If there is prejudice, there is also tolerance

Has a riot revealed a racist nation? A poll published this week showed that three-quarters of us believe, contrary to what John Howard said after the Cronulla riots, that there is "underlying racism" in Australia .

But something else the Prime Minister said that day is much less controversial. Over many years, he pointed out, Australia has absorbed millions of people from different parts of the world with remarkable success. Not only do migrants still arrive in large numbers but public support for them is at levels not seen since the late 1960s.

Can both these views be right, that Australia possesses underlying racism and can successfully take in migrants from a wide range of countries?

Through the 20th century, belief in the inherent superiority of white races was slowly discredited. The last poll to show majority support for the White Australia Policy was conducted in 1957 and few people will now admit to pollsters that they believe in the intrinsic superiority of one race over another.

As Gwenda Tavan describes in her book The Long, Slow Death of White Australia, after World War II concern shifted from racial purity to national unity. Behaviour mattered more than skin colour, but worries persisted that bringing people from non-British cultures to Australia could cause division.

Post-war migrants from continental Europe eased these concerns. "New" and "old" Australians generally considered migration to have been good for Australia . Clear majority support for Australia as a multicultural society has been reaffirmed in polls taken after the Cronulla riot: 81 per cent in a Herald-Age survey.

This suggests that few Australians find cultural diversity inherently threatening.

Nor does racial difference concern Australians enough for them to object to people of other races moving in next door.

In an international survey carried out in 2000, just 5 per cent of Australians said they would not like a person of a different race as a neighbour. Only seven of the 77 countries surveyed had lower levels of concern.

At the same time, Australians remain concerned about people fitting in. A 2001 poll that found 85 per cent support for cultural diversity also found 55 per cent agreeing that Australia is weakened by "different ethnicities sticking to their own ways". Numerous other surveys found similar results.

The view that some groups or sub-cultures don't quite fit in explains, I believe, why quite large numbers of Australians still admit to racial prejudice. A national poll in 2001 found only 4 per cent of Australians saying they were "quite prejudiced" against other races, but 50 per cent saying they were "a little prejudiced". Interpreted in light of other polls, race here is a proxy for culture.

A small majority of Australians admit to prejudice, but is this a fuse of racial tension waiting to be lit? In daily life, the answer is no.

For all but a handful of very prejudiced people, prejudice is a weak sentiment complicated by other views (cultural diversity is good) and, importantly, norms and laws about the proper treatment of other people, irrespective of private opinion. This makes Australian racism underlying.

As far back as the mid-'80s, anti-discrimination law received overwhelming support. Everyone fitting in means give and take; migrants should modify some of their "own ways", but longer-resident Australians should not act on whatever prejudices they hold.

A country does not need to be free of prejudiced views to be tolerant. Rather, tolerance is what keeps countries peaceful despite prejudice, whether this is racial, religious, political or anything else that can irritate and divide.

Consistent with this, migrants' reaction to Australia is better than we may expect based on the self-reported prejudice of Australians alone. While in some surveys one-third to one-half of migrants report some racial discrimination, it is not so pervasive that they believe Australia is a racist country.

In a 1999-2000 survey of the settlement experiences of recent migrants, of whom most were non-European, 5 per cent gave "people racist" as a dislike about Australia , while 41 per cent gave "friendly people" as something they liked about Australia .

A 2002 SBS survey found that people from migrant groups were likelier than those in a general sample of Australians to rate Australia as tolerant or very tolerant.

Forty per cent of the general sample rated Australia this way, compared with two-thirds of Somalis and Vietnamese.

Interestingly, children of migrants expressed views closer to the general sample than to their parents. Perhaps this is because kids are teased at school, a negative experience parents interacting with better-socialised adults miss out on. Or perhaps parents compared Australia favourably with other countries, while their children compared Australian practice with the high standards of Australian ideals.

Australian ideals of tolerance were evident in the appalled and disgusted reaction to their violation during the Cronulla riot. Even some of those involved in the riot, once over the influence of alcohol and the crowd, realised they had done the wrong thing and made public apologies. They understood that a riot wasn't the way to deal with their anger at misbehaving Lebanese gangs.

In the week after the Cronulla riot, there was understandably a lot of soul-searching going on. In the longer term, though, we still have cause for optimism. Despite the youth of many of the rioters, young people overall are less likely to tell pollsters that they are prejudiced or hostile to multiculturalism. Unlike older Australians, few of them know any other way of life or have reason to be troubled by ethnic difference.

What we need, and what we have had perhaps to the point of overkill this past week and a half, is to enforce rules of tolerance that already enjoy wide support.

Changing the attitudes of those who, through ideology or experience, have strong ethnic prejudices is difficult and time-consuming.

It has been going on for decades, and has some time to run yet.

Changing behaviour can be done much more easily and quickly. It is the key to ensuring that underlying racism can coexist with absorbing people from around the globe.

We can't expect Lebanese gangs and Anglo Cronulla beachgoers to think much of each other anytime soon. But with social and police pressure, civility can and will return.

Andrew Norton is a research fellow at The Centre for Independent Studies.