Ross MacGregor

The term NESB was introduced in 1985 to describe non-English-speaking-background migrants, and since then has been widely used as an indicator of social and economic disadvantage. It is, however, a gimcrack indicator of disadvantage and a number of official reports have recommended that it be dropped. Despite this, the NESB-equals-hardship equation persists because of lobbyists arguing both for group rights and for a broader role for social reformers. An analysis of the way in which the term NESB is used by the Race Discrimination Commissioner (RDC) bears this out.

THE INDICATOR OF DISADVANTAGE THAT FAILED

NESB’s false colours were unmasked by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Community Affairs in its January 1996 Report A Fair Go For All: Report on Migrant Access and Equity. Para. 9.21 of this report states that: ‘It is clear that the identifier "NESB" is no longer appropriate as a measure of disadvantage’.

Further, the Committee, having recalled that the fundament of the Access and Equity Strategy (A&E) was that ‘disadvantage is addressed’, concluded that the entire set of ethnic variables (including NESB) assembled by the Office of Multicultural Affairs (OMA) since 1988 and justified in its 1994 bible Diversity Counts: A Handbook on Ethnicity Data had also failed: ‘disadvantage is not a function of ethnicity’¹ the Committee said, and told OMA to start again.

A creature of the OMA, arising out of that office’s early drive for ethnicity data, NESB never had any necessary nexus with disadvantage and the OMA knew it: its Guide for the public service states:
 

Diversity Counts stresses that information on individual ethnic groups is preferable to information on NESB as a single broad entity. This is because the NESB population is far from being a homogeneous group. For example, the NESB1 grouping combines people with a high level of educational qualifications who may speak English fluently (such as many who were born in Germany, the Netherlands, India and Hong Kong) with people, such as refugees, many of whom cannot speak English at all.²

Nevertheless, NESB has been publicly perceived since birth to be swaddled in disadvantage. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) expressed early concern at the false colours given it and testified in 1995 before the above Committee (which noted that the ABS was reiterating earlier views that NESB was no indicator of disadvantage). The ABS said that ‘there is a widespread view that NESB defines a group of people who suffer disadvantage of one type or another in Australian society’ and further that ‘there is confusion as to what constitutes that disadvantage’.³ (At the moment the ABS is unresolved over a suitable alternative to NESB, its current thinking ‘is not to replace the term with another blanket term of similar connotations.’)⁴

None of the legal or formal definitions of NESB implies disadvantage. The OMA definitions are:
 

NESB1 refers to people who were born in a non-English speaking country, i.e. other than Australia, New Zealand, UK, Ireland, USA or South Africa.

NESB2 refers to people who were born in Australia and have at least one parent born in a NESB country.⁵

For the purpose of the Equal Opportunities (Commonwealth Authorities) Act 1987, being ‘An Act to require certain Commonwealth authorities to promote equal opportunity in employment for women and persons in designated groups’, the NESB group is defined as ‘persons who have migrated to Australia and whose first language is a language other than English, and the children of such persons’.⁶

For the purpose of higher education the definition adopted out of the 1994 Martin Report is ‘those who were born overseas, arrived in Australia less than ten years ago, and speak a language other than English at home’.⁷

Other fuzzy usages of NESB have circulated; the Race Discrimination Commisioner (RDC) once stated that NESB, apart from the Aborigines, ‘constitute all those who are not part of the dominant Anglo-Australian culture’,⁸ but the usefulness of this bit of enlightenment is nullified by the absence of any definition of the culture referred to.

THE PERSISTENCE OF THE NESB INDICATOR

The persistence of NESB with its aura of disadvantage cannot be due only to residual momentum since its launch in 1985. Though one of the emblems of this militant banner of the New Multiculturalism⁹ — ethnic preferment in the Commonwealth public service and agencies — has been shot away by recent Ministerial enunciation,¹⁰ its remnant escutcheon continues to be held aloft by the authorities of higher education. Despite the Higher Education Council having found as a fact that the NESB category was no longer underrepresented in higher education as of last year, the Council nonetheless recommended that NESB be continued as a designated equity group through to the year 2000.¹¹ Thus the 1997 Equity places and scholarships have recently been advertised and the application form for the NESB student asks only (I quote from the Northern Territory’s):
 

In which country were you born? In what year did you arrive in Australia? Do you speak a language other than English at home? If so, which?

No enquiries as to means or disadvantage are asked, yet the lucky student will be granted total Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) exemption for the whole of his course.

