It has been eleven months since I posted my last report - in actual fact, a nil return - of John Winston Howard’s public references to Darfur.

Nothing has changed in that regard. Disappointingly, I can only find one reference to “Darfur” in Federal Parliament since the start of this year, a speech in the adjournment debate of the House of Reps on February 28 by Liberal MP Louise Markus, whose electorate in the Blacktown area is home to a large number of Sudanese refugees. Ms Markus took to task an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph.

Our Immigration Department and its parade of incompetent ministers have copped some bad press, quite rightly, over recent years, but to their credit they have admitted more than 10,000 Sudanese refugees over the past three years. According to DIMIA figures (PDF), in the six months to the end of 2005, a total of 2026 Sudanese settlers arrived in Australia - that’s out of a total of 65,804 from all nations. In the 2004-05 financial year, 5572 Sudanese arrived in Australia under humanitarian settlement programs, and that’s 42% of all humanitarian admissions for that year.

If we’ve done well in accepting Sudanese seeking asylum here, we haven’t been quite so forthcoming in helping to make their homeland more peaceful. We still have the grand total of fifteen (15) Australian Defence Force personnel with the UN Mission in Sudan. Enough for a rugby team without reserves.

We could do a lot better with foreign aid too. According to AusAID’s summary of Australia’s Overseas Aid Program 2005-06, a total of $77 million was projected for aid programs for the whole of Africa. A sub-total for Sudan was not given. Overall, Australia’s ODA (Official Developmental Assistance) for the 2005-06 year was projected at just under $2.5 billion. That’s a total of 0.28% of Gross National Income.

How can we get Little Johnnie to take an interest in this major humanitarian calamity? (And here, by the way, is the latest from IRIN about the African Union’s peace talks. The April 30 deadline has come and gone but the AU has given a 48 hour extension.)

… a part of our community might be regarded as suspect because many were recent immigrants. They put the strictures of their faith above Australian law and recognised a foreigner as their highest authority. Their loyalty and patriotism were suspect, particularly when newspapers published stories of secret training camps in the Blue Mountains for young men planning to fight against Commonwealth forces. Unemployed young men roamed the streets in gangs, and a series of harrowing and brutal gang rapes left many convinced that these immigrants had changed the country forever for the worse. Rather than admit that their culture and religion were at fault, their community leaders blamed discrimination in the legal system. They established separate schools where their religious values were taught and sought to change Australian laws and political institutions. And their families had large numbers of children while more and more Australian women were practising birth control. The name of this threat to Australia? Irish Catholics.
- Senator John Faulkner, Federal Parliament, 1.3.06 (source: Hansard)

A superb speech by Senator Faulkner, now sadly languishing on the ALP backbenches, reminds us that the current vilification of Muslims in this country is just a new manifestation of an old problem. The full speech is here.

“There are countries that apply religious or Sharia law; Saudi Arabia and Iran come to mind. If a person wants to live under Sharia law, these are countries where they may feel at ease, but not Australia.”

- Peter Costello, from an address to The Sydney Institute, 23.2.06 (source: AM, ABC)

So there you have it. The aspirant future Prime Minister taking up the cudgels of wedge politics, invoking a bogeyman - Sharia law - that has never been raised by anyone of consequence in Australia before. Most islamophobes in this country would never have heard of Sharia law, let alone understand what it is.

Or perhaps Dollar Sweetie (as the good folk of Crikey call him in honour of his finest hour as a union-bashing barista) is merely playing diversion politics - ie, get the AWB scandal off the front pages…

“What we’ve seen in the last 72 hours are more urban terrorists terrorising the community”

- Peter Debnam, New South Wales Leader of the Opposition, 15.12.05

Pete, in the words of another passionate Australian xenophobe: Please explain?

Pollies aside, the community is getting on with the job of resolving the underlying causes of Sunday and Monday’s riots. The Lebanese community - Muslim and Christian - have offered curfews this weekend as a means of helping defuse things this weekend. The Sutherland Shire Council’s website has a sequence of media releases online outlining their course of action.

State parliament is recalled for today to deal with the “law and order” issues. Whether the changes are appropriate (P.Debnam thinks they don’t go far enough) is something I can’t comment on yet. I’ll link to Hansard once it is available. Debate is currently winding up in the upper house - here’s the link to the webcast. (Oops, it seems to have finished just as I was writing that.)

