re: to chuck:pathetic howard on aca.....
Morning gyro, ridge et al... I thought this editorial from the Canberra Times said it quite well.
Race only an ugly face of gang wars Tuesday, 13 December 2005
UGLY, NASTY, BRUTISH and racist as Sunday's confrontation at Cronulla was, there is probably less in it than meets the eye. It is not primarily a story of multiculturalism gone bad, or about the racist undercurrents that flow around parts of Sydney and of Australia, although there are disturbing elements of both involved which cannot be ignored. It is more about gang cultures, tribalism, underclasses and testosterone than it is about fundamental social breakdown, but the real breakdown that it represents must be taken seriously nonetheless. The danger, however, is that those who grandstand on either side of the equation, particularly about the raw racist hatreds revealed, will miss many of the points essential to confronting the problem.
There are sharp differences between the cultures, particularly of young men, in many parts of Sydney and they are as old as time. In the 1950s and early 1960s it was bodgies and widgees, mods and rockers, and later surfies, sharpies and Whoies. People from the western suburbs of Sydney - lastingly called, derisively, "westies" - have always been on the outer with children growing up alongside or near the northern and southern beaches, and strong senses of territory have evolved, as well as different youth cultures, one more centred on the beach and drugs, the other more centred on motor cars. Because housing in the western suburbs is cheaper, and because most of the Sydney urban sprawl is westwards, the western suburbs have always been a particular magnet for the waves of new migrants - whether southern European, Middle-Eastern, or Indo-Chinese - and even in their own regions, the youths from new migration streams have faced active discrimination based on obvious differences. They have responded by a group solidarity and ethos and a very cocky - perhaps very Australian - determination not to be cowed by simple intimidation into having their movements determined or to changing obvious cultural features which are the latest thing being picked upon by those who think that this new lot are intruding upon their turf. It was always thus, right back to the Irish being victimised by the Cockneys and doing their share of victimising back. Gangs are, unfortunately, as Australian as apple pie. In some relatively harmless respects they coalesce around chauvinism for the local football team, and ethnic pride and defiance; in more sinister ways they become involved in territorial warfare, crime, including drug trafficking, and in cultures which see the rest of the world, and police, as enemies. And when the regions they come from are, as they so often are, not only places where unemployment is rife, and there is discrimination in the job market to boot, the sense of grievance is often vehement and righteous.
These are observations as true of the beach culture of Cronulla, or the Sutherland Shire, as they are of young men of Middle Eastern background, or, in some cases, of Indo-Chinese background from Sydney's western suburbs. It is, of course, aggravated by competition over women (as the Brisbane riots between Australian and American troops during World War II were), by drugs and alcohol, and often, in the case of shire residents, by the fact that the chauvinist culture stretches back three generations. The parents of many of the nasty hoons seen in Sunday's riot were the people portrayed in Puberty Blues, a frank description of 1970s youth surfie culture, when animosities were not being directed at "Lebs" or "people of Middle Eastern appearance" but at boys from Bankstown such as, for example, Paul Keating. While it might seem odd, whether from the perspective of Puberty Blues or the circumstances which demonstrated such racist hate on Saturday, that perpetrators can speak with grievance about "disrespect" for our women, there is even some truth in the charge that young men of either side have been known to go out of their way to insult the women of the opposite tribe, often making these maidens as shrill and aggrieved as the boys, and adding to the testosterone of the inevitable (and often desired) confrontations. The mobile telephone and the SMS system add an extra ingredient in being able to summons reinforcements.
The tensions are by no means necessarily relaxed by mutual withdrawal to own turfs. The boys of the shire regard the beaches as "our beaches". They are not, of course; they are public beaches to which anyone can go, with the assistance of the law if necessary. The boys from the west have no beaches of their own, and when they want, as they are perfectly well entitled, to enjoy themselves in the sun and the sand and the surf, they are as entitled as anyone else, including locals, to go there. In truth, of course, the argument is not about rights to go to the beach, or even to do there anything which does not disturb anyone else's rights. It is about turf, an entirely different thing. It is also about each side spoiling for fights.
It is hardly surprising that political manipulators have moved in. Ugly racist remarks have long been a part of the currency, but the evidence which emerged on Sunday that the racist undertones are being manipulated by racist groups is disturbing, if hardly surprising. So too is the evidence of Hansonite statements - evidence that her crude and divisive propaganda and influence has not ebbed away even after much of her agenda was seized on by the Prime Minister.
But some of the shock and outrage of the openly racist and hateful exchanges - and the grandstanding by senior police and by politicians - is a little confected. Racial differences are an element of the brew, but they are not the only ones, and those who focus on them too strongly are using it as an excuse to avoid some of the deeper problems, whether among a group of alienated and increasingly displaced Australians of Middle Eastern origin, or among a group of alienated youths of largely Anglo-Saxon background who have adopted the hedonism, but all too often the emptiness, of the beach culture. The police have been involved in such conflicts before, even if, from their point of view, this was the more remarkable in that most of the animosity was not focused on them. The recent riots in Redfern and Macquarie Fields have much in common with the scenes at Cronulla.
Both sets of Australians are being quite unAustralian - even if they are re-enacting conflicts and confrontations that are part and parcel of Australian history. The conflicts will neither go away with sharp denunciations, however well deserved, nor with pacific attempts to mediate, however well intended. They might go away with more successful efforts to give the youths jobs, status and more acceptance in the broader community. But that involves investment in the community's social infrastructure from which politicians on both sides of the fence have all too often shied.