From her citadel within the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC), the RDC too flags her allegiance to NESB which, now stripped of its trappings of disadvantage, reveals its purely racial skeleton. The RDC has been an early and strong proponent of NESB, and she has published periodic State of the Nation Reports on the Peoples of NESB. Her latest thinking is set out in a 426 page document, Racial Discrimination Act (RDA)1975: A Review,¹² published as part of an yet unconcluded review of that Act. I deal herein only with the writings of the RDC past and present and with no disrespect for these dedicated public servants personally.

NESB AND THE RDC

The RDC is ex officio a member of the HREOC which has responsibility for the RDA. That Act charges the RDC with only one task — pursuant to section 20(1)(a) ‘to enquire into alleged infringements and endeavour by conciliation to effect settlements of the matters alleged to constitute those infringements’. The HREOC is given the major, remaining task of promulgating the benefits of racial toleration and of educating racism out of existence in Australia. In practice the HREOC seems to allow each Commissioner to run the whole of their respective statutory bailiwicks, so that although the RDA makes it clear that the RDC is to be a mere policeman while the HREOC works on the proselytising that will, we hope, one day make her redundant, the RDC appears de facto as the bell-wether of the anti-racist crusade, a Grand Inquisitor indeed (as are all Commissioners) whose classic function is to hunt out, prosecute, judge and punish the sinful.

The RDA declares to be unlawful certain acts of discrimination on the ground of ‘race, colour, descent or national or ethnic origin’ and in some cases, of being a migrant, and it also prohibits offensive behaviour based on racial hatred. NESB itself is not a term used or recognised by the RDA, nor would its incorporation into the statute add anything to its operation. Since NESB has not entered the vernacular, it is hard to imagine NESB ever being nominated by a racial discriminator as the reason for, say, refusal of a job, but, were it so, doubtless an infringement would occur for its racial loading is undoubted.

In my opinion the NESB preferences in higher education and employment amounted to a clear discrimination but my complaint to the HREOC was met with the defence that these practices amount to ‘special measures’ (a temporary dispensation allowed under the RDA) and a denial of my standing to complain anyway because I was not ‘aggrieved’ (not being, say, an ESB applicant actually displaced by a NESB).¹³ The RDC chooses not to initiate a complaint as she could if she wished, and so NESB is immune from open attack through her office.

The RDA may be described, as in the tradition of Australian English law, as minimalist and basically negative; that is, it leaves the citizen to his own thoughts (hence racism per se is not outlawed) but comes down heavily when he engages in acts that disturb the peace. Broadly speaking, it contains no charter for affirmative action.

This characteristic narrowness of the RDA chafes the RDC who has had a ready sympathy with the elitist dirigisme and crusading rhetoric of the New Multiculturalism. The focus too of her office has shifted onto ‘outcomes’, ‘equity’ and ‘access’, the local euphemisms for Affirmative Action, the end of which has been to get the freshly-identified victims — women, Aborigines, NESB, the disabled for a start — into the same material circumstances which the dominant citizens are enviously perceived unjustly to enjoy. In a plethora of creationism, the States, except for Tasmania, out-emulated the Commonwealth and each other with extra anti-discrimination laws which sanctified the new desiderata on public breastfeeding, old age, pregnancy, religion, to name a few. As Paul Keating could say, even by 1992, ‘Multiculturalism is one of the great social engineering achievements’.¹⁴

The RDC made her move, announcing to the 1992 FECCA Congress:
 

thus we are moving our concept of human rights from the basic survival level (which may be a luxury in some other countries) to a level which encompasses some notion of quality of life [my emphasis].¹⁵

AMBIGUITY AND THE NEW MULTICULTURALISM

This last phrase of hers, note, becomes one of the new codewords, picked out, its benignity loaded with double entendre, and then insinuated back into the Newspeak. Frankness would of course have been fatal, for by 1988 the Labor Government well knew from its own OMA survey and the findings of the FitzGerald Committee that the new Multiculturalism was highly unpopular with the electorate.¹⁶ On the one hand the last thing the Labor Government wanted was for OMA to exult openly that the whole basis of Multiculturalism was deviation from the Anglo-Celtic norm, if not its demolition, and that all the ethnics, downtrodden or otherwise, were to get various special privileges in recognition that, after all, in awarding nine per cent more of their votes to Labor than to the other lot they were keeping Labor on the right side of the House.¹⁷

In labouring to deceive, what a tangled web the OMA wove! Here is the more articulate part of its explanation of ‘Access’:
 

