Bolt’s column illustrates the steady and sinister drift of Australia’s national conversation towards a permissible racism
Last week four Murdoch tabloids – the Daily Telegraph, the Herald Sun, the Courier Mail and the Adelaide Advertiser – published an opinion column by Andrew Bolt. The headline the Telegraph chose, “The Foreign Invasion”, was not inaccurate. According to Bolt, Australia was losing its identity. The principal cause was “a tidal wave of immigrants” who refused to assimilate and treated Australia not as a “home” but as a “hotel”. In his view “immigration was becoming colonisation”.
One piece of evidence Bolt cherry-picked, to demonstrate the colonisation of Australia, concerned the demography of North Caulfield where, as he pointed out, “41 per cent of residents are Jews”.
It is indeed true that 41% of North Caulfield residents cite Judaism as their religion. But it is also true that 59% of North Caulfield residents were born in Australia, that 69% speak only English at home, and that only 5% thought of their ancestry as Jewish. It is more than slightly odd to argue that Australia was being colonised by unassimilated hotel dwellers by pointing to a suburb where 40% of the residents are Jewish but where almost 60% were born in Australia and almost 70% speak English exclusively at home.
Does Bolt regard those who practise the Jewish religion and who choose to live close to other Jews as foreigners, colonists or parasitic hotel dwellers – a common view 70 years ago in Europe but one not entertained in any western country since the Holocaust? Or was his column so ill-thought out that he did not grasp the implication of what he wrote? This seems to me certainly the case. Bolt is not an antisemite. However, in using the fact that 40% of the residents in a small Melbourne suburb are Jewish to support his more general claim that Australia was being colonised by hotel dwellers, probably inadvertently Bolt crossed a line.
Bolt’s most dramatic claim concerned not the Jews but the Chinese. In Box Hill, a moderately well-to-do suburb in Melbourne’s east, he informed us, “an astonishing two-thirds of residents were born in China or have Chinese ancestry.”
Read the article by Robert Manne in The Guardian.