What the cat dragged in

Cronulla one year on

A heavy and permanent (at least in summer) police presence marks an ironic return to normality at Cronulla beach – an expanse now much more spacious and blisteringly White.

Apart from the conspicuous-policing angle, the national media marked the anniversary with little ado. A TV news report on the weekend actually made an issue of showing two young men of Middle-Eastern appearance on Cronulla beach – a forced (and quite possibly staged) incongruity akin to a 1950s’ newsreel showing Indigenous Australians as so ultra-assimilated in suburbia that they are whiter than White.

There can be no doubt that the white-pride thugs have won, in having got the current peace, of a thick blue line on the sand. The criminal justice system has creaked a few desultory convictions out of the hundreds of neo-Nazi whites caught on camera assaulting people, while a “Leb” revenge attacker, whose crime was against property* only (property with a replacement value of about $50) received a three-month jail sentence – one of only seven persons jailed, white or “Leb”.

In response to the riot, PM John Howard said:

"There are some people in the Australian community who are racist, but I do not believe the average Australian is a racist. I mean, why would we have accepted people so well? Why do we practise every day our tolerance and respect for people?"

Notice his twice-used contrast of “we” (= Whites, aka “average Australians”) with “people” (= those other than “we”). As ever, Howard’s message has gone down a treat with Sydney’s white-trash: here’s a 30-ish Cronulla male surfer using the same false dichotomy yesterday:

“I think when something like this happens . . . and it's from one type of community continually and I think they need to be more tolerant of the rest, of the whole of the Australian community”.

This person votes – and it’s pretty obvious who for.

Then there’s the mysterious Hazzard report into the riots, yet to be released publicly in full, but whose further incendiary contents are strongly suggested by the report’s having already lead to the sacking of Carl Scully as Police Minister, and Assistant Police Commissioner Mark Goodwin taking stress leave (penultimate URL).


* The property was an Australian flag. The the late Oriana Fallaci famously removed her chador, calling it a “stupid, medieval rag”, while interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979. After 11 December 2005, a day on which when the Australian flag was widely used as a proxy Nazi swastika, calling the flag a “stupid, medieval rag” seems far too kind.