What Do We Understand By Access? The concept of access implies that all who are entitled to a public service should have access to it on a basis comparatively equal to all others so entitled ... However, it does not necessarily exclude the practices of targeted or ethno-specific services which are available or directed towards a NESB or migrant clientele ... While services may be universally applicable they may not be equally accessible if they are uniformly delivered, because the clientele is not uniform.¹⁸

Then for the hard one:
 

What Do We Understand By Equity? In implementing the Government’s A&E Strategy, you may have found it easier to deal with access than with equity. Equity is harder to define, harder to operationalise into a set of desired outcomes and harder to measure. Treating everybody the same may simply perpetuate existing inequalities ... The achievement of Equity means resolving the tension between formal equality and real difference by means of mechanisms to ensure participation of disadvantaged groups in decision-making and by means of special policies to break down barriers and meet varying needs and wants ...¹⁹

and so on for 47 pages, spreading ‘confusion across governments and among community organisations’.²⁰

FOR WANT OF RACIAL DISCRIMINATION THE RDC TURNS TO THE NESBS

Meantime the RDC has been able to find little to do in her strict statutory role. The total of all the complaints made to her office in the twenty years of the RDA, including those made since 1990 under section 9(1A) which was expected to generate a torrent, have averaged ten a week, of which 60 per cent were withdrawn, lapsed or otherwise disappeared or came to nothing.²¹ The RDC therefore has not even one a working day to handle. Over the last decade, of those actually going to a public hearing, only twenty complaints were upheld, only two a year.²² As there are eighteen million citizens out there, these statistics must lead to a conclusion that RD is a very minor worry in Australia but the RDC will have neither the conclusion nor the credit for such a happy result.

In her State of the Nation Reports the RDC was harvesting the statistics on employment, public housing and the like for the racial groups that make up NESB but, apart from some brief figures on racial harassment, the picture that emerges is that all racial groups cover the spectrum from rich to poor, that most of the hardship suffered by the minority is due to lack of work, and that precious little if any of that can be put down to racial discrimination. Indeed, Jock Collins records: ‘Econometric studies by sociologists Evans, Jones and Kelley (1988) conclude strongly that there is no evidence of racial discrimination in the labor market’, as regards NESB, at all.²³

At this point the RDC has strictly dealt her statutory persona out of the game since any other causes of social disadvantage are ultra vires her charter and, politely, none of her business. But she audaciously deals herself back in again by claiming an authority to worry at large. In her 1993 Report she warns:
 

There are worrying signs that some ethnic communities have not been able to establish themselves in as equitable [my emphasis] a fashion as other communities or on a par with the Australian-born community,²⁴

And,
 

Some ethnic communities are shouldering a much greater burden, their communities are disproportionately unemployed which adversely affect not only their present quality of life but the future quality of life of their children [my emphasis].²⁵

In one leap, the RDC arrogates unto herself a whole new constituency which has only the most peripheral link with racial discrimination — NESB people — of whom only a minority could be individually described as disadvantaged. They become a group ‘underepresented’ in the scheme of social rewards and wealth distribution and so the RDC hastens to warn us ‘it is symptomatic that people of NESB are underrepresented in Parliament’.²⁶

Individual hardship elides into group underrepresentation, notions of an individual’s responsibility for his own destiny, hard work, sacrifice and causality are abandoned, pure proportionalism for the group is crowned as the goal, and everything becomes administratively a breeze. NESB is the only handle the bureaucrats need to hold the hose of Multiculturalism and get a grip on the sophistical gobstoppers of ‘equal treatment’, arithmetical placement and naked social engineering. As Nick Bolkus ministerially said:
 

Equity is not simply equality of treatment. Equity policies recognise that citizens are different in their needs, interests and values. Treating everyone the same may simply perpetuate existing inequalities. The goal is a greater social equality overall [my emphasis].²⁷

Is all this deliberate parody of, or homage to, George Orwell? Are all animals equal but some are more equal than? ‘Yes!’ shouts the Human Rights Commissioner, chiming in with his obbligato:
 

Ensuring human rights for all does not mean that all people are the same and are to be treated in the same way. Equal treatment does not mean the same treatment.²⁸

Four legs are indeed better than two legs and so that hoary Marxist halfway house ‘From each according to his work, to each according to his needs!’ has been reached without bloodshed, in our sunburnt country girt by sea.

