There is a crisis in multicultural Australia and we are not facing up to the problem. For some time now the news from Sydney has been dominated by one theme; ethnic gang violence. Recently there has been a series of horrible gang rapes for which young men have been convicted to short jail terms. During the same period there have been expressions of concern by Bankstown police and the general public over the obvious involvement of Asian gangs in the drug trade. Those of us who have lived most of our lives in a pluralistic society and indeed like me are products of multi-ethnic families, are understandably bewildered and frightened of the implications for Australia in the future if this violence is allowed to go unchecked.
However I am even more concerned that in attempting not to offend anyone we will shy away from exploring its origins and leave it to proliferate.
There have been two seemingly opposite reactions to the rape of several girls by boys from Lebanese backgrounds. On the one hand the so-called fundamentalist Sheik Al Hilaly has declared that it is not a Lebanese problem, but Australian society’s problem. On the other end of the great ethnic divide (and ironically on SBS television) Pauline Hanson has spoken of “white women” not being able to walk the streets in safety, and deliberately confusing the issue with the refugee detention crisis.
Meanwhile in the middle, everyone, including Premier Bob Carr, is trying not to blame anyone. Although to his credit Carr shies away from the pointless political correctness that would ban the police from issuing descriptions of ethnic background, he seems as confused as the rest of us about what to do when a law and order crisis seems to have obvious ethnic implications.
The bad boys of Cabramatta are not exactly a new phenomenon. We all know that, like the Sicilian mafia before them, there are links between organised crime and ethnicity. But as someone who bore an Italian surname and whose family were pioneers of agriculture in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area I can tell you that always being mistaken for mafiosi whose links to agriculture are somewhat more recent, can be at best a tiresome joke, at worst infuriating. After all, as most shop keepers in Cabramatta will tell you, members of a particular ethnic group are as scared of criminals as any other member of the public and in fact more vulnerable.
But the phenomenon of the ethnic gang is not new either. Gangs of young men tend to form in an atmosphere of social and economic dislocation and in Cabramatta this has been exploited by organised criminals. Crime makes money, but Asian family life is quite strong and in most families the traditional virtues of education and hard work are fostered, which explains Peter Wong’s splenetic fury at what he sees as branding of ethnic groups during the rape trials.
However the impetus of young men involved in gang rape is quite different from the general problem of ethnic youth gangs, which might have a blurred mixture of alienations at the core of their formation, but whose bottom line raison d’etre is money and the power it brings. If anything rape, particularly rape that targets girls of the host country’s dominant ethnicity, is indicative of more than overwhelming alienation.
At its heart lies anger