WorkChoices - the new white Australia policy?
(c) Melina Magdalena 2007
This week I met with my Job Network Provider, who shall remain nameless. People I have talked to say that I should “report her”, but I don’t know what good that would do.
In any case, report her for what? For shamelessly displaying a lack of compassion and ignorant racist attitudes that are grounded in the economic rationalism which constructs and governs her professional persona? Should she be punished for speaking her mind, because I find the things she has to say disturbing and offensive? I’m sure many more Australians lack the courage to speak the hatred and rage they harbour in their mean little tight-fisted hearts.
It could be that in voicing these things, she was testing me or testing herself, pushing the boundaries. Maybe she’s ready to push through and transform herself into a glorious-blooming-heart-on-the-sleeve-loving-compassionate-angel?
Anyways, I have to fulfil my obligations to the Australian Government and continue to meet her regularly so she can track my employment. So much for WorkChoices!
This woman’s job is to assist people to find employment. She has been brainwashed into believing that everyone is employable and that those who are unwilling to take whatever job is offered them, are traitors to the Australian economy, and bludge off the Australian taxpayer. She has spoken to me seriously about what I will do during the school holidays when I do not have work. Yes, this is an industry shutdown. It would be unreasonable to expect me to go to work at schools when there’s no one to teach. On the other hand, I am healthy and strong and I must be prepared to take whatever’s going – whether that be cleaning, retail, office work or following the grape harvests. (Actually, I threw in the grape harvests – it’s my idea. I mightn’t mind doing that for a week or two…)
She has several intractable clients. The Long-Term Unemployed (people) resent their obligations to meet with her regularly and to jobseek. She in turn resents having to do anything to assist these clients in meeting their obligations. I can understand this. It is frustrating and self-defeating to feel that one is putting energies into attempting to help someone who does not wish to be helped.
The power of transformation lies within every individual’s grasp, but she or he must be willing to grasp the possibilities of transformation in order for it to take place.
This woman can take all the steps she has in place to help her clients, but if her clients do not wish to be employed in the jobs she makes available, they have the power to invent ways to avoid becoming employed. It’s not that hard to miss out on a job.
She has spoken to me before about the problem she has encountered with clients who are refugees to Australia. These people are prepared – even desperate to work, but they lack the necessary language skills to be able to do so. She blames her clients for their failure to learn English. In the conversation we had this week, she blamed me as their putative teacher, for failing to teach them English, and failing to instruct them in Australian values that would induce them to be jobready.
I am fully aware that this woman has no educational training. She has no concept of what it means to enter a new culture and to acquire a new language. It would be unfair for me to condemn her for lack of insight into these matters. On the other hand, she was a sole parent herself – and as a parent she would know that neither she, nor her children learned Australian English in 12 months, even as bright-eyed bubbly babies. Why she imagines culture-shocked traumatised adults who experience racism from white Australia almost every time they step outside their front doors would have the willpower and means to acquire workready English within 12 months of classes is beyond me.
Would it be equally unfair for me to condemn her for failing to recognise the skills and resources that refugees bring with them into their new homes? She refuses to get off her pedestal and sit on the floor with them to see everything they have to offer, let alone listen to the dreams and hopes they hold inside their hearts for what their lives could be, in this new place of promise.
That’s not after all, what WorkChoices is about. WorkChoices is not about the worker’s choice – we are all workers, cogs in this immense social machinery. It is our privilege and our obligation to take whatever place is allotted us within that machine. We know the limits of our power to choose and if we choose not to conform, we are learning quickly, under this ever-tightening regime, how severely we will be punished for our differences.
Refugees do not know about this machinery. They do not know that their choices are so limited. Their spirits have not yet been crushed and remodelled to resemble the narrow aspirations of White Australia. Having struggled so hard to reach these shores, they are full of hope and wonder.
My Job Network Provider made the mistake of assuming that I am a “White Australian” like her, which in fact, I am not and have no intention of becoming, despite my outward appearance. I did not feel safe enough in this situation to set her straight on that point. But I left her office feeling angry, betrayed and bewildered. Also deeply shaken and frightened by the hatred she expressed and its potential to erupt in ways that will fracture and destroy the peace that Australia has built upon generations of dispossession, denial and apathy.
Her view is that Africans come to Australia and milk our welfare system; impoverish Australia by sending most of their welfare money back to Africa; refuse to take on Australian cultural values, which embody the Australian work ethic. She believes African men send their wives and children to Australia in order to collect the sole parent pension when they know full well their husbands are in Africa living it up. She believes that African men who are in Australia live 7 – 11 in subsidised 3-bedroom rental properties, in order to save welfare money and send it back to Africa. They refuse to learn English, in her opinion. This is backed up by her clients’ accounts of how they spend their time. They do a couple of hours of ESL (English as a Second Language) every day, and then hang out with their buddies from their own culture, who speak their own language. They never interact with anyone else outside the classroom. They fight amongst themselves (clearly in her mind all Africans are the same) and they fight with Aboriginal people. She believes all Africans are racist.
If that’s not a marvellous example of projection, I don’t know what it is.
I did try to educate her a little.
I talked about refugee camps, economy and the fact that people who have had nothing need time to learn how to work with money, budgets and to acquire a worldview where employment is a possibility.
I did not talk to her about war and dispossession and the fact that so many African men have been killed or disappeared, leaving their wives and children with no father and no husband. I did not mention to her the uncounted dead women and children who never have the chance to come to Australia at all.
I did not talk to her about the young men who escaped to Australia after years of lives as child soldiers. These men need time to transform their self-images and embrace positive possibility for how to go on living. What they have endured is no less traumatic and scarring than the atrocities many were forced to witness and commit.
