Pimps, Star Chambers, Ratbags, and Westphalians: The Rhetoric of Reaction and Racial Discrimination in Australia, 1975–1995

Abstract

Australian public debates about race have featured intense contests about free speech and identity, including about the federal Racial Discrimination Act (RDA). While these developments may be understood as reflecting the contemporary ascendency of “culture war” politics, they may in fact follow a familiar pattern of political contestation around racism and anti-racism. This article seeks to retrieve some of the history of this contestation by examining parliamentary debates associated with the first two legislative contests relating to the RDA: in 1975 surrounding the enactment of the Act, and in 1994–1995 around the proposed inclusion in the Act of provisions relating to the prohibition of racial hatred. While each set of parliamentary debates was concerned with specific questions of legislative development, our analysis reveals significant continuities. Debates about racial discrimination in Australia have served as sites of contest over multiculturalism and national identity and reveal the shifting parameters of acceptable debate about racism. They also illustrate how political conflicts in Australia, rather than merely exhibiting national tendencies, replicate rhetorical patterns that broadly characterise ideological contests between progress and reaction. This article, in particular, draws upon Albert O. Hirschman's work on the “rhetoric of reaction,” and analyses how Australian political argumentation about race has frequently centred on certain ideas of “perversity,” “futility” and “jeopardy.”