THE RDC’S 1995 REVIEW OF THE RDA

Now the Delphic utterances of the RDC in her Review fall into place. Thus her complaint that the RDA’s ‘transformative potential remains unutilised’, her ambition to rewrite the law to ‘better reflect contemporary social justice thinking’ and the unidentified ‘community groups’ and ‘those’ for whom the law must be a ‘tool of empowerment’. Racial discrimination legislation must be ‘perceived and used as a tool of social change’ because the present Act ‘has been inadequate as an agent of significant and systemic social change’.²⁹ Yet she never identifies the shadowy beneficiaries she so favours, nor the vision of the Promised Land to which all the upheaval is leading us — doubtless for fear of frightening the horses.

In a Review on racial discrimination the RDC does NOT define ‘formal equality’, ‘substantive equality’, ‘equal in substance’, ‘the principle of non-discrimination’, ‘structural equality’, ‘systemic discrimination’, ‘structural discrimination’ or ‘NESB’ (of course not). Thus the uninitiated are excluded from the discourse.

Incorporated in her Review are contributions from nine selected academics and experts whom the RDC tells us ‘we are lucky to get’. Cross-victim solidarity is provided by two of the papers being the rant of gender fanatics whose immediate ambition is the overthrow of the WAAMS and ‘Benchmark Men’ (both are the wicked White Anglo Australian Males) and the smashing of their citadels of power in Parliament, the Courts, Big Business, wherever. The entire production is of the same cloth, smoothly forming a one-dimensional manifesto for the reshaping of society nearer to all Multiculturalists’ hearts’ desire.

Thus the RDC has moved out beyond the arena of racial discrimination into the arrogance of unfettered social activism, defiantly, in the shocking belief that she may legitimately wield the limited power which her Act gives her in the furtherance of a nakedly political agendum designed by others. She is instead ‘the victim of the temptation of scientific certainty’, otherwise known as hubris. Nothing amiss is too petty for her eagle eye — she is severely discombobulated even by the discovery that only five per cent or so of grandchildren speak their grandparents’ language ( the rest of us would construe this as a good sign of successful assimilation) and gives us all a stern lecture:
 

Australia has an appalling record in the destruction of indigenous languages. It must make a conscious decision about whether it will allow the attrition of the numerous language brought to this country by a diverse range of immigrants!³¹

Beware — this Queen Canute actually believes government can do it and should do it!

References 1 A Fair Go For All, Report on Migrant Access and Equity, House of Representatives, Standing Committee in Community Affairs, Australian Government Publishing Service (AGPS), Canberra, 1996

2 Achieving Access & Equity, 2nd edition, AGPS, Canberra, 1994, p. 11

3 ibid., Paras 9.16 and 17

4 Letter from Australian Bureau of Statistics to author, 3 February 1997

5 Achieving Access & Equity, op.cit.

6 Section 7, Public Service Act 1922

7 See I. Dobson, B. Birrell and V. Rapson, ‘The participation of non-English-speaking-background persons in higher education, People and Place, vol. 4, no.1, 1996, pp. 47-48.

8 I. Moss, State of the Nation: A Report on People of non-English-speaking-background, AGPS, 1993, Foreword

9 By New Multiculturalism I mean the social-engineering programs of the 1983-1996 Labour Government which transmuted the earlier Fraser Government’s emphasis on respect for migrant cultures and settlement assistance to a drive for social justice outcomes, particularly for greater social ‘equality’. See B. Birrell, ‘Our Nation: The Vision and Practice of Multiculturalism under Labor’, People and Place, vol. 4, no.1, 1996, p. 19-27

10 See accompanying article by Birrell and McGregor.

11 See I. Dobson et al., op. cit., p. 23.

12 Racial Discrimination Act: A Review, AGPS, 1995

13 Letter to author, 15 May 1996

14 FECCA Congress Report, September 1992, p. 26

15 ibid., p.123

16 K Betts, ‘Immigration and public opinion in Australia’, People and Place, vol. 4, no. 3, 1996, p.13

17 K. Betts, ‘Class and the 1996 Australian election’, People and Place, vol. 4, no. 4, 1996, p. 32

18 Achieving Access & Equity, op. cit., p. 26

19 ibid.

20 A Fair Go For All, op. cit., para. 4.12

21 Racial Discrimination Act: A Review, op. cit., pp. 33 and 86

22 ibid., p. 95

23 J. Collins, ‘The changing political economy of Australian racism’ in E. Vasta and S. Castles (Eds), The Teeth