Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note the answer by the Minister for Foreign Affairs (Senator Wong) to a question without notice I asked today relating to International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination

I take note of the minister's weak and hollow response to my question about scrapping Harmony Week, a tokenistic, whitewashed celebration. Today is marked around the world as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. In Australia the Howard government introduced Harmony Day, a hollow, skin-deep celebration of diversity, which ignores the whole point of 21 March, which is to acknowledge and eliminate racism in all its forms. In 2019 the Morrison government took this watering down of racism even further by introducing a whole Harmony Week, a week-long tokenistic celebration of inclusion which whitewashes historic and ongoing racism in Australia.

I'm calling on the Labor government to ditch these Liberal-era initiatives that obfuscate the reality of racism and hinder the real action needed for a genuinely equal society. Labor should instead replace Harmony Week with a week of antiracism so we can have an honest reckoning with white privilege and systemic racism.

The Greens were the first to create an antiracism portfolio, four years ago, recognising the need to grapple with the scale of the challenge, and it is high time for the government to establish an antiracism portfolio in cabinet to have a sharp focus on eliminating racism. It is incredibly telling that, in responses to my questions on ditching Harmony Week and creating an antiracism portfolio, the minister put it back on the community to tackle racism, rather than taking responsibility of leading on antiracism work.

Racism is structural in this country. It harms people and communities every single day, but governments are not even capable of acknowledging the depth and breadth of racial discrimination that started with the violent colonisation and dispossession and goes on to this day for First Nations people and for culturally and racially marginalised people. Today is also the National Close the Gap Day, and, sadly, we are so far away from closing the gap. The latest Closing the gap report shows only four of 19 areas are on track for improvement. Adult imprisonment, suicide, rates of children in out-of-home care and early development are areas that are getting much worse. We cannot really tackle racism until there is justice for First Nations people—until we have truth-telling and treaties.

While tackling racism remains a long and hard battle in Australia, this government and others prior have done a remarkably good job of pretending we don't have a racism blind spot in this country, pretending there is no serious or systemic racism here, pretending all is well and ignoring the voices of the oppressed. Racism is flung around so easily in this chamber, whether it is mispronouncing someone's name despite being corrected time and time again, whether it is the stereotypes that are very often flippantly joked about, whether it is the ugly rhetoric around 'illegals' and migrants taking Australian jobs, or whether it is the bipartisan agreement on treating refugees and asylum seekers as cruelly and as inhumanely as possible. For those of us on the receiving end, it is exhausting.

We are tired of seeing another year roll past since the Christchurch Mosque massacre with barely a murmur from the government and with not even a national antiracism strategy in sight for another few years. We are tired of seeing migrants being used as scapegoats for governments neglecting the housing and cost-of-living crises. And we are angry at seeing the Labor government support the apartheid and genocidal State of Israel that is murdering tens of thousands of Palestinians and forcefully starving children. We are tired of being gaslit and ridiculed and told that we are dividing the community when we highlight racism as a problem, as if we are the problem and not racism.

We are tired of being used as props at Harmony Day celebrations as governments fail to address racism. These events may provide a fleeting sense of inclusion, but they distract from the need for meaningful change and societal shifts towards genuine racial equity and racial justice. These box-ticking celebrations appear inclusive, while the real issues we face fall by the wayside. Until real action is taken, until there is meaningful change, Harmony Week will be nothing but a mask that hides racism.

Question agreed to.