But will all the players in this dreadful episode be accounted for? There’s the case of Allan Belford Jones, who is alleged to have repeatedly made comments on 2GB last week which appear to have breached the Racial Hatred Act 1995. (Here’s the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission’s explanatory page relating to the Racial Hatred Act.)

And then there’s “Australia First” who apparently exuberantly performed rent-a-crowd duties at Sunday’s North Cronulla gathering. Make sure you hold your nose before you visit their website and note their pre-publicity for the “Cronulla Mass Mobilisation”. There’s a lot of disturbing reading there that we probably should all be aware of.

One of Australia First’s more prominent members, Jim Saleam, ran for council in Marrickville’s South Ward in the March 2004 local government elections. He received 41 votes.

Moving briefly onto overseas coverage, Germaine Greer has written a piece for The Guardian today which reminds us of some of the outstanding Australians of Lebanese heritage - the Governor of New South Wales, Marie Bashir; her husband, former Lord Mayor of Sydney and Australian rugby union legend Nick Shehadie; and current rugby league legend Hasem el-Masri of the Canterbury Bulldogs. She could have added Victorian premier Steve Bracks.

And the BBC World Service website has a moderated forum for discussion of the Sydney riots. Interesting to see what the punters around the world think of it all.

There can be no doubt that racial hatred is a major element in this week’s riots in and around Cronulla. Is Australia an inherently racist society? No - we’ve come a long long way since the massacre of Aborigines and the proliferation of the White Australia Policy. But there’s still a hard core of rednecks in this country who believe that their brand of Australian nationalism - an unwritten White Australia Policy if you will - is the right one. Pauline Hanson, curiously enough, lives at Sylvania Waters, a few kilometres up the George’s River from Cronulla.

There are those who say this is only a “law and order” issue and that we should not “over complicate this” - and I’ll discuss the conduct of those persons in a future posting. Yes, there is a great deal of evidence that the Cronulla-Sutherland district has been under-resourced in NSW police personnel for quite a while. It’s a point of criticism that opponents of the ten year-old Labor government in New South Wales have been quick to pounce on. But “law and order” only becomes an issue when there is “disorder” that needs policing.

What about the causes of that “disorder”?

Racism is an important issue here, but it’s really just a platform on which a greater problem is being thrashed out. Call it xenophobia, or even more fundamentally, call it intolerance. The issues are complex, and they are issues of clash, not of cultures, but of society.

People in the Sutherland Shire feel aggrieved about a number of problems that have festered over the years, and they all came to a head when those two lifesavers were bashed up on the weekend before last. However, these people jumped to the wrong conclusion, and took entirely the wrong approach to a solution. Highly irresponsible (and highly paid) people in the media spurred them on.

While the state government and affected community groups are getting together to try and sort out the underlying problems (and secure a peace in the immediate term), and they are to be commended for this, there is no time more important than the present for sound Leadership at the national level. And it is the conduct of our national Leader that I will discuss next.

There’s a concept that has been much discussed this week that I’m having a bit of trouble with. “Middle Eastern appearance.”

What does a Middle Eastern gentleman look like?

Is he Pakistani? Is he Afghani? Is he Iranian? Is he Iraqi? Is he Kurdish? Is he Yemeni? Is he Omani? Is he Qatari? Is he Kuwaiti? Is he Turkish? Is he Syrian? Is he Lebanese? Is he Jordanian? Is he Palestinian? Is he Israeli? Is he Saudi Arabian? Is he Egyptian? Is he Libyan? Maybe he looks like a Brazilian walking to catch his train.

Or maybe he looks like that chap from Nazareth whose birth we are celebrating in twelve days’ time.

It’s 11pm Tuesday night and all seems quiet in southern Sydney so far this evening. NSW parliament is going to be recalled on Thursday to pass legislation to give police greater emergency powers. Tonight they have roadblocked the Cronulla area, and apparently only residents are being let in. I have vivid memories of the Newcastle CBD being similarly sealed off in the opening days of 1990 following the earthquake, but when (if ever) was the last time a locality of this magnitude in this country was shut down by police for reasons other than natural disaster or Olympiad?

Nonetheless, there have been some other disturbing developments today, with racist SMS messages being received on the Gold Coast, a racist attack on a family in Perth and an assault on a Lebanese-born taxidriver in Adelaide. And there’s still the very real prospect of more trouble on Sydney’s beaches next Sunday.

