No, you dog: we’re not going to do away with ourselves

The nation’s Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane has urged Australians of ethnic backgrounds not to be deterred from speaking out on issues, after a conservative commentator urged the French-born commissioner to “go back to Laos”.

Rowan Dean, the editor of the conservative publication ‘The Spectator’, made the comment on the Sky News program ‘The Outsiders’.

Mr Dean was referring to an article in which the commissioner was featured, critical of the lack of media diversity in Australia.

He accused Dr Soutphommasane of attacking Anglo-Celtics.

“Tim’s parents escaped from Laos via Paris and came and settled here in Australia,” Mr Dean said.

“Where they came, I presume, to enjoy the freedoms, the society, the culture, built by the Anglo-Celtics of Australia.

“I’m sure that they didn’t mind coming to a country that had, where Anglo-Celtics had died giving their lives to create the peace-loving culture that we have.

“Tim, if you don’t like it, join Yassmin [Abdel Magied], hop on a plane and go back to Laos, where I doubt you will find the taxpayer paying you $300,000 a year to lecture bigotry and racism.

“Which is what you are doing by attacking Anglo-Celtics.”

Dr Soutphommasane has been behind a campaign calling for racial and cultural diversity targets in corporations.

Responding to Mr Dean’s comments, the commissioner told SBS World News it was important for a multicultural nation to have multicultural voices in its debates.

“I hope people aren’t deterred from speaking up about issues because they fear they might be targeted for racism,” he said.

“Being from a migrant or non-English speaking background doesn’t disqualify you from enjoying your freedom of speech and from contributing to this country.”

Sky New presenters Kieran Gilbert and Peter Van Onselen have come to the defence of Dr Soutphommasane, emphasising the importance of diversity.

Racism as ‘common sense’

University of Technology sociology professor Andrew Jakubowicz said comments like those of Mr Dean aim to “test the limits of racist hate speech”.

“Each step they take which isn’t resisted or pushed back marks the new limit where the status quo is,” he told SBS World News.

“Every time they can get away with trolling someone of colour to the point where they give up and leave, that’s a great victory.

“And there is no desire at the national level of government to stop them. “

Monash University’s Andy Ruddock, who specialises in media audiences, says the comments are part of a new market for the alternative-right.

“You’ve got to the dangerous point where it’s this reconstruction of racism as common sense,” he told SBS World News.

“It’s just the idea that ‘We’ve embraced multiculturalism as far as we’re willing to go and now you’ve got to get on with it’.

“All of this builds this groundswell of this idea of white civilisation that needs to be defended and therefore it’s ok to say things like this.”

‘Extremist racism being emboldened’

Dr Soutphommasane also spoke out about a series of posters from nationalists groups featuring racist slurs against Asian people and prominent Muslim Australians Yassmin Abdel-Magied and Waleed Aly, saying it’s ‘extremist racism’ being emboldened.

The posters, which also feature the Melbourne ‘Apex Gang’, are from a group calling themselves ‘Aussie Nationalists’ and meant to resemble Pokemon cards.

They attack Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young as a “traitor” who “destroys Australia by promoting self-hatred and open borders”.

Another poster describes Abdel-Magied as a “nuisance feminist” and Aly as “charming yet insidious”.

Dr Soutphommasane said those behind the “racist” posters were being increasingly encouraged by some public discourse.

“The vile posters in Sydney reflect how extremist racism is being emboldened,” he said.

“Some of the public commentary about race and immigration is encouraging vicious racism.

“There’s no place for racial vilification and racial incitement. Our society must hold this racism to account.”

Continued:

Tim Soutphommasane: benign title, surreal life

“A driving force was Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane,” the newsreader continues effusively, before crossing to archival footage from ten years prior featuring the visionary himself. “Australia’s a very multicultural society,” said he, stern-faced and with much gravitas, “but we don’t see that diversity represented yet in our senior leadership…It’s pretty striking, and simply it’s not good enough.”

“Passionate words from Tim Soutphommasane,” adds the newsreader admiringly, repeating the great man’s name for posterity. All that was missing in this video were the shots of cheering citizens taking to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations of joy and thanks.

