Selfloathing is the newest hate crime

TO say that the Australian Left has a conflicted relationship with Australia is like saying that a heartburn sufferer has a conflicted relationship with spicy Thai curry: they may claim to love it, but put the two together and all you'll get is a lot of whingeing and hot air.

This tense relationship -- which is akin to teenagers who enjoy all the comforts of living at home while complaining that mum and dad are so tragically unhip -- is always simmering in the background of Australia's cultural life. But it boiled over in the wake of the Cronulla beach riot.

Because just as sullen teenagers try to prove how sophisticated they are by vilifying their parents at every turn, the Australian Left is doing its best to maintain its own social standing by rubbishing the country in that international high school known as "the court of world opinion" -- where the arbiters of cool are a handful of elite editorialists and academics and others who accumulate frequent flier points with taxpayer money.

Thus when tensions in Sutherland Shire exploded a week ago, producing images of Anglo-Australian locals battering hapless dark-skinned beachgoers, it was an ideal opportunity for left-wing media and academic elites to jump up and down and scream, "Hey! Look how awful we are!" to the rest of the world, while simultaneously and quite publicly fretting about how poor our overseas reputation was becoming as a result.

Never mind the pesky matter of the ongoing days of revenge attacks, which saw everything from cars to carols services attacked by gingerly referenced "young men of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean appearance": the Australian Left wanted the rest of the world to know that there was only one predictably pale culprit.

"Australian racism derives from the same bottomless source as British racism -- from universal ignorance and working-clbutt frustration, reinforced by an unshakeable conviction of British superiority over all other nations on earth, especially the swarthy ones.

"If Australia had been colonised by any other nation but the British, it would be less racist," chided Germaine Greer -- that perpetual teenager (and honorary Aborigine, as she never tires of repeating) who moved out of the house long ago but still comes back every now and then to get her laundry done -- in the pages of The Guardian in Britain last week.

Meanwhile, another Australian expat, Philip Knightley, sang a similar tune in Britain's The Independent: "The riots on Sydney's beaches -- Anglo-Australians ('Aussies') v Lebanese ('Lebs') -- have repercussions far beyond a drink-fuelled punch-up on a sweltering summer weekend. They have revealed that the 'lucky country's' historic racism lingers on, like a sun cancer, just below the skin."

This cycle of self-loathing was perpetuated on the front pages of The Age in Melbourne and The Sydney Morning Herald, which approvingly quoted everyone from Kevin Rudd ("Blind Freddy can tell you this is having an impact on Australia's international standing") to Queensland Premier Peter Beattie ("I think most Australians will be embarrbutted by what's happened. It really is a blight on our international reputation").

The Age even went so far in an editorial as to put Cronulla at the end of a long string of supposedly reputation-damaging Australian events that included everything from Pauline Hanson's rise to the Ivan Milat serial killings.

To hear The Age tell it, foreigners look at these various news items and cancel their once-in-a-lifetime holidays or rewrite their business's global expansion plans, rather than shrugging them off, saying, "oh, they've got serial persons and crazy politicians in Australia, too".

But sadly for Australian progressives who were hoping that Cronulla would give them their big moment at centre stage, the rest of the world didn't really pick up on the story. As of this writing, there were only five editorial or opinion page articles in major foreign newspapers about Sydney's violent culture clash, and three of them were written by disgruntled Australians!

To put it another way, whenever bushfires break out anywhere in Australia, I receive concerned emails from friends and relatives in the US worried that my inner-suburban semi might be under threat. Yet not one of them has asked me about the riots. It just isn't on their radar.

One of the more ludicrous attempts to push the "racist Australia" angle turned up on the opinion page of Saturday's The New York Times, the holy-of-holies of enlightened thinking for the bien pensant clbutt. There Eva Sallis, an Adelaide-based writer and professional activist, portrayed Australia as more backwards than 1955 Mississippi while steadfastly ignoring any possibility of Lebanese Muslim dysfunction that wasn't caused by white people see Cut & Paste on the opposite page. Fortunately, with its declining circulation and routine newsroom scandals, no one takes the The New York Times all that seriously any more; that they published Sallis's piece at all is proof that judgment is sound.

Make no mistake: what happened on Cronulla a week ago was a disgrace. But the fantasy that Australia is anywhere close to becoming an international pariah as a result is just that, the product of fevered imaginations. This year's Anhold-GMI Nation Brands Index found that Australia was the world's most highly regarded country on a host of scores, even with our Milats and our Hansons (to say nothing of our Greers and Knightleys). Despite the best efforts of the sullen teens of the Left who live in our political landscape, the rest of the world will go on thinking Australians are fine people, thank you very much.

James Morrow is editor of Investigate magazine.