Australia in 1960 was a vastly different place to the multi-cultural, racially diverse, economic powerhouse of the Asia-Pacific region it is today.
Back then aboriginal Australians were not allowed to vote — a right not bestowed on them until 1967 — and most white Australians regarded the original inhabitants of this huge continent as uncivilised and inferior. The word “nigger” — borrowed from the United States’ Deep South — was commonly used by white Australia to describe Aboriginals.
In Toowoomba — a large town in Queensland, Australia’s most conservative state and referred to as the “Deep North” by those who live outside it — the local burghers decided to honour one of their favourite sons, a former rugby league star, Edward Brown, by naming a grandstand after him.
Brown’s nickname was “Nigger” because of his shock of white hair and the fact that he used a brand of shoe polish of that name. So the stand was named “Nigger Brown”.
More than 40 years later, an Aboriginal activist, Stephen Hagan, decided that this relic of Australia’s racist past should be confronted. He asked the Toowoomba Sports Ground Trust, an agency of the Queensland state government, to change the name.
The trust refused and Hagan pursued the matter through Australia’s courts. He found no joy there and ended up heading the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, which last week ruled in his favour and recommended that the trust remove the offending sign. (The committee has
no power to enforce its rulings in Australia.)
The UN committee found that, although at the time the decision to use the term “nigger” was made it was not with racist intent, it is an offensive word in 21st-century Australia and its use cannot be condoned by any country that is a signatory to the UN Treaty on Elimination of Racial Discrimination — as Australia is.
Hagan now faces bankruptcy because of the Aus$70 000 in legal costs he has incurred in fighting the case. But more disturbingly, from his perspective, is the reaction of Australian politicians to the UN committee’s decision and what it says about the politics of race in present-day Australia.
The popular Queensland Premier and centre-right Labour Party member, Peter Beattie, told Hagan that while he understood the offensiveness of the term to many Australians today, he was not going to tell the Sports Ground Trust to remove the sign because it is “not inappropriate bearing in mind the history of it”.
Beattie is facing an election in the next 12 months and wants to hold on to the strong conservative working-class vote.
Many of the lower-income voters in Queensland previously supported the far-right Pauline Hanson and her One Nation Party. Hanson campaigned against what she said were special privileges for aboriginal Australians and against “political correctness” in language and attitudes towards race.
Her party won 11 of 82 Parliamentary seats in the 1998 Queensland state election, but lost all but one of them in the 2001 election. But, although Hanson might have gone, the sentiments she stood for are still alive and well in Queensland.
However, Susan Booth, Beattie’s own anti-discrimination commissioner, has now taken up Hagan’s struggle.
She has just begun to step up her campaign to have the premier send the right message to the Australian community — that the word “nigger’ has no place in the vocabulary of a nation that wants to claim credit for having a reasonable human rights record.
But Booth is going to have an uphill battle. After a week of local media frenzy and suspense, the Toowoomba Sports Ground Trust last Thursday unanimously decided that the stand’s name would remain unchanged.
Hagan is not going to get any help from the federal government, led by Conservative Prime Minister John Howard, either.
The government is no fan of the UN. It has dismissed out of hand two UN reports condemning conditions in Australian detention centres where asylum seekers and refugee applicants are held on entering the country.
Minister for Industry Ian McFarlane, the local MP for the seat of Groom, which is based in Toowoomba, delivered more bad news to Hagan on Monday.
McFarlane told the media that the offensive sign is “not an issue which affects the federal government” because the Australian courts had not ruled in Hagan’s favour.
The Howard government, elected in 1996, has been highly successful in playing the politics of race.
In 2001 it won an election by running a campaign in favour of protecting Australia’s borders from asylum seekers seeking to get to Australia on unseaworthy boats, generally via close neighbour Indonesia. It has also refused to provide a formal apology to aboriginal Australians for past injustices, such as compulsory removal of aboriginal children from their parents, a practice that only ended in the 1950s.
The UN committee’s decision on the Nigger Brown stand is a political gift for the Howard government and Queensland’s Labour government to shore up conservative lower-income voters who still live in electorates that are predominantly white and who are less exposed to the multi-culturalism of major cities such as Sydney, Melbourne and Queensland’s capital, Brisbane.
Hagan said this week: “South Africa and Mississippi have removed all racist public signages. A lot of Aboriginal people experience this derogatory term, and if you can’t address issues such as ‘nigger’, what hope is there for our children in the future?”