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Contents
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The Labor Party and racism
Reflections on the historic role
of Al Grassby
By Bob Gould
The flamboyant Labor politician Al Grassby died a couple of weeks ago
on the same day as the reactionary populist former Queensland premier
Joh Bjelke-Petersen, and Grassby's death was a bit overshadowed by
Bjelke-Petersen's.
It's important to commemorate the life of Al Grassby because his role
in the areas of migration and race reflected much that was progressive
and healthy in the broad Labor tradition.
It's not accidental, as the old Stalinists used to say, that pundits of
the right, such as the Sydney Telegraph's
Piers Ackerman, used the occasion of
Grassby's death to pour scorn on him as the main source of their bete
noir, multiculturalism.
Many reactionary pundits have dredged up some old-fashioned Anglophone
hysteria in a dog-whistle attempt to associate the
Spanish-Irish-descended Grassby with alleged Mafia activity in the
Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area of rural NSW, which he represented in the
federal parliament.
Grassby functioned as a minister in the Whitlam Labor Government for a
relatively short time, but that short period was decisive for
settling accounts with the reactionary vein on matters of race and
migration that
ran through previous Labor politics. This vein of racism was replaced
by what has now
become known as multiculturalism, a term that Grassby more or less
invented, and a policy that he was central to initiating.
The two figures who were decisive to Labor's change of stance on
migration were Arthur Calwell in an earlier period, who despite his
residual anti-Asian racism widened the sources for mass migration to
include non-English-speaking countries, and Grassby who brought the
irreversible process of overturning the White Australia Policy close to
completion in the Labor Party.
Grassby was a very effective Labor politician and after his defeat in
his rural electorate as a result of a vicious dog-whistle campaign that
tried to associate him with the alleged Mafia, he went on to function
in a lot of public organisations, at both state and federal level,
appointed by Labor governments. All his activity was marked by an
indefatigable commitment to anti-racism and the energetic and vigorous
expansion of the theory and practice of multiculturalism.
I've written at length on these questions previously, (The ALP,
the
Labour Movement and Racism, Mass
Migration
has been Good for Australia and It Should Continue and Multiculturalism
and Australian National Identity).
The ruling class knows its enemies pretty well, and knows what weapons
are available to it in seeking to divide the labour movement and
keep it at bay.
There's a certain tension in the ruling class between those who derive
direct benefits from migration and the broader concern of keeping
racial and other divisions alive in the working class as a political
tool for the ruling class.
The period since the election of the Howard Government in 1996 provides
something of a case study in these tensions. Sections of the ruling
class want mass migration from almost anywhere, particularly skilled
migration, but that hasn't stopped the Coalition Government whipping up
hysteria about refugees, with the full support of the most reactionary
sections of the media.
Hysteria about refugees was directly responsible the
re-election of the Howard Government in the Tampa election of 2001,
despite great difficulties facing the conservatives on other questions.
Grassby's courageous expansion of the notion and practice of
multicultural was very important. The essentially conservative book by
Mark Lopez, The Origins of
Multiculturalism (Melbourne University
Press, 2000), recognises the critical importance of Grassby in
developing multiculturalism, and that book is now the bible of the
forces on the right that oppose mass migration and
multiculturalism. Lopez's index contains a very large number of
references to Grassby.
A book published more recently from a more leftist standpoint, is
likely to become the definitive history of these events: The Long, Slow
Death of White Australia, by Gwenda Tavan (Scribe 2005). This
book
discusses at length the roles of Grassby and Calwell.
The significance of these books is thrown into bold relief by the
current media hysteria about a young Shi'ite Muslim student at Auburn
high school, in Sydney, who is courageously asserting the right to wear
a Muslim tunic for personal religious reasons. The May 17 Sydney Telegraph carries an unpleasant
article by the frenetic Ackerman
attacking the young woman's stand.
The DSP and multiculturalism
Several years ago, the youngish DSP activist Iggy Kim was given the
task of writing a pamphlet, The
Origins of Racism. Poor Iggy Kim is
used from to time by the DSP leadership to do this kind of job, witness
his recent articles about North Korea.
The main thesis of this pamphlet is that the Labor Party has been the
main source of racism in Australian society, which is nonsense. Kim
doesn't address at all the dramatic changes that have taken place in
the
labour movement concerning racism.
The only real point of the pamphlet was to "expose" Labor, and one
mechanism for this exposure is a broad-ranging attack on "official"
multiculturalism, which the DSP argues is a conspiracy of the ruling
class designed to confuse workers.
That can be said about almost any reform under capitalism, but it
doesn't get socialists very far, and the DSP only chooses to say such
things about
reforms when this kind of ultraleft rhetoric can be worked into an
attack on Laborism. The general thrust of this argument is political
rubbish.
The main task of revolutionary socialists in current conditions is to
give vigorous, if critical, support to multicultural theory and
practice against the most primitive, atavistic and reactionary forces
in society.
It's now nearly a month since Al Grassby died and the dead-end
instrumentalism of the DSP leadership's approach to multiculturalism in
Australian society is underlined by the fact that it hasn't deigned to
offer any balance sheet of Grassby's political activity, or even note
his passing.
PS. It was notable that
both Grassby's wife Elinor and his longtime
partner Angela Chan appeared publicly at events celebrating Grassby's
life, one at the funeral and the other at an event in Sydney. Angela
Chan is an outspoken advocate of multiculturalism in her own right. At
a Sydney Labour History conference in the year 2000 on the labour
movement and mass migration, the protagonists on the pro-migration
side were Angela Chan and Bob Gould, and the speakers for the other
side were the academic Catherine Betts and the Australian populist poet
Mark O'Connor.
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