Unity and Uniformity

I keep stumbling across something I find really perplexing, a vision of Australian unity which sounds innocuous, but is not.

Because it's summer, let's start with a cricket tale.  You have probably heard of Usman Khawaja, a Pakistani-born Australian cricketer who has just announced his retirement at the age of 39 after a long, successful career playing Test cricket for Australia.  He is the first Pakistani-born player, and the first Muslim, to play cricket for Australia.  He is devoted to his Islamic faith, not in the sense of thinking everyone else should be a Muslim, but in the way it orders his life - he reads the Koran and prays every day, attends Friday prayers and fasts during Ramadan when cricket schedules permit, refrains from alcohol, is devoted to his family and generally tries to live by the tenets of his faith.  As he's got older he's also been more prepared to speak out on wider issues - combating racism in sport and elsewhere, calling out racist abuse in the Lords long room, advocating for freedom for Palestine.  At his retirement press conference he said this:  

"I understand that I've talked about certain issues outside of cricket which a lot of people don't like," he said. "I still find it hard when I say that everyone deserves freedom, that Palestinians deserve freedom and equal rights, why that is such a big issue.

"But I get it, I put myself out there, even when we talk about Australian politics, and we get all these right-wing politicians that are anti-immigration, anti-Islamophobia [Islamophobic], and I speak up against them.

"I know people don't love that, but I feel like I have to because where these guys are trying to divide, create hate, and trying to create animosity in the Australian community, I'm doing the exact opposite. I'm trying to bring everyone together. I'm trying to bring inclusivity into Australia."

If you've read this blog you know that I agree with the stances he is taking.  However, I don't think his critics see themselves as trying to divide and create hate, and they probably think he is the divisive one.

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I first started thinking about this issue in the wake of the Voice referendum in 2023.  One of the key arguments of the 'No' campaign was that the Voice proposal was divisive - that it proposed rights for Aboriginal people that other Australians don't have.  The formal launch of the 'No' campaign included a video featuring 'No' spokesperson Jacinta Nampijinpa Price and her Scottish-born husband, Colin Lillie.  Amidst scenes of domestic bliss and family music-making, the couple talk about their concern that the Voice would divide their family, treating Jacinta differently to Colin.  In the wider campaign there was a strong thread of argument that the proposal was unfair, that it would privilege Aboriginal people and create two different classes of citizenship.

This argument assumes that we are currently united, and that everyone is equal.  The idea might seem absurd.  Of course we are neither equal nor united.  But it rests on an idea of unity which is pervasive in Australia's history since colonisation - that unity means uniformity.  If we are to be united as a nation, then we must all be the same.

To some extent this is rooted in classical Liberalism - we should all be equal before the law, have equal voting rights, have equal freedom to express our opinions provided they don't hurt anyone else, and so forth.  All these things are good, although simply saying them does not make them so.  But this idea goes further - we must all speak the same language, live the same lifestyle, adhere to the same sexual mores, adopt the same culture.  This, in other words, is the language of assimilation which I discussed when reflecting on the Voice referendum.

The problem with assimilation, with unity as uniformity, is that it assumes something which is not true - that we all have the same starting points.  It assumes that there is an 'Australian culture' which is somehow self-evident and to which we all have the same access.  All we need to do is step on board.  This culture, when you interrogate it closely, is British with a few local adaptations, roughly middle-class, literate without being especially highly educated.  Within this we can tolerate some differences.  It's OK if your skin is a different colour (as long as you are prepared to laugh off slights about it), if you like different food (we don't even mind adopting some of your food), have a different religion (as long as you don't flaunt it), speak a second language (as long as you don't do it around us).  We are happy to embrace Usman Khawaja because he excels at cricket, that quintessentially English sport, as long as he does not say or do anything we find upsetting.

People like me are brought up in this culture and it's easy for us to adopt it - indeed, we don't know any other way to be.  But if you come from outside it, there are barriers.  Many of these are invisible - neither those on the outside, nor those on the inside, can see them, but those on the outside keep slamming into them.  It is tempting for us on the inside to maintain, 'no, there is no barrier, you are imagining it, come on in'.  If people persistently fail to do so we consider that there is something wrong with them.  After all it's not hard for us.

***

This, then, is the dark side of unity as uniformity.  Diversity is not a social aspiration, it is simply a fact.  Australia has always had different cultures, different races, different languages.  The first colonists arrived in a place with a million people and hundreds of languages.  The colonists were not all English - there were Irish, Chinese, Afghans with their camel trains, Pacific Islanders helping navigate the ships through an ocean they knew far better than the British mariners.  

