven resource depletion and climate change, etc that you speak of... no, no, no Jim, you can have too much of a good thing, no more diversity talk, puleeeez. We already have diversity overload driving the complexity of rapid social change with consequently evolving frictions and urban neuroses... spreading tens or scores or hundreds of millions more Asians and Africans across our wide, brown, toasted land like Vegemite is just not in anyone's best interests... yeah, I've heard too often the line: "They will come anyway so when rape is inevitable, say it's in the national interest and make a buck off the back of it in the meantime" ...It doesn't wash that well even with me anymore... let me tell you frankly Jim, we may appear superficially a bit flabby and foolish right now, but we'll work on that as the end times get closer and we swing back naturally to an �Australia First' position. I've learned that you can't rush these things. Did you notice that particular slogan, bannered up big for voters to see in the 2001 election?: "The coalition putting Australia first" or something close to that... I can't recall where we lifted that from but it sure helped give the right impression. There was a nice front page shot of it right behind me in one of the papers at the time. I've got it at home in a drawer somewhere. Traditional Australia likes that sort of thing, and so do I... anyway, to sum up, we're reasonably well positioned to sit out the unhappy coming international demographic problem to which you refer... yeah, yeah... I know, no man is an island, but Australia certainly is, mate... lol... Good Jim... OK... all the best, and give me a call when next you're in Aus... OK mate, good to talk... bye for now!

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1) Traditional Australia, a.k.a. predominantly white Australia. John Howard in vice and virtue is archetypical traditional Australia. At his decade-in-office party when quizzed on his achievements in government, JWH mentioned with high priority "the rebuilding of self-belief in what I call traditional Australia," TA as he well knows has always been synonymous with �predominantly white Australia' or �white Australia' or �Anglo-Celtic Australia' or �Australians of European background.' PWA is today less PC since our government enshrined unrequested multicultural policy for us in 1975. MC was designed specifically to pave the world's way to a brave new PC post-colour (PC2?) Australia. Since 1975, generations of children have been educated against their reality, and encouraged to denigrate their history and heritage. Some remain confused, conflicted and perplexed by the experience, and symptoms of this play out in sometimes harmful ways like too many of them landing in academia and media, coaxing us to forget ourselves by spreading their misconceptions. But most see through it, and quietly recover. PWA is a truly descriptive and inclusive term which covers our racial reality, history, culture, religious background, and impetus to sovereignty as a nation state. The Prime Minister's own website is linked to the National Archives of Australia site which has a detailed timeline starting from Federation 1 Jan 1901. The sixth event it records reads in part "23 December 1901 The enactment of the Immigration Restriction Act...It enabled the government to create a predominantly European population," which by our overwhelming desire we already were and had, from our 1855 legislation onwards, determined that we should always be. Our flag was chosen 3 September 1901. TWA is also inclusive of Aborigines as first among other numerically non-threatening minorities who have been happy to join us on our terms. PWA was first legislated for in 1855 in colonial Melbourne which became the focus for federation in 1901, around which all else was built. PWA was and remains our foundational wisdom, and as such has continued to bestow its civilizational achievements everyday, on everyone, everywhere in Australia whether we recognize it, appreciate it, abuse it, are ignorant of it, or not.

Most Aborigines and we Yobborigines who take the time to contemplate "what if" realize that some colonial power or other was going to arrive here eventually, and that between the best and worst intentions, unhappy stuff happens on frontier fringes of expanding empires no matter which one, when, or where. If we examine the fate of other indigenous peoples who were caught up in other empires, by and between other races at other times, we know why we thank our lucky stars that the British settled Australia "Where most Asians are concerned, the survival of Aboriginal people has never had any priority" said Prof Wang Gu Wu, Vice Chancellor of Hong Kong University, past- President of the Asian Studies Association of Australia in the Canberra Times 8 July 1992.

Gularrwuy Yunupingu, past Australian of the Year, and Aboriginal Community Leader in Australia's Northern Territory warned of PWA's timidity in the face of multiculturalism over ten years ago in The Australian 6 Jan 1996: "There's too many outside immigrants.... People who are Aboriginal and who are Australian-born [another popular PWA synonym] have the main rights. Those cultures should be dominant instead of Australia being multicultural. It's an insult to say multicultural. You're trying to hide behind other cultural groups. This is Australia it should have a culture of its own. Why do we have to hide it among the Chinamen, the Arabs and the Jews? We love outside stuff too much..." Amen, brother Yunupingu!

2) See K. Betts, People and Place, Vol 11, No. 3, 2003: "In 2002 the proportion of net permanent and long-term migrants who had been born in Asia was just under 72 per cent and the proportion from the Middle East and North Africa was just over 7 per cent." Note that this calculation of majority non-European immigration didn't include sub-Saharan African immigration which has also been rising. Since Betts' article we've had even higher non-European immigration.

