Racist flyers strike again
Inner-west letterboxes have again been hit by anti-immigration leaflets, much to the disappointment of local residents and community leaders.
For the second time in less than two months, little, white, squares of paper were delivered anonymously to houses throughout the area. Printed on them was the message, “350,000 immigrants arrived during the crisis. That’s more people than Wollongong! Not one more!”
Summer Hill resident Matthew Withers found one of the fliers in his letterbox. “I was surprised to see there are such racist organisations in Sydney’s multicultural inner west,” he said. “I folded it up and threw it away.”
Pino Migliorino, chairperson of the Federation of Ethnic Communities’ Council of Australia, said that he was sad to see the leaflets again, after a similar campaign flared around Australia Day earlier this year.
He said such messages amounted to scare-mongering. “What those pamphlets do is they create a sense of moral panic around these big numbers coming in. I think the reality is they’re also factually incorrect.”
Mr Migliorino pointed out that while the raw numbers might be genuine, to see them out of context was misleading. “While Australia has a significant migration program – and no-one is denying that – you need to see migration in its totality,” he said. “For every year there might be 150,000 people come to Australia, you think, well, 50-80,000 are actually emigrating from Australia.”
The Department of Immigration and Citizenship backed up Migliorino’s claims, stressing the important role immigration plays in sustaining Australia’s labour supply. “From 2010 the ageing of the population will see more people retiring than are entering the workforce,” a department spokesperson said.
Despite this, anti-immigration sentiment has continued to gather steam, with another campaign also bombarding the University of Sydney during O-Week in early March.
The leaflets, which first appeared a year ago, are distributed by a group called the Nationalist Alternative. They blame the problems domestic students encounter in finding accommodation on the large amount of international students, whom they believe “absorb the market”.
Rashmi Kumar, co-president of the Sydney University Postgraduate Representative Association, branded the fliers as “hate speech”. She and they “breached university regulations about appropriate communication, harassment and discrimination, because they specifically target international students.”
A spokesperson for Nationalist Alternative rejected the accusation. “Nationalist Alternative is about love,” he said. “We are about love of our country, love of our people and love of our culture.
“Political correctness is ruining Australia and people are not given the right to freely express their opinions,” he added. “The Australian people are tired of being taken advantage of and are being forced to accept multiculturalism without question.”
However, Ms Kumar believes the sudden heightened interest in immigration is less to do with nationalistic ideals, and more to do with the backlash of the global financial crisis. “We are in a global financial downturn, and generally in those types of times, finding groups to scapegoat for problems that are occurring in our society is something that happens,” she said.
by Jennifer Lush
