NRI Affairs, Pause with Nandini
NRI Affairs, Pause with Nandini
"Don't Blame Migrants for Complex Problems" - Giri Sivaraman on 'Pause with Nandini'
Giri Sivaraman, Australia's Race Discrimination Commissioner, spoke with Nandini Sen Mehra about the larger questions of racism in Australia, the institutions and structures that need an overhaul, and the genuine concerns and issues that everyday Australians are facing, across communities and ethnicities.
He talks about the critical need to implement the anti Racism Framework that includes the establishment of the Anti Racism Taskforce with representation from government, institutions and civil society, something we at NRI Affairs have been championing as well.
In addressing concerns over the targeting of the Indian diaspora in inflammatory fliers being circulated by anti-immigration campaigners, he offers his perspective on preventive measures, the role of law enforcement in building trust in community, and what he considers of primary concern should a racist attack occur.
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Hello and welcome to this episode of Pause with Nandini on NRI Affairs. I'm joining from Mianj in the unceded lands of the Yegera and Turba people and I pay my respects to elders past, present and emerging. Today I have with me Giri Siviraman who's the Race Discrimination Commissioner. It's an opportune time to get him on our show because there's a lot going on and I can't wait to ask him a few questions that have been top of mind, not just just for multicultural communities, but I think for all of Australia. Thank you for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_01:Absolutely. So, Giri, I'll get right into it. The past sort of perhaps a year has seen an increase in protests, in community coming together for various things, for various causes that are dear to them. Of course, there's been a lot of protest on the situation in Gaza. There have been other protests as well. And we have supposedly a big one coming up on the weekend. Given that around the protest, there's always a lot of collateral damage, if you can call it, on social media, there's rhetoric, there's some sort of hate, there is obviously clear signs of racism in the way people interact and the way people want to make a point. What is your take as the race commissioner and race discrimination commissioner on all of this? And how do you think multicultural communities should respond at this point?
SPEAKER_00:I understand that communities feel unsafe at the moment and I've been contacted by community members, by community leaders, by peak organisations and I just spoke at a gathering organised by the Settlement Council of Australia and it's very clear that communities feel unsafe and this is migrant communities, communities of colour. And I think that unfortunately what we saw before the election and we've seen more recently is migrants being blamed for what are far more complex problems which require complex solutions. So let's just take the housing, the difficulty in getting housing. That's due to many different things. Migration may have some sort of impact on it, but there are a lot of other factors that clearly have an impact. For example, our tax system. and the way in which our banks act in lockstep and have massive profits, all of that impacts on housing affordability and availability. So it requires complicated solutions and complicated reform rather than the simplistic approach of blaming migrants. And the problem is that when migrants get blamed, often the only signal as to whether someone's a migrant is the colour of their skin or the way they talk or their name. And it is very important that we ensure that any debate or discussion on migration doesn't then lead to racist rhetoric or racist language, and that can be a slippery slope. I mean, of course, we can have discussions about migration, and it's an important policy issue. And we should talk about it. But we just have to be really careful about how we talk about it. And we shouldn't blame migration for what are more complex problems.
SPEAKER_01:Giri, there was something disturbing that came up, I think, today, this morning, which was this brochure. It's a flyer that's going around. And it's about this mass migration issue that they want to address. One of the things that is highlighted there is that there have been more Indians in five years and Greeks and Italians in 100. And this is obviously causing a fair bit of distress within the Indian community to be singled out like that. I mean, Senator Polska put out a statement in Queensland saying that, you know, this is really unacceptable and it's extremely disturbing and Indians are valuable to community. But to my mind, you know, everyone's valuable to community. So just on this, did you have anything to say about what you think where you think this is coming from and what message if any you had for the Indian community
SPEAKER_00:I think it's terrible and I would I'm from the Indian community I was born in Chennai I think that I understand it the community feels unsafe and really disturbed and upset about it and they have every right to it it's unacceptable I would I don't know if that statistic has any truth to it either unfortunately what we find with some of the anti-migration rhetoric is it is fused with mis and disinformation and again it comes up with convenient scapegoats and simplistic solutions to a lot of complex problems and it's ironic because I'm there was racism towards Italians and Greeks when they migrated here then there was racism towards the Vietnamese there's been racism now towards Indians, as evidenced in that poster. This just confirms we have a fundamental problem. Every time someone comes, there's this spiral of racism. So that means that our structures are racist. They were built during colonial times and baked in during the white Australia policies, and they were never designed to let in people like you and me. And that's what needs to change. We need to change our structures so they are properly reflective of our population and our history and, of course, most importantly, importantly, of our first peoples.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you for that. One of the things that has been happening, of course, and you would know, is that there have been direct attacks on people of color. Recently, we've heard of two women in Sydney who were attacked on a train and physically sort of intimidated. And one of the things that's happening is in such situations, the sort of commonsensical parental advice seems to be, don't go out, stay at home on difficult days, on difficult that can seem a little bit sensitive. And as community leaders, a lot of the counter argument to that is that that's really not the way to solve this sort of problem. By shrinking or by making yourself invisible, you're not really going to address it. So in terms of an immediate response, what would you say should be some of the things that people can do to keep themselves safe? And what are some of the recourses Say you're a bystander. You know, you're seeing something happening right in front of you or you are actually being attacked. What is it that you can do? I know this is not strictly just, you know, in your domain. I mean, there's police and there's all of that involved. But if you had any comments at all. I