When I pointed out to her that many African families have more than one wife, her response was instantaneous and blunt: “That’s not our culture.”
What could she have meant by this? That therefore these people should not be allowed to enter Australia as refugees? That therefore these people do not really exist? That they are not really people at all?
She believes refugees should receive Education in Australian Values before they are allowed to come into the country. What does that mean? How is that even possible, when such education would have to be so decontextualised as to be meaningless?
How do you teach someone who has never taken a holiday, what it means to go away for a long weekend? For someone who has never celebrated Christmas or Easter, that they should put up a Christmas tree in December and wait for the Easter Bunny in March or April every year? For people who have seen different flags, different uniforms, different governments come and go, always at their horrendous expense, that they must now swear allegiance to the Australian flag? What has Australia ever done for them? Why would they choose to do so, if not on pain of death? Is Australia not a free and democratic nation?
Why on earth would you say to someone who struggled so hard to gain access to Australia that they have no right to assist the fractured remnants of their families who remain in harrowing, dangerous, inhuman circumstances overseas?
There is at least one other way of looking at the issue of sending money to Africa. Refugees have a great deal to teach Australians about complacency and need. They should not be put down for their ability to survive on so little. Isn’t this something we should applaud and emulate? Most Australians believe it is impossible to live comfortably on welfare.
For refugees, compared with having nothing at all, welfare means unimaginable affluence. The power to choose how to spend that money is precious indeed.
Also, the obligation to share is part of many of their cultures no less than it is part of most of Aboriginal Australian cultures – the part that white Australians sneer at and use to blame Aboriginal Australians for living in interdependent squalor rather than selfishly guarding their precious hoards in order to get ahead of their brothers and sisters and buy the bigger castle. When you suddenly have so much, it doesn’t mean you forget that your relatives overseas have nothing at all. Wouldn’t you do whatever you could, to help them bear their burdens?
Why shouldn’t refugees share accommodation? Is it the Better White Man’s way that each of us lives in isolation, autonomously and alone? Can you think of anything lonelier than
a) having your family dismembered dispersed and destroyed
b) being flown across the world to a place where no one speaks your language, no one knows you, and where the inhabitants are so suspicious of the colour of your skin and the whiteness of your teeth that they avoid meeting your gaze when they pass you in the street and pretend that you are invisible
c) existing alone in a small flat filled with no reminders of home, no loved ones and nothing of personal significance or value?
This is not milking any system. It is about living in community; sharing the burdens of being in a new place; learning how to be oneself and how to retain those shreds of identity left precariously intact, whilst reshaping oneself to be a new person, an Australian.
I can’t believe white Australians are so ungenerous as to place the onus of welcoming refugees onto the shoulders of those refugees...that we could be so inhospitable as to hold refugees responsible for their arrival on our soil. A refugee is just that – she has nowhere else to go.
I asked my Job Network Provider whether she sees any parallels between her refugee clients and her Aboriginal clients. She doesn’t, except to say that her Aboriginal clients are also all racist – but they believe they are the most entitled people in the country.
AREN'T THEY?
Aren’t Aboriginal Australians the dispossessed, the put down, the ostracised, the stolen, the labelled and the people of such immense, obstinate strength that they do everything in their power to resist the lure of economic rationalism that promises them an eternity of hell spent running on the treadmill of financial security? Are they no less entitled than White Australians, to make choices about what is important to them, and how they wish to conduct their lives?
What is WorkChoices, anyway, except a one-way street to slotting ourselves into a system that dispossesses every individual of his or her potential to self determine where she wants to work and what she wants to do? WorkChoices is not about choice. It is about obligation.
Like every one-way street, power exerts itself from above in a trickle down effect that swells to flood level the farther down the food chain that it flows. Those closer to the bottom are oppressed to a far greater extent than those in the middle. Those at the top ignore the fact that the obligations they are so fond of enforcing, were always supposed to be mutual.
My Job Network Provider finished up with these words: “These people have a welfare mentality. Australia used to be a welfare state, but not any more. Not now that we have WorkChoices.”
It was what preceded this statement that chilled me to the bone, especially because she conspired with me in saying it. Every fibre of my being resists the possibility of my collusion in the horrible crimes she conjures up. She is offended by the carelessness of refugees in their attitude to Australian culture and what it offers them. What other country in the world would let them build their mosques, she asks? What other country in the world would let them flaunt their beliefs, their languages, their cultural norms without requiring some cooperation in return – some assurance that they are not so different from the rest of us, and that they do not secretly aim to take us over? How dare they come here and expect handouts?
She said that White Australians are becoming angrier and angrier, and more and more upset by the way refugees are taking advantage of us. Already she lumps all newcomers into one group, and blurs the fragile boundaries of mutual respect that enable cultural diversity to flourish. I am truly frightened by the potential of this anger.
The rage of Aboriginal Australians is justifiable. I am saddened by the failure of White Australia to pay attention to what Aboriginal Australians have tried to share with us. But for White Australians who have never seen anything wrong with using our power for violence to repress and punish those upon whom we seek to foist blame; those whom we seek to control, the potential for deadly violence shakes me to the core of my being. To what extent am I part of this “us”? How can I prove that I am different? What good does it do me, as an individual, to cry out against her claim? What can I do to turn the tide?
Can you imagine anything more horrible than an explosion of retributive violence by those who sit three-quarters up the way of the ladder of success against newcomers who huddle around their fires at the very bottom of the ladder, still catching their breath, not having yet realised that the ladder is even there, available for them to grasp in their hands and begin to climb?
It is not the fault of refugees that White Middle Australia struggles.
