by Andrew Bolt
The Sydney Morning Herald, 11th November 1998
Pssst! Wanna hear a secret? Australians aren't racist after all.
But don't try telling race discrimination commissioner Zita Antonias. She doesn't seem to want to know.
Ms Antonios this month admitted complaints under the Racial Discrimination Act had fallen by more than a third over the past year.
Fantastic news!
Mind you, I always knew that we weren't the racists we were accused of being during the One Nation hysteria.
I've been to at least 30 countries and can't think of one that is more tolerant than ours.
But Ms Antonias won't accept the glad tidings.
In the annual report of the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission (HREOC), she says the figures are "incongruent with anecdotal evidence", and "feelings of race issues have seemed more heated than ever".
Translation: people tell her stories that make her suspect that we really are racist and never mind the statistics.
So let's look at some of the "anecdotal evidence" - starting with the HREOC's own files.
The commission is a government funded body whose job includes punishing racists under the Racial Discrimination Act.
So far this year the HREOC commissioners have - after two years of hearings - found just two proven cases of racism in Australia.
Two, and look at them.
Case one involves Venelin Stamatov, a Bulgarian weapons expert.
Mr Stamatov has worked in the armaments industry of his former Stalinist homeland and in Russia.
Just ten months after landing here in 1996, he was offered a job by the Defence Department weapons testing centre at Port Wakefield.
The catch was he had to get a security clearance to the "Secret" level.
Strictly speaking, Mr Stamatov was ineligible under Defence Department rules.
He was not an Australian citizen. Nor had he lived here for at least ten years.
Could the rules be waived? No, said the Defence Department's security chief. ASIO couldn't do the proper checks on anyone from Bulgaria.
You get the picture. Our Defence Department didn't want to over secrets to a newcomer from a formerly communist regime whose past could not be checked.
Isn't that common sense?
No, said HREOC commissioner Kathleen McEvoy. That's racism.
She criticised the Defence Department's rules for having a "disproportionate impact on non-Australian citizens from Bulgaria".
She said the department should have checks on Mr Stamatov's loyalty, as it might have done had he come from a "checkable" country.
Odd. Especially since Ms McEvoy agreed "that a person coming from Bulgaria is a person who has in that respect an uncheckable background".
Odder. She also accepted that Mr Stamatov was "unlikely" to have got his security clearance "even had further inquiries been made".
But the Department of Defence, it seems, should have made Mr Stamatov feel better by pretending to check his past, knowing it was a waste of time.
Still, Mr Stamatov hasn't wanted his. He got Au$10,000 to soothe hos "hurt feelings".
Case two involves the unlucky Defence Department, and a German born civil servant, Rolf Kummle.
A selection panel had rejected Mr Kummle for a job involving a lot of telephone work, saying he couldn't communicate well enough.
It cited three bits of evidence:: Mr Kummle's application contained bad grammar; he was long-winded and unclear; and he had a strong accent that several people had found hard to understand.
Oh dear! Racism!
Commissioner Graeme Innes agreed Mr Kummle's communication skills weren't up to the job.
But how dare the panel quibble about his accent! Mr Innes thought he understood Mr Kummle fine.
So he gave him Au$1,000 for his "hurt and humiliation".
The other cases heard by HREOC - but dismissed - are even sillier.
There's the Jewish man who complained that a World War II aircraft pictured on a series of Telstra phonecards had a swastika.
Then there was the Australian enraged by an SBS satire showing African ethnographers touring his birthplace and reporting on the locals as if they were some exotic tribe.
True, the HREOC last financial year successfully conciliated 71 other complaints of alleged racism.
It's also true that state anti-discrimination tribunals settled other cases.
For example, Myer caved in when it faced the prospect of a discrimination hearing for insisting its Santas be played by white men.
But we pay a price for this witchhunt, and not just in millions of tax payers dollars.
Senior SBS staff had to spend days on the case of the Austrian who couldn't get a joke. Others must hire lawyers to defend themselves - a cost they don't get back even if they win.
In fact, it seems the people getting most harrassed now are the defendants.
Last year, 187 of 600 racism complaints received by the HREOC were ruled frivolous, vexatious or plain silly.
Ltogether 464 complaints were turned down or withdrawn. One case which did finally go to a hearing was against One nation's Pauline Hanson. Even that was dismissed.
All this aggravation - and for what? For the joy of forcing the Defence Department to make futile checks on Bulgarian nationals?
No, there's only one benefit in this trivial pursuit, as Ms Antonias should admit.
It proves the statistics are right. Really, we're not such a bad bunch of bastards.