Before I moved to Ireland with my family, we lived in Apex St, Dandenong. Yes, that Apex St. For a number of years as my daughter was growing up, she happily walked up and down the street to the primary school where she spent her days studying and playing with her Cambodian best friend Melissa, her Samoan neighbour Malachi and her Sudanese pal, Buom. We counted it a blessing to live in Australia's most multicultural city.
Sadly, my street is not famous for its diversity. For our current conservative and right-leaning politicians and journalists, my street is agitprop. It's supposedly the eponymous moniker of an African gang that's been wreaking havoc in the south-eastern 'burbs of Melbourne, along with others in a wave of African-flavoured crime.
So much so that Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has 'real concern about Sudanese gangs', supporting Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton's telling Sydney-siders that their Melburnian cousins can't even enjoy an evening's fine-dining anymore. 'People are scared to go out at restaurants of a night time,' he explained, for fear they might be accosted by a roving African.
Except that the Victorian Crime Statistics Agency says crime has actually been dropping in the southern state, and that the Sudanese make up only one per cent of the 'unique offender population'. Melburnians are much more likely to be a victim of an ordinary 'Anglo' Aussie's criminal activity than that of a Sudanese or Somali-ancestry offender. Even the tragic killing of 19-year-old African-Australian Laa Chol last Saturday was unrelated to gang activity, according to police who specifically dismissed Dutton's suggestion of a Sudanese gang problem.
So why has this become such a hot topic, given the lack of empirical evidence? The answers are not very flattering to prominent members of the Liberal Party and the media outlets that support them. Either they are flat-out wrong, unable to read crime reports or understand what the police and other agencies are telling them (which leaves in question their ability to accurately and intelligently govern), or some apparatchik in the strategy back-rooms has decided it is a good way to garner votes with a 'tough-on-crime' campaign.
Given that Turnbull and Dutton have been attacking the sitting Victorian (Labor) Premier Dan Andrews as being in denial over the 'problem', my bet is on the latter.
But stigmatising a minority community to win votes is a terrible idea, even though Australia has a long and not-so-proud history of race-baiting and dog-whistling. Whether it was British colonial settlers treating Indigenous Australians as 'savages'; the enactment of the 1888 Chinese Exclusion Bill because of moral panic over Chinese miners; discrimination against Irish-Catholics as potential fifth-columnists; the internment of German, Japanese and Italian 'enemy aliens' during the World Wars; the obsession with Asian crime gangs in the 1980s; or the anti-Lebanese and anti-Muslim sentiment that fuelled the Cronulla Riots, Australia has spent most of its European-settlement era history demonising one group or another.
"Eventually their wellbeing is threatened to the point that it damages the very fabric of society."
But the effects of stigma are damaging, both to its victims and wider society as a whole. Stigma is an attribute — in this case African ancestry marked by black skin — that 'taints' an individual group in the eyes of others, particularly those who have more power in society. There has been much research on the effects of stigma on those who experience it, demonstrating links to poorer mental health, barriers to education, employment and housing, poverty, and even physical illness.
Human beings have a strong need to belong, and when a segment of the population is constantly told there is something wrong with them; when they are racially profiled by police and security agencies; when they battle experiences of prejudice and discrimination, from suspicious shopkeepers following them around, to muttered comments on public transport, to job applications being rejected for no apparent reason, to politicians demonising them as an election tactic; eventually their wellbeing is threatened to the point that it damages the very fabric of society.
Racism at its most cancerous becomes the Holocaust in Germany, the Rwandan Tutsi genocide and the Srebrenica massacre. But before that, it feeds into the social exclusion of immigrants in the French banlieues, White Nationalist violence in Britain, and Mexican children in American cages.
But I'm an optimist. What Turnbull and Dutton don't realise is that Victoria is a different political beast to those to our north. Tough-on-crime may have worked for Bob Carr (sadly, to the detriment of Lebanese Aussies in New South Wales), but it won't play as well to a state that prides itself on boasting restaurants of every ethnic cuisine imaginable. Turnbull and Dutton might even like to drop in on one for a meal some fine evening.
Dr Rachel Woodlock is an expat Australian academic and writer living in Ireland.