A problem solved is an existential crisis for an activist. Especially an activist on a fat government pension.
After all, if such an activist admitted that the problem they were employed to solve had gone away, or at least dwindled to such an infinitesimal degree that it was literally “micro”, then what would happen? Their government-funded office would close. The plump sinecure would vanish. They’d have to get a real job, maybe — gasp! — in the private sector. You know: where they expect results.
Naturally, taxpayer-funded activists like “Race Discrimination Commissioners” desperately scrape around for anything to keep that sweet government job going.
Race Discrimination Commissioner Chin Tan was targeted by bigots almost as soon as he arrived in Australia.
As he was starting his new life here with his family in the 1980s, Mr Tan’s wife was told to “go home” while she was out for a meal with their kids.
Mr Tan was refused a train ticket by a conductor.
“That was the two weeks I was first in Australia as a student, where the conductor… refused to sell to me until I said the word ‘please’,” he told the ABC in an interview to mark the launch of a new national anti-racism campaign today.
If the only “racism” you can find was 40 years ago, and mostly because you were just plain rude, then, buddy, your only problem is that your job is clearly redundant.
“Manners maketh man,” as the Kingsman movies remind us. In Australia, what my mother called “common courtesy” is (or at least, was) considered a basic part of life. I was rigorously brought up to say “please” and “thank you”. So were my kids. It grates on me whenever I hear someone just grunting their orders at a service worker, without a single “please”.
It’s just rude, and I don’t blame the conductor.
Consider it a lesson in expectations of public behaviour in your adopted country.
The Malaysian-born lawyer ran into similar attitudes when he moved into the public sector, first as the Victorian Multicultural Commissioner then national Race Discrimination Commissioner.
“Even when I got into government… you have these situations where officers within government would adopt different attitudes, would say things like, ‘I don’t know what you do in the Chinese community, but this is what we do in government,'” he said.
Once again, it sounds like you’re taking umbrage at being asked to fit in with the way of life in the country you chose to move to. Because, guess what? The country is under no obligation to change to suit you.
Over the years, racism has become more subtle, Mr Tan said.
Translation: “I can’t think of anything else that even I can call ‘racist’.”
“Many non-European Australians have come forward and told us stories and said, ‘We can’t get ahead, the system is stacked against me, I just don’t know what to do, it’s like we can’t find a place’.
“What we are and who we are is not appreciated.”
Well, welcome to the workforce. Because, no white, European Australian has ever felt the same way.
But apparently the red carpet is supposed to be rolled out for everyone else. Someone has quite the sense of entitlement.
Mr Tan says the new campaign focuses on institutional and interpersonal racism.
“It’s time we seriously addressed racism in this country,” he told the ABC.
Sure, because we haven’t had government-funded grifters banging on at us about it for the last half-century and more.
Sydney TV journalist Antoinette Lattouf is disappointed with the media diversity on our screens.
Throughout her career, she has found workplace racism to be rampant.
“I’ve had lots of covert jokes about my ethnic group. If crimes happened in Western Sydney, little so-called jokes about, ‘what have your cousins gotten up to now’,” she told the ABC.
ABC Australia
Because that’s what Australians do: we poke fun at each other and make jokes about everything. In an ABC report from the 1960s, about British immigrants adapting to life in Australia, one talked about how his workmates ribbed him about being a “Pom”. “But I just say something back, and they love it. It’s how you fit in.” It’s been a part of Australian culture since convicts sardonically danced a jig in their shackles, on their way down the gangplank.
Obviously, though, in a “multicultural” Australia, white Australians are the only people not allowed to have their own culture.
Because that’s “racist”.
