If 'speak Australian' is the standard set in the Senate, what hope is there for the rest of us?
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Version 0 of 1. What’s the difference between a playground in a rural NSW primary school in the early 1980s and the Australian Senate in 2015? Not much. News that Senator Ian Macdonald told a fellow senator, Doug Cameron, to “learn to speak Australian” on Wednesday because of his Scottish accent took me right back to the torment in the playground in 1983 when my family relocated from Scotland to the southern tablelands of NSW. Related: Malcolm Turnbull gets down to work as Tony Abbott declares he will stay – question time live At age six, it hadn’t occurred to me that I was different from anyone else. I had just been through the major upheaval of moving continents, leaving behind everything and everyone I knew and loved, and lobbed straight into the confusing new world of being an outsider. It was made abundantly clear to me, from the first day at school, that I was different. For every child who found me to be a curiosity they wanted to strike a friendship with, there was another child telling me angrily and hatefully to go back to my own country. Telling me they couldn’t understand my accent. Telling me to “speak Australian”. As the weeks rolled on, I went from being a happy kid in Scotland who couldn’t get enough of school to being an anxious child in Australia terrified and wanting to stay home. Knowing if I spoke, and the meanest kids heard my accent, I would be mocked and ridiculed. With the school’s permission, I even went home for lunch every day after a while. Me not being in the playground was a better option for the school than actively dealing with it. Within two years I deliberately lost my Scottish accent – at school, anyway. I liken it to being like a bilingual kid who would speak one language at home and another one everywhere else. So while I remained comfortable speaking in my “real voice” with my family, I felt I had to hide it from my peers so they would forget I was different and leave me alone. Mostly they did. When you are in a small town comprised of mostly Anglo people, anyone who stands out as different to narrow-minded bigots is a target. I was white, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t racial abuse. The accent was gone, but jibes about my heritage continued through until the end of high school. Racism isn’t just about the colour of your skin: it’s about diminishing cultures and accents and making dumb jokes about peoples’ country of origin. I’ve heard it all as a Scot. I’m yet to find it funny. I knew, too, from being on the receiving end of this as a white person from an English-speaking country that it must be far worse for the non-white children struggling with a different language and culture. So when Macdonald made this remark to Cameron – who was born in Bellshill, Scotland just like me – that anxious six-year-old girl inside me recoiled. When opposition senate leader Penny Wong called for the remark to be withdrawn, Macdonald dismissed the offensiveness of his remarks, telling Daily Mail Australia: “This is political correctness to the nth degree – I was saying it to Doug Cameron, and poor old Dougy got hurt and ran to Penny.” “If I took offence to everything anyone said that could be upsetting to me, I’d have slit my wrists 25 years ago.” What Macdonald – a fifth generation Australian with a Scottish heritage of his own – fails to understand is that his remark is casual racism and is offensive to not just Scottish Australians, but every Australian whose accent doesn’t meet the standard. Research by the Australian Human Rights Commission has found casual racism can add to a lifetime of injury for those who deal with racism – with adverse effects on physical and mental health, and causing the victim to feel excluded and unwelcome from society. We are a multicultural society and when we accept this standard in the Australian Senate, what hope is there for everyone else out there copping remarks like this about their heritage, skin colour or accent? |