With ABC Radio’s current affairs programs sidelined today because of an industrial dispute, the only playlist I have for today’s news if the ABC TV news coverage - five clips (WMV broadband) totalling about nine minutes in duration. Click here for the playlist.

From here on I won’t be stigmatising Cronulla with its name in the title of each post, and I’ve created a separate category for “Sydney Riots”.

ELLEN FANNING: Prime Minister, part of what was chilling yesterday was seeing a lot of people in between the violence doing things that you’d see at the cricket, singing “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie, Oi, Oi, Oi”, wrapping themselves in the Australian flag. What do you say to people who use the Australian flag in that way?
PRIME MINISTER: Look, I would never condemn people for being proud of the Australian flag. I don’t care – I would never condemn people for being proud…

- interview, A Current Affair, Nine Network, 12.12.05

More thoughts of Chairman Johnny:

JOURNALIST: Do you think anything the Government said over the last few years has set the tone for the actions on the weekend?
PRIME MINISTER: Which Government?
JOURNALIST: Your Government.
PRIME MINISTER: My Government? No certainly not. What do you have in mind?
JOURNALIST: Your position on Iraq….
PRIME MINISTER: My position on Iraq?
JOURNALIST: Do you think that’s had any influence on people feeing alienated?
PRIME MINISTER: Well my position… my position on Iraq? You’ve got to be joking.

- Press Conference, Sydney, 12.12.05

Later on in the same PC which, on Monday morning, was John Howard’s first public statement on Sunday afternoon’s riots:

JOURNALIST: Prime Minister you did mention tribalism. Can you talk a little bit more about that? What is it that…
PRIME MINISTER: Well I think most Australians, put simply most Australians want a nation where, irrespective of our background and always accepting the right of people to retain affection for their own culture and to honour it as well as their own religion and to honour that, we should encourage to the maximum extent possible, everybody to become part of the integrated Australian community, that’s what I mean and I think any emergence of so-called ethnic gangs is a manifestation of tribalism and something which in different ways, we should try to discourage.

and a bit later:

JOURNALIST: Why has it taken you until now to condemn this situation? It’s been building up for a week or (inaudible) a month?
PRIME MINISTER: Me? Well I would have thought that condemning something before yesterday, when… what was I going to condemn?
JOURNALIST: Well pressure’s been building up. I mean publicity’s been…..
PRIME MINISTER: What was I supposed to do?
JOURNALIST: Perhaps you could have called for calm earlier, perhaps….
PRIME MINISTER: Oh, call for calm, yes.

and discussing the issues this morning before choofing off to Kuala Lumpur for the inaugural East Asia Summit:

“I don’t think we should over complicate this”

- from doorstop interview, Kirribilli House, 13.12.05

While the law-and-order aspects of the riots are a state responbility, this is what Senator Amanda Vanstone, the federal Minister for, among other things, Multicultural and Citizenship Affairs, has had to say to date:

Kim Beazley commented at a doorstop interview on Monday morning. There have been press releases issued by Senator Andrew Bartlett (Australian Democrats) and Senators Kerry Nettle and Bob Brown (Australian Greens). The NSW Liberal Party has issued press releases by Malcolm Kerr (local member for Cronulla) on Saturday, and by state Leader of the Opposition Peter Debnam on Monday and Tuesday.

(Did I ever mention that no political party on the right wing in Australia has an RSS feed for press releases on their website, while every major centre or left party does?)

Meanwhile, here are statements from: George Pell (Roman Catholic Archbishop of Sydney), Peter Jensen (Anglican Archbishop of Sydney)

OK, Part 6 will be my opinions. I’ll write them up late tonight, hoping that there is no more trouble this evening.

Two playlist files here of ABC coverage of the riots of the last few days.

Firstly, click here for a stream of five clips from the ABC television news from Monday and Tuesday. (I have selected the Windows Media Video broadband option for these - other options will be accessible for the next few days at least at the ABC News website.)

Second, click here for a stream of twelve MP3 files, of reports from ABC Radio National’s three daily news programs on Monday, ie, AM, The World Today and PM, as well as one from SBS Radio’s Worldview. There’s a total of 63 minutes of audio here, and probably some duplication between programs. Transcripts of each ABC report can be found on the respective program websites.