JWH purports to be an Australian history buff, and was no doubt horrified when in Orwell's year of 1984, Prof Geoffrey Blainey's hide was hung out to dry for stating the obvious dangers to traditional Australia from excessive Asian immigration. Jealous PC zealots amongst his academic colleagues and their associated media jackals made a meal of hero historian Blainey, who responded later that year with All for Australia (Methuen Haynes, 176 pages). It is an Australian classic that nearly said it all. Its warnings of a thundering blunder downunder have proved too true since its publication 22 years ago. His diagnosis back then has now become a chronic condition. JWH must have read it, agreed with it instinctively, but had to have recognized himself as a part of the problem, being a rising star in the Fraser faux conservative government (1975-1983) which opened Australia to waves of Asian boat people in the late 1970's. This was the start of publicly funded mass Asian immigration into Australia which JWH continues today, only more so! In All for Australia, pages 66 to 69, Blainey gently muses:

"It should be easy to find out how many Asian immigrants are coming to Australia and how quickly they will change the composition of society. It is not easy.... The immigration department which sometimes appears to be an autonomous empire, is skilled in clouding the facts.... Where is Asia? Every atlas and globe can point to it but the immigration department has cut Asia down to size. If Asia is made smaller, the pace of Asian migration to Australia does not appear so great. Since about 1980 the 'Asian' figures issued.... go no further west than Afghanistan. That is where Asia ends, or begins according to the department. The immigrants who arrive from Iran, Lebanon, or Arabia are now classified as coming from the Middle East, not from Asia. And yet much of the Middle East is part of West Asia... If the immigration department wishes to diminish Asia, it should coin a different title for its shrunken Asia for instance 'Eastern and Middle Asia...' the immigration department is entitled to break Asian statistics into regions.... But to omit a crucial part of Asia and to continue to use the word 'Asian' for that dismembered continent is misleading.... It is important to know how Australia will be affected if the present rate of Asian Immigration continues for the next fifteen or twenty years. The official view is that Australia's population will not be noticeably altered, and the Sydney Morning Herald in its editorial of 21 March 1984, was one of many newspapers to approve the Canberra view. 'The recent rising proportion of Asians coming here makes little overall difference to the make up of the Australian population. Demographers agree that something like 2 percent of the Australian population is Asian. According to departmental estimates Australia's population will be about 4 percent Asian by the year 2000 if present trends continue. The demography department at the Australian National University predicts that the Asian population in this country will reach 7 percent by the year 2000 if present trends continue...' The immigration department has followed the old trick of ignoring the western part of Asia without revealing its omission... thus omitting one of the most vigorous phases of Asian immigration in our history. It has also counted none of the locally born children of Asian immigrants."

You get the drift.... we've been lied to comprehensively, systematically, for a long time by successive Prime Ministers from both sides of politics and the bureaucracy. Today those "skilled in clouding the facts" still ensure that the quickly growing cumulative numbers of Asians here from Turkey to Timor, is still "not easy to find out." Immigration mistakes are big mistakes. They don't go away, they only get bigger.

3) �Migrant cut is key Carr tells Crean' Melb. Sunday Age. 6 July 2003. Carr was then New South Wales State Labor Premier telling the federal opposition leader how to win the next election. He was ignored. They lost. Carr's plan was to halve immigration. It's not rocket science and would fly faster and higher today given the Labor Party's current low stocks, and as the unions begin to understand better the post- Cronulla reality, not to mention the consequences of the 457 visa foreign workers flood.

4) The police have copped a mostly undeserved basting as ready-to-roast scapegoats for what they supposedly did or didn't, could or shouldn't have done about a time bomb that they identified, they told us about and they heard ticking years ago. In the mid 1990's, then newly arrived from the UK Police Commissioner Peter Ryan brought the roof down on himself for daring to state on record the bleeding obvious, ie. that Sydney had ethnic crime and ethnic gang problems. Also see The Social Contract, Vol. XIV, No. 2, Winter 2003-4 themed "France Once a Nation" which carried on page 148 a boxed excerpt from an article in The Australian 12 Jan 2004 on Middle Easterners and crime which drew parallels between Sydney and Paris. It was written by Tim Priest, a police detective in Sydney until 2002, by which time his common sense had clashed with his career prospects. It makes even spookier reading now, after riots in both Paris and Sydney! Politely left unmentioned in all the post riot analysis critical of the police is the fact that their hands, along with those of the already libertarian activist riddled judicial system, were tied to the new PC reality some years ago. A communication issued by The Australian Law Reform Commission, 15 Nov 1995 refers to its "Recommendation 29 from ALRC 57. A number of the criminal law recommendations have also been implemented while others are presently under consideration. The Crimes and Other Legislation Amendment Act 1994 amends the Crimes Act 1914 to ensure that the offender's cultural background is specified as a factor to be taken into account when the court considers whether to proceed to a conviction and when considering sentence." read another ever-enlargening lawyers' picnic for special pleading, as our newspapers daily report that it has turned out to be!

Across the months of media "self-flagellation" that I've attempted to monitor regarding the riots, only one commentator on one TV program so far has mentioned the one central issue in one sentence "Cronulla was referred pain from an immigration program that's been off the rails since it was combined with multiculturalism in 1975." (SBS TV's �Insights' 7 March 2006 titled �Culture Clash,' transcripts available on their website.)

5) �Populate: the gospel according to Clinton', Melbourne Herald Sun, 24 Feb 2006.

6) No, not Enoch Powell but the earlier one, �Bishop Barnes On Birth Control: Increase in Populations Bad,' Melbourne Sun Pictorial, 29 November 1929.

About the author

Denis McCormack is Australian correspondent for The Social Contract.