The Foreign Minister has had to step in to help mend the rift with India

 
Cameron Stewart From: The Australian February 13, 2010 12:00AM 
 
The Foreign Minister has had to step in to help mend the rift with India
 
CONTROVERSY over attacks on Indians in Melbourne has fallen victim to rubbery statistics, political spin and a reluctance to admit that a city with such a proud multicultural tradition might be home to a sub-culture of violent racism.
 
The Rudd government has watched in dismay as both Victorian Premier John Brumby and police Chief Commissioner Simon Overland have stumbled in their increasingly lonely attempts to play down the seriousness of the problem and the racial factors underpinning it.
 
It has been left largely to Foreign Minister Stephen Smith to try to heal the widening diplomatic rift with India, which Mr Brumby and Mr Overland have helped to create through what many see as their tardy responses.
 
On Tuesday, Mr Smith was forced to stand in federal parliament and deliver an impassioned, lengthy defence of Australia's relationship with India, admitting the nation's "brand and reputation" in India were in urgent need of repair because of the spate of violent attacks on its citizens in Melbourne.
 
On that same day in Victoria, the Brumby government was too busy fighting a tawdry political row with Ted Baillieu, accusing the Opposition Leader of exploiting the race issue by using a major speech to say what many believe to be obvious: Victoria has a serious problem with racist attacks on Indian students.
 
Federation of Indian Students of Australia chairman Guatam Gupta said: "The whole state is now talking about this issue, except Mr Brumby. Most Victorians acknowledge there is a problem with racism in Victoria which needs to be fixed, but they (the Brumby government) have failed to manage this issue properly."
 
Rarely in the nation's recent history has a public debate about such an explosive topic as racism been conducted with so little hard data. It is a debate that relies heavily on the terrible personal stories of those who have been attacked.
 
Over time, it has become increasingly difficult to deny -- but equally impossible to prove statistically -- that Indians are being deliberately targeted by racists in the suburbs of Melbourne.
 
Simon Marginson, professor of higher education at the University of Melbourne and the co-author of a soon-to-be released study into the security of international students, said: "The trouble with this debate is there is no authoritative data in the public domain about the incidence of these crimes and who are being targeted.
 
"We only have a murky picture about this, and I'm not even sure the police have got accurate figures. But what is clear from court testimony of those who have been bashed is that it has often been accompanied by racial abuse."
 
The Indian government, Indian students in Melbourne and now the Victorian opposition have accused the Brumby government of being in denial about the role racism is playing in the spike in the number of attacks on Melbourne's 46,000 Indian students.
 
Denial may be too strong a word, but there have been calculated attempts by Mr Brumby and Mr Overland to play down suggestions racism has played more than a fleeting role in the attacks.
 
Mr Brumby is motivated in part by fears that an admission of racism will scare off prospective Indian students from choosing to study in Melbourne. He is also defensive about the broader damage to its reputation Victoria might suffer because of the actions of what he calls "a small number of bigoted, narrow-minded idiots".
 
Mr Overland, according to Professor Marginson, is just falling in line behind his political master. "The police are really following the political brief, which the chief commissioner has got, which is to support the state government's line," he said. "Their response has been to deny that race was a factor. They are locked into a political response which is not their professional judgment."
 
Last June, Mr Overland said crimes such as robbery and assault against persons of Indian origin in 2007-08 had soared from 1082 to 1447. They rose further in 2008-09, but not by as much, to 1525 attacks. In a published interview, Mr Overland admitted that Victoria Police grouped all people of "south Asian appearance" into one statistical category, even though they might not necessarily be Indians. He refused to release the full raft of police data on the issue because it was "subjective and open to interpretation".
 
Since the issue began to make headlines in the middle of last year, Mr Brumby and Mr Overland have appeared reluctant to attribute any more than a small minority of these attacks to racism. "Some of these crimes are racially motivated," Mr Overland said at the time. "However, I also believe that many of the robberies and other crimes of violence are simply opportunistic."
 
It is a message both Mr Overland and Mr Brumby have stuck to, arguing that many Indian students are soft targets because they take public transport late at night to poorer suburbs and that this, rather than the colour of their skin, is what leads to attacks.
 
But as India's high commissioner to Australia, Sujatha Singh, wrote this week: "In this case, it should apply to all Indian students across Australia . . . however, students in the other cities do not seem to be facing these incidents on the same scale . . . this is a question that needs to be answered."
 
Professor Marginson said Mr Brumby had been stubborn about the attacks.
 
"It has hurt him," he said. "(Former premier) Steve Bracks would have handled this differently because he was more in tune with inter-cultural issues. He would have opened his arms and included the Indians early on."
 
Professor Marginson, who has studied similar targeting of foreign students in other countries, said Victoria had been far slower to recognise the race issue than was New Zealand when it faced attacks on Chinese students and the US with students of Middle Eastern origin.
 
Mr Overland said recently that the police had been aware of the unusually high level of attacks on Indians for the past two years. However, it was only when the issue received widespread coverage in the middle of last year that the Brumby government and the police launched a series of visible initiatives to try to stop the attacks. Since then, measures have been steadily introduced, ranging from sentencing laws for hate crimes, a 24-hour student care service and a targeting of hot spots. Yet Mr Brumby has not given Mr Overland what he needs most to combat the problem: a surge in police numbers to enable officers to be stationed permanently at night at train stations, on trains and in the streets of poorer suburbs where the attacks are taking place. Mr Brumby last year announced he would lift police numbers by 120 officers, barely enough to combat the general rise in violent crime across Melbourne, much less crimes specifically directed against Indian students.
 
"The chief commissioner is clearly not getting the resources to manage the situation," Mr Gupta said. "I think this will come back to haunt the government at the next election."
 
Link : http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/state-politics/victoria-in-a-st...