This article is an instalment in a new series, “Peter Dutton is racist”, on Dutton’s history of racism and the role racism has played on both sides of politics since the 1970s.
In today’s political discourse, “racist” is a pejorative term, an accusation, an insult. No-one, except for a few white supremacists, accepts being labelled a racist, with its terrifying connotations of deadly violence justified by perceived biological differences — slavery, genocide and the Holocaust.
More mildly, racism refers to state-based oppression in differential laws, which the Racial Discrimination Act has rendered impossible, and to prejudicial social attitudes that create in-groups and out-groups. So is it useful to understand the patterns revealed in Bernard Keane’s list of Peter Dutton’s statements? Dutton and his supporters will reject out of hand the description of him as a racist. His opponents will take it as evidence of something they already know. And no-one will be much the wiser.
This is not to say there is no pattern; there clearly is. But I think it is more accurate — and useful — to describe this as xenophobia rather than racism. The word does not carry such a heavy historical load, is not so quickly reacted to as an insult, and points us towards the history of nationalism rather than differences among bodies. (What follows does not apply to Dutton’s comments on Indigenous peoples, which raise different questions.)
Although “xenophobia” is composed of two words from Ancient Greek — “xenos”, which means both stranger and guest, and “phobia”, which means fear — its origins are not ancient at all. It was coined in the late nineteenth century to describe the Chinese Boxer Rebellion’s attacks on foreigners of all sorts. Generalised into a term for extreme forms of nationalism, the word’s use started increasing in the 1940s. It then took a sharp upward turn in the early 1980s as nations tried to manage the multiethnic polities forming from successive postwar waves of migration, which brought “strangers” to live and work in largely ethnically homogenous host nations.
Nations are a creation of the nineteenth century, a rejection of the polyethnic, polycultural, polyreligous, polyracial empires where the unity of the polity came from the top, created by the crown, the monarchy, the dynasty, holding all who fell within its light together as subjects of the same state. The idea of the nation was powerfully radical: that people who share a territory, a language, a history, a culture, perhaps a religion, and who look like each other, should govern themselves rather than be subjects of a “foreign” monarch.
The unity of the polity would no longer be top down but bottom up, inhering in the shared qualities and sympathies of the people who composed it. This was a progressive, modernising idea, but one which had terrible consequences in the twentieth century when the ideal of the nation came up against the messy reality of different peoples cohabiting in a territory. Ethnic cleansing was one consequence, as was the capacity of nationalism to mobilise people for war.
When the Commonwealth of Australia was formed at the end of the nineteenth century, it was common sense that nations comprised people who shared a language, a heritage, a culture and who were bound together by common sympathies. In the debates of the day, the term “race” was used interchangeably with “people”, much as we now use “ethnicity”. Having invaded and settled the Great South Land, why would the new nation invite strangers to live among us?
Half a century later, Australia did just that, as the postwar migration scheme brought in first non-English speaking Europeans, then moved south to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, to build our population. Yes, there was a racial basis to this, as a key criterion was the colour of people’s skin and the angle of their eyes, and there was anxiety about the strangers’ foreignness: their food, their beliefs, their lack of English. The booming postwar economy did much to assuage these anxieties, and governments started quietly to loosen Australia’s racially based immigration restrictions.
It was not until the 1980s, though, with the highly visible migration of Vietnamese refugees, that there was much of a public debate about the way the Australian nation was changing. The Vietnamese migration was not especially popular, and historian Geoffrey Blainey observed it was a potential threat to social cohesion. John Howard, who was then leader of the opposition, insisted the government should retain the right to impose some form of racially restrictive immigration if it deemed it necessary, even though he was not, in fact, advocating it at the time. Howard lost the Liberal leadership over this to the more cosmopolitan-minded Andrew Peacock, and he later regretted his comments. But he knew that there was a challenge. How was the unity of the national polity to be understood now that it included so many people who were essentially strangers to each other?
Nations are inherently limited, and political leaders are boundary riders, protecting the nation from external threats and managing the flow of people, goods and money across its borders. Howard was as energetic a boundary rider as any, with his notorious claim: “We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come.” But he did not restrict his nation-building energies to policing the borders. He also put considerable effort into reinforcing the values he believed held the nation together: easy-going informality, the fair go, practical mateship. In his “Headland” speeches, on Australia Day and Anzac Day, he offered his take on what Australians were like, their temperament, and he did this in a way that invited identification from non-British Australians. That is, he saw his task as the nation’s leader to not only defend the borders but also articulate what Australians share, to shore up and extend the bonds of common sympathy.
The point here is not whether or not one agrees with Howard on Australia’s core values, but the contrast with Dutton, who pays barely any attention to the difficult leadership task of building social cohesion in a society as ethnically and religiously complex as contemporary Australia. In fact, he seems to scorn the task, as in the deaf ear he turned to ASIO director Mike Burgess’ plea on the ABC’s Insiders to political leaders to be careful of their language when discussing terrorist threats. Almost immediately Dutton was calling for a ban on refugees from Gaza because of the risk of terrorists hiding among them, stoking passionate divisions among different Australians over Israel’s response to Hamas’ attacks on Israel on October 7 last year.
In the more than two decades since Howard returned to the Liberal leadership, migration has continued apace. The 2022 census found that more than a third of people were born outside Australia. People born in India are now the second-largest group of overseas-born residents, after those born in the UK, and people born in China the third, but newcomers have come from all the continents and islands of the planet. So many strangers to welcome, to try to understand, to build the bonds of sympathy with that create a nation, in a world where many people remain emotionally invested in the politics of their homelands, as we can see in the war in Gaza.
Strong leaders promise to protect the nation from threats, so it is in their political interests to find threats and magnify them. Maybe it is sometimes primarily people’s skin colour that Dutton is responding to when he sees various groups as a threat, but it might also be their religious beliefs, or their understandings of gender differences.
But it is wrong, I think, to assume skin colour is always the primary driver. It is more general than this: a response to the stranger, the foreigner, to people whose lives and thinking are opaque, who challenge our taken-for-granted grip on social reality, who have habits and beliefs we don’t share and may vehemently reject. But in contemporary Australia, we have to learn live alongside each other with civility and tolerance.
We need to call out Peter Dutton’s leadership not because he is racist — this accusation will just bounce off him — but because his reflex xenophobia makes him ill-fitted to lead the polyethnic nation Australia has become.
Is Peter Dutton more helpfully described as a xenophobe? Let us know your thoughts by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
