Constructions of racism in the Australian parliamentary debates on asylum seekers

Abstract

The proliferation of the subtle and slippery nature of the new racism has made it increasingly difficult to define racism and to develop an effective anti-racist rhetoric with which to challenge it. To explore the implications of the new racism for anti-racist discourse, this article uses discourse analysis to examine the parliamentary speeches of politicians opposing Australia's new asylum-seeking laws for what these refugee advocates challenge and make accountable as racist. Using a corpus of the 2001 Australian Hansard speeches on the MV Tampa, amendments to the Migration Act, and the Border Protection Bill 2001 as data we identify four ways in which the government's representation of asylum seekers was constructed as racist. These included: the use of categorical generalizations in talk about asylum seekers, the unequal treatment of asylum seekers compared with other categories of `illegal' immigrants, talk about the nation and cultural-difference-talk. We demonstrate how articulating these constructions of racism in political discourse (and no doubt, in everyday talk) is a socially delicate conversational act that was carefully managed. We suggest that anti-racism strategies must take this issue of the complex nature of making an accusation of racism into account, and search for ways to articulate such accusations in a hostile political climate.

“There but for the grace of God go we”: Prejudice toward asylum seekers.

“…However, boats have increased in the last few years, public debate on this issue within Australia is intense and there is a widespread prejudice towards asylum seekers (Pedersen, Attwell & Heveli, 2005; McKay, Thomas & Kneebone, 2011;Schweitzer, Perkoulidis, Krome, Ludlow, & Ryan, 2005). This prejudice is fuelled by both political figures and by the media (Every & Augoustinos, 2007;Suhnan, Pedersen & Hartley, 2013) and has resulted in a regime of mandatory detention that has been criticised for its severity (Briskman, Latham & Goddard, 2008, as well as many national professional associations; e.g., Australian Psychological Society, 2011). Indeed, this type of systems-based oppression has been seen by some peace psychologists as "structural violence" (Galtung, 1985;Pedersen, Fozdar & Kenny, 2012).…”

Migration and Multiculturalism

“…References to threat are omnipresent in anti-immigrant rhetoric disseminated in the public sphere: Immigrants are depicted as "flooding" the country, "taking" away the jobs of citizens, abusing the welfare system and undermining national values (e.g., Every & Augoustinos, 2007). In many European countries, for example, following the joining of former Eastern European countries in the European Union, the "Polish plumber" has gained some notoriety as an objectification of an immigrant taking away jobs from national The notion of threat is present in a plethora of social psychological theories that are concerned with understanding the underpinnings of anti-immigration attitudes (see Riek, Mania, & Gaertner, 2006).…”

Discursive Approaches to Race and Racism

“…As a result, in contrast to the openly racist discourses that were previously commonly treated as acceptable, analyses of modern racist discourses 7 (particularly among elites, for whom reputational issues tend to be an especially salient concern) emphasize their markedly more subtle forms and their recurrent packaging in the form of denials of racism (for reviews of research in this regard, see e.g. Augoustinos & Every, 2010;Every & Augoustinos, 2007).…”