SPEAKER_00:mean, first and foremost, if you're being attacked, you should call the police. That's just what you should do. And that's the most important thing to do. And whatever the situation is, your safety is the utmost consideration so I would say do whatever it is that's required to be safe and if you're a bystander that means that deciding whether or not you can do something often it does require an assessment as to whether or not you're safe and sometimes you can't do something at the time but afterwards you can offer to help or offer assistance and we've got a range of resources on how to respond to racism and I think I've sent you a copy underneath which I'm happy for in our right to distribute to all of its subscribers. The staying at home is not the solution. When I say be safe, that doesn't mean that you stay at home and you don't go out and that you avoid public places. That is a terrible outcome if people feel so unsafe that they can't go out. We should all be entitled to be safe in public and to be able to go about our daily business without feeling vulnerable or targeted. And I think that the issue here is that that vial of interpersonal racism pours out pretty regularly, unfortunately. It's very sad to hear about that attack that you mentioned. And I suspect that's the tip of the iceberg. Most people don't report racism or racist violence because they don't expect anything to happen if they do. What that indicates to me is our structures are broken. They need fixing across all areas of our lives. We need a coordinated approach to tackling racism, like we've called for in the National Anti-Racism Framework. Broken structures give license to that interpersonal racism. So unless you fix the structures, you're not going to fix the problem.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things you said really struck a chord because you said people don't report because they think nothing is going to happen. And the sort of flip side of that is that people are emboldened because they also feel there are going to be no consequences for their attacks or for, you know, intimidation and all of that that happens in public spaces as well. So, you know, what can sort of the messaging be from from government to say, look, you can't get away with it. This is not acceptable and there are going to be consequences. In the short term, fear can possibly be quite a strong deterrent while you work on everything else and while structurally and systemic change happens. Sometimes the fear of the rule of law can possibly also be a deterrent. Do you have a comment on that at all?
SPEAKER_00:Yeah, I mean, it's unfortunate that people don't have faith in reporting systems. And we also don't have common language or common national mechanisms for recording incidents of racism. It's very ad hoc. It relies on communities and certain communities have the resources to do it and others don't. So you need a multi-pronged approach to deal with this. Firstly, you need to build better racial literacy and cultural safety within police forces and other parts of the justice system. Secondly, you need to have better complaints mechanisms. Thirdly, you need to actually have proper anti-racism data collection that documents the racism that's occurring. And all of these things are things we call for in the National Anti-Racism Framework. But unless you have that multi-pronged solution, I don't I don't think we'll get to the point where people feel comfortable and we'll always see action in response to their complaints.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things that, you know, I wear a couple of hats. I'm with Hindus for Human Rights, Humanism Project, NRI Affairs, and we speak to allies and other organizations across the spectrum. And one of the things, there is a little bit of frustration that whenever we are engaging with government, it happens sort of in silos. Multicultural communities are speaking to government. The Indians are listening to the Chinese, are listening to the Arabs. But we're not engaging with, say, Anglo-Australians. There are no forums. where we're having difficult conversations in the same space. We're not having those conversations in the spirit of making things better for everybody. You know, it's my community versus your community and my safety versus your safety. And you keep talking about the anti-racism, the framework, and we have been such big champions of it. And we've been saying that, you know, that needs to be implemented because a lot of the things we're saying is part of that. What do you think the holdup is? I mean, you know, we've thought it was fantastic. We thought all communities were actually really excited that this was going to sort of see it come into action. But apparently nothing's happened. What's going on?
SPEAKER_00:We tabled the framework with government nine months ago and to date they haven't responded. There's been no commitment to, there's been no endorsement of it, nor has there been any commitment to funding the recommendations in it. And we think that these issues where the constant issues that threats to our society or the division, they'll continue to happen until you tackle racism. And our research shows that government approaches to racism are very ad hoc, disjointed, piecemeal. There are some levels of government that don't even want to use it. I'll use the word racism. I'll use euphemisms like social cohesion. It's not clear exactly what that means. If it means we should all get along, I absolutely agree we should all get along. But we won't get along by pretending racism doesn't exist. We actually have to confront it first. And that's why I think the National Anti-Racism Framework is clearly the way forward. And the first recommendation in it is the National Anti-Racism Task Force, which would identify the key recommendations to proceed with. And these could be recommendations that align with some of the work, for example, by the Envoy to Combat Antisemitism and the Envoy to Combat Islamophobia and others that are operating the field where there's a commonality in terms of issues that have been identified. We can then coordinate the approach through the National Anti-Racism Task Force. Because otherwise what happens is you have communities being pitted against each other because they're all competing for resources and they think, oh, well, if I get something, sorry, if they They get something I won't. And it becomes a league ladder of racism, which doesn't help anyone. That task force would have, sorry, just on my final point, it would have senior secretaries of departments. It would have the commission. It would have community leaders. So in terms of you said you wanted everyone at the table, that task force would have everyone at the table.
SPEAKER_01:We absolutely want that. And the other thing that you spoke of, I mean, that's a whole different conversation, is about being able to have funding and resources. for this work. Because as you know, a lot of our organizations are stuck in a six-month grant cycle and this is not a six-month project that is acquitted at the end of May and you're done with it. This is long-term commitment because these problems, as you say, are systemic and these problems need all of Australia participation and involvement. Thank you so much for your time. Hopefully we'll connect again very soon and hopefully everyone stays safe over the next couple of weeks and we continue to engage with these difficult questions.
SPEAKER_00:Thanks very much for having me, Nandini, and thanks for all the work that you guys are doing.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.