The SBS report, which is last on this playlist, does not include the introduction. As per the Worldview website, it is:

National debate surrounding the race riots in Sydney over the weekend, has raised many questions about ethnicity and belonging. One contentious issue is the use of the word gang to describe groups of young people from diverse backgrounds. Greg Noble from the University of Western Sydney has researched the experiences of young Arabic speaking males for over a decade. He says the word “gang” is often misused, and ethnicity is not always the main characteristic of youth association. Dr Noble is speaking to Natasha Cuculovski about why young people form groups.

There will be no ABC radio current affairs programs today (Tuesday), as journalists belonging to the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance are in dispute with ABC management.

Part 5 will include quotes and statements released by political, religious and community leaders.

MALCOLM KERR, STATE MP FOR CRONULLA: Well, you go back to the core problem and ensure that people can go to the beach and to parks without being subjected to any antisocial behaviour.
JONATHAN HARLEY [7.30 Report, ABC-TV]: And what does that mean? For the people of Cronulla, what does ‘antisocial’ mean?
MALCOLM KERR: It means being insulted, spat at and being abused when you go to a beach or a park with your children.
JONATHAN HARLEY: How widespread is that in your view?
MALCOLM KERR: That’s been quite widespread of a weekend over the last few years.
JONATHAN HARLEY: By whom?
MALCOLM KERR: Oh, by Middle Eastern gangs and just generally.
JONATHAN HARLEY: What do you mean by Middle Eastern gangs, how do you characterise them?
MALCOLM KERR: People of Middle Eastern appearance, some will undoubtedly be Lebanese. That’s a matter of public record.
- Transcript, The 7.30 Report, ABC-TV, 12.12.05

The catalyst for the current situation appears to be the bashing, by four men, of two surf lifesavers, aged 19 and 2o, on North Cronulla Beach on Sunday December 4. Here’s an AAP report published by the Sydney Morning Herald website in their Monday afternoon December 5 edition.

The SMH continues to chronicle events last weeks as follows:

• Police Cuts Blamed For Beach Attack - 6.12.05
• Bad Blood Boils In The Cronulla Stomp - 8.12.05
• Witness Tells Of Gang Attack On Resident - 8.12.05 PM
• Muscling Up On Beach Gangs - 8.12.05 PM
• Beach “morons” vigilante alert - 8.12.05 PM
• Police Comb The Beach Amid Calls For Calm - 9.12.05
• Beach gangs: 60 police to patrol - 9.12.05 PM
• A Lesson In Beach Etiquette And Good Manners - Shire Style - 10.12.05
• Let’s Take Back Our Beach - Editorial, 10.12.05
• This may be irrelevant but I include it as a matter of record: Shark Scare Sparks Mass Evacuations - 10.12.05 PM
• Sunny, 28 degrees, but violence keeps the crowd away - Sun Herald, 11.12.05
• Mob violence envelops Cronulla - 11.12.05 PM
• Photo Gallery: Mobs rampage in Cronulla - 11.12.05 PM
• Race riots spread to suburbs - 12.12.05
• Thugs ruled the streets, and the mob sang Waltzing Matilda - 12.12.05
• Worst possible outcome - vigilantes rip unity to shreds - 12.12.05
• A day at the beach becomes a nightmare - 12.12.05
• Locals talk of fear and disgust after Bloody Sunday - 12.12.05
• Alcohol, text messages incited violence: Mayor - 12.12.05 PM
• Neo-Nazis in race riots: Police - 12.12.05 PM
• Cars smashed in Cronulla violence - 12.12.05 PM
• United in condemnation, divided over the causes - 12.12.05 PM
• Armed gangs on rampage - 13.12.05
• Abandoned drink laws rushed back - 13.12.05
• The hordes came with guns and iron bars - 13.12.05
• An angry ride into the dark side of mateship - 13.12.05
• Blinky Bill, the face of race hatred - 13.12.05
• Treat us like dogs and we’ll bite back - 13.12.05
• Australians racist? No way, says Howard - 13.12.05
• One-way radio plays by its own rules - 13.12.05
• Welcome to Cronulla - unless you’d fit in better at Brighton - 13.12.05
• Don’t Over-complicate Riots: PM - 13.12.05 PM edition
• Gang peace deal appeal - 13.12.05 PM
• Lock up your sons, Lebanese mothers told - 13.12.05 PM

Here’s some video footage of Sunday’s events (Windows Media format).

Part 4 will include some more audio-visual coverage of events, and then maybe Part 5 can get around to my comments. But that’s it from me for a few hours. We’ll see what Tuesday night will bring.