Laugh if you will at this cringeworthy and grandiose affirmation of one’s own legacy, but remember your taxes are paying Soutphommasane’s $339,460 salary. That does not include the budget for his support staff, or travel, or the office outlay. Not bad work for an entry-level academic and former ALP staffer who was appointed by the Rudd Government to the AHRC at the age of 31.

In a speech last week to the Western Australian Multicultural Mental Health Forum, Soutphommasane denounced those who sought to “reopen ideological culture wars”, and dismissed with derision suggestions that “cultural Marxism [is] taking over public institutions.”

Ideological culture wars? The very use of that simplistic terminology to describe an opposing view is revealing, especially for a man supposed to personify diversity. But for this human rights commissioner, the ideal culture is Soutphommasane-centric, and dissenting opinions threaten social harmony. Indeed, such people are guilty of “deviationism”, to borrow a Stalinist term. Critics therefore are not to be regarded as opponents, but as enemies. What is cultural Marxism if not aggressive social engineering in the name of equality, together with public condemnation of those who question its worthiness?

“Today’s conservatives frequently endorse a form of destructive radicalism towards public institutions and civil society,” wrote Soutphommasane, a self-described social democrat, only months before his appointment to the AHRC in August 2013. This is tosh. One need only look at the events last week in Hamburg’s G20 summit and the actions of so-called anti-fascists in the US to see who is responsible for this destructive radicalism. It is not conservatives who are torching cars, looting shops, and attacking police officers. Yet Soutphommasane maintains “very nasty forms of xenophobia and populism are on the rise in many countries.” In other words, we must blame those who voted for Trump and Brexit.

And last week’s speech would not be complete without Soutphommasane attributing ill-motive to those seeking amendments to the Racial Discrimination Act, particularly section 18C, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate people based on their race, colour, or national or ethnic background.

Never mind that careers and reputations have been destroyed as a result of complainants exploiting this section, or that the test for infringing 18C is essentially a subjective one; Soutphommasane’s take on reformists appears to be one of malice. “Some commentators…complain about there not being enough freedom of speech to racially insult or offend others,” he said. That’s right, the man who once wrote the ‘Ask the Philosopher’ column for this newspaper resorted to using a cheap logical fallacy – the straw man argument – as a substitute for informed rebuttal.

Yet Soutphommasane champions freedom of speech when it comes to defending the left. “The arts must…consciously question the status quo,” he wrote in June this year. “This has always been the role of the arts: to challenge, to disrupt, to speak truth to power…” But what of artists who disrupt progressive dogma? The late Bill Leak spoke truth to power with his cartoon last year in The Australian featuring a delinquent indigenous father, and Western Australia police commissioner Karl O’Callaghan said it was an accurate depiction of what his officers saw daily. Soutphommasane, however, responded by tacitly urging people to make a complaint under the 18C process. He later denied this constituted touting. Presumably he meant at no time did he don a sandwich board or spruik outside the entrance to the AHRC office.

Given his antagonistic demeanour and his glass jaw, Soutphommasane will likely struggle to sell an already controversial blueprint requiring cultural diversity “targets” within corporations. The recommendation that employers should gather and report “cultural diversity data” has been labelled “racial profiling” of employees by Liberal backbenchers. As an aside to the statist connotations, the blueprint is written in depressingly familiar bureaucratese, especially with its espousing of “diversity metrics”. “Diversity and inclusion”, it says, must form part of “managers’ performance appraisals.”

Are you having trouble staying awake? What a surreal life it must be for the likes of Soutphommasane and the others at the AHRC. Then again that office’s culture has been defined by its president, Gillian Triggs, with all the trappings of elitism and her personality cult. Fortunately she finishes this month, and who knows what lavish ceremony will mark her departure. Flying out Elton John to play Goodbye England’s Rose as the British-born Triggs walks down the steps for the last time, perhaps? As the American political philosopher Thomas Sowell observed “We should not be surprised to find the left concentrated in institutions where ideas do not have to work in order to survive.”