These outsiders were not always treated well in the colony.  The Aboriginal people got the worst of it, but others found themselves excluded too.  I recently saw an exhibition by Chinese-Australian photographer William Yang, who grew up in North Queensland in the 1950s and 60s.  He tells how he came home from school one day in early childhood after being teased with a racist song and asked his mother, with some bewilderment, whether he was really Chinese.  She snapped at him words to the effect of 'yes you are, and you'd better get used to it!'.  His family had learned that the only way to get by in Australia was to suppress their Chinese-ness and embrace Anglo culture, but they were never more than partly successful, and only grudgingly accepted.  In his young adulthood Yang came out as gay, accompanied by the various difficulties associated with being openly gay in the 1960s and early 70s, but he reports that it was only much later, and with much more difficulty, than he 'came out' as Chinese and embraced his heritage.  

The thing about assimilation is that our attempts to bring it about tend to be inconsistent and half-hearted.  The missionaries to Aboriginal communities documented by John Harris tried to educate their Aboriginal charges for colonial society, teaching them English language, manners and cultural norms, but even they only envisaged Aboriginal people as occupying the lowest rungs on the social ladder - as unskilled laborers or domestic servants.  The wider society treated them far worse - I need not rehearse this history again here, there is no shortage of it elsewhere in this blog if you don't know it already.  

In the light of this history, I would suggest we need another vision of unity, one that respects and embraces difference, the kind of unity Usman Khawaja aspires to.  We are not united because we are the same - we are not the same, and such unity is really domination.  To the degree we are united, it is because we respect that others are different, and embrace their difference.  This is not easy - we may find ourselves challenged by views we find strange and even abhorrent.  We may be confused, at sea with a culture we can't understand, missing crucial cues and being unintentionally rude or absurd.  We may also have our failings highlighted and challenged - and nobody likes to dwell on their own failings.  But the alternative is worse, at least for those who don't fit the 'norm'.  Their failure to conform comes to be seen as their fault, and we punish them for it.  This in turn makes even those in the dominant culture less safe as there are more people forced onto the outer and some of these will be angry or desperate.  

***

I believe this is the vision of society we should be embracing, one that is better for us all.  However, I don't think it's easy, or that it's without its own risks.  Nothing shows this more starkly than the recent mass murder on Bondi beach.

There are only two criminals involved in that murder, the father and son who carried out the shooting on a peaceful event.  The victims are not to blame in any way for their own murders.  Whatever the inquiries and Royal Commissions uncover about the more detailed background to the crime, this much is completely clear.

It also brings starkly to light the big challenge for embracing diversity.  Other recent atrocities highlight the same challenge - the shooting of two police officers by Dezi Freeman in Porepunkah in August last year, or the shooting of three people at Wieambilla in December 2022.  In all three cases, the murderers were people who appeared to embrace extreme and violent ideologies.  The Bondi killers appear to have embraced Islamic State, although it is not known whether this was their primary motivation for these killings.  Dezi Freeman was a 'sovereign citizen' who believed that the police who were serving a warrant on him were agents of an illegitimate government.  Gareth, Nathaniel and Stacey Train, who committed the murders at Wieambilla, combined sovereign citizen ideology with an extreme version of Christian millennialism.  

All of these ideologies test the limits of our embrace of diversity.  We might be willing to welcome, indeed be curious about, the strange reasoning behind the sovereign citizens or the notion of reviving an Islamic caliphate.  These things might be harmless enough - until they lead to people murdering others.  How do we draw the line here?

One answer is this - talk about these ideas as much as you want, but we will not give you guns, and once you start to acquire them, or encourage others to take up arms for the cause, you will be committing a crime.  But how do we know when this line has been crossed?  At what point do we intervene, and how?  

Now let's consider another ideology.  The event on Bondi Beach was not just any Jewish festival.  It was a Hannukah celebration organised by the Sydney branch of the international Jewish organisation Chabad-Lubavitch.  This is a complex, multifaceted movement within Judaism, but politically it is firmly Zionist, opposing negotiations or territorial concessions to 'Arabs'.  Hannukah is a celebration of the retaking of the temple in Jerusalem by the Maccabees in the 2nd Century BCE, after its desecration by the Seleucids.  The symbolism, in the context of the ongoing Palestine war, is unmistakable.

The people celebrating Hannukah on Bondi Beach were not hurting anyone, and did not deserve to be shot.  But this background suggests that rather than view these murders as part of a generalised anti-Semitism we should understand the attack as specifically targeting a politically charged event.  As we are currently seeing in Gaza, extreme Zionism is no less violent an ideology than extreme Salafism, although its violence is more specifically focused on its own locale.  What are the limits of our toleration of this ideology?  I don't think we should be outlawing it, but perhaps we shouldn't be letting it take over our iconic public places.  

***

Unity as uniformity is a pathway to peace and inclusion, but it is not easy or straightforward.  Utopia will not come.   Differences between us are not trivial, or illusory.  Like framing unity is uniformity, it requires the setting and policing of boundaries.  Some views, some actions, are not to be tolerated, much less embraced. 

However, what it does do is spread the boundaries wide, and open all of us up to learning, growth and the righting of wrongs.  It ensures that those who are different need not be punished or denigrated for their difference.  It teaches us humility which, after all, is one of the seven heavenly virtues.  In a time of conflict and tension, we could all do with a bit more of that!