Every cloud has a silver (top) lining...

By Richard McEncroe – Racial Tolerance in Melbourne – July 2013

 

I like to think that every cloud does have a silver lining; it’s just that sometimes the density of the atmosphere makes the ‘bling’ hard to see.  Sometimes the wind blows a whole lot of little clouds together to smother the light.  We know the sun is still there; we just can’t see it or feel its warmth for now.  Negative attitudes can be like clouds, but that they are just attitudes and therefore changeable, is the silver lining.

 

When racial intolerance and prejudice underpin our national policy settings and infest the community, it can be hard to be positive.  Racially based asylum seeker policies; national tolerance of the ‘third world’ plight of so many Indigenous Australians; riots on beaches and racist rants on buses can make you feel that this prejudice is coming at us both from the top down and the bottom up.  For some parts of the community, the inherent racism problems are more in your face than for others.  Like the 130 plus thousand Indian students who live here in Oz, well more the 1400 of them who were assaulted in Victoria in 2009. (Victorian Department of Justice Crimstats 2011)

 

Racial prejudice doesn’t get measured by the ABS, and is not recorded in the census data or reported in the Budget Papers.  So when it comes to taking the racial temperature of the community I have always had great faith in the diagnostic value of taxi drivers.  

 

Like many of us I suspect, the chemicals swirling in my brain that have given rise to me being in a cab late at night also give rise to me chatting relentlessly with whoever happens to be behind the wheel of the vehicle.  In Melbourne, much more often than not, that person is a very well qualified, intelligent, ambitious, and Indian, man. 

 

It is fair to say that my relationship with cabbies has been mixed over the journey, as it were.  I like to think that the shit-stirring smart ass of my twenties has (usually) been replaced by an interested conversational forty-something.  The bits of those late night geo-political discourses I remember always left me thinking that I didn’t really understand why Indian degrees were not translating to Australian opportunities; and whether there were factors other than race at play. 

 

God knows what I was thinking but for a period of about six months last year I commuted a couple of times a week from my home in the Melbourne ‘burbs’ to Canberra.  No kidding, the cab ride from home to the airport took longer and cost more than the flight to our national capital.  This in itself represented a fairly black cloud, but the silver lining was that for about 4 hours each week I was in a Melbourne cab - sober.  I know, sounds like a fairly sub-prime lining, but the thing is it meant I had real time each week to try and understand what it was like for these guys.

 

I found out that life was pretty tough for them most of the time.  I met guys who were qualified in a whole range of disciplines, from mechanical engineering to computer engineering to civil engineering and back to mechanical engineering again.  Alright, not so varied, but the point is, very qualified.  Apart from a shared enthusiasm for matters Tendulkar and engineering, what these guys   had in common was frustration.  Frustration not just at not being able to use their training to make a buck, or that Aussies equally or less qualified can, but also at the difficulties they have in communicating their skills to an Australian audience. 

 

Amidst all the doom and gloom though, there was a universally positive thread that ran through all my conversations my sub-continental chauffers, and that was that things are getting better.  Assaults are down, and the stats show this.  After a serious rise in assaults through 2008 and 09 – and a corresponding drop off in Indian student numbers, assaults last year were down by about 20 per cent.  And, according to the cabbies I talked to, incidents of racial abuse or assault or becoming fewer and further between.  They all said that things were harder even a decade ago.  They all said communication and understanding is improving and that attitudes are changing, softening.  I came to understand that the barriers that existed a decade ago are slowly breaking down.  I learnt that cabbies now consider driving as a transitional rather than permanent state.  Australian employers are hiring.  Their friends, their cousins, their mate from the Punjab all used to drive cabs, but all now work in the telecommunications sector, in mining, or in computer programming. 

 

One of these guys, Sunil Singh (pictured) says his older brother and cousin both drove cabs for four and five years respectively at the start of the last decade "they took much longer to break through than me.  They had better degrees than me, but I got professional advice and pitched my resume to an Australian audience. I have just got a job in computer programming and will start next week, just two years after I started driving...".

 

Cabbies still put up with a lot.  They still endure disrespect, racial abuse and drunken raves – but what was once the rule is becoming the exception.   They know it’s changing, and they now know with confidence, that what can sometimes seem like a big, nasty, ignorant intolerant racist cloud can have a silver (top) lining. 

___________________________________

 

Chewing the electoral cud...

By Richard McEncroe

The 2013 Election Campaign is not yet a week old, but the flavour of the contest is starting to settle on the electoral palate.  To my taste at least, the offering so far is disappointingly bland, difficult to digest with the promise of a lingering bitter after taste.  Many ingredients have combined to produce this bitter stodge, but a few dominate for me right now. 

The first is that despite considering itself to be the government in waiting for three years, the Coalition is on the back foot and desperately lacking in policy depth or imagination.  Second K-Rudd and his oh so hip to the groove (social) media team will have to beat Rupert Murdoch as well as Tony Abbott to hang on to power.  A third thing that is becoming apparent is that social policy, in particular improving the lot of Indigenous and other Australians enduring serious disadvantage and poverty, is not a priority for either of the mainstream parties.  And lastly, and responsible for the bitter after taste, is the major party’s apparoaches to asylum seeker policy. 

Polling coinciding with the death rolls of the Gillard administration seduced the Opposition into believing their assumption to power was a fait accompli.  After all, Australians are known for voting Governments out rather than in.  Surely, they thought, Labor’s penchant for eating their own and their tax and environmental policy flip foppery, will combine with greed motivated official corruption in NSW to make Labor totally unelectable.  But, with Julia dispatched and Rudd back wearing the head chef’s hat the game has changed dramatically.  Kev has so far managed to excise himself from the disasters of his NSW colleagues and Australia from its own migration zone.  He has neutralised the carbon tax issue and, um guess what folks, he wants to talk about the future. 

This quite simple reorientation of the public debate from the past to the future has left Abbott flatfooted.  Tony wants t talk about the past as unwaveringly as Kevin wants to talk about the future.  Invoking the “Howard Government way” at every opportunity, Abbott is, and is seen to be, out of touch.  He and his mates have been exposed as being underprepared on several policy fronts.  On economic policy, the big LNP play exacerbates rather than addresses the core structural problem – not enough revenue.  Australia’s ageing population, groaning infrastructure, and ever increasing health care expectations means we need to be creative about new revenue streams.  Abbott has opted to reduce revenue by reducing the company tax rate.  The Opposition asylum seeker policy, such as it is, is confused, and has been developed in a consultation vacuum.  No criticism will be brooked, and even very senior defence personnel have had their concerns about the policy turned away – when it is safe to do so. 

The future versus the past theme of the election extends beyond the policy subject matter to the means of engagement between the contestants and their electors.  Both camps use social media, but Labor’s embracing of the medium contrasts with the LNP’s concession to it.  Abbott would always prefer a Murdoch tabloid to a Facebook page when it comes to pitching his messages – such as they are.  Kevin13 can’t get enough of social media, and doesn’t seem too fussed about having Rupert off-side. Given that the daily circulation of the Tele is about 350,000 and that 11 million Australians are on Facebook I’m not surprised - lol. 

And what of the policy ‘options’ themselves.  Tony keeps telling us there is something so terrible happening we need a ‘better future’.  They both want us to know they are ‘fair dinkum’ and want us to live in a ‘stronger Australia’ – whatever that is.  The trouble is, for all the people for whom life here is really crap, as opposed to just not quite as nice at it might be, our leaders have nothing.  Homelessness in the big cities; the grinding poverty and disadvantage in Indigenous communities; and chronic double digit unemployment in regional centres are not election issues.  It seems as though in the eyes of the Government the NDIS has used up all the social policy air time and budget, and there’s no room for any more.  The LNP site their paid parental leave scheme as evidence of their social policy contribution.  Good policies both, but not enough, not nearly enough.

The electorate is being asked to chew on and somehow digest a pretty bland chunk of Australian political cud right now.  The convergence of political thinking to a point somewhere just to the right of centre has neutralised so many of the real issues such that there is no genuine contest of ideas.  But there will be a contest over the next few weeks and it will be between invoking the past and imagining the future and between new and legacy media.  Who knows, maybe Mr Murdoch is not quite as influential as he (and Tony) think he is?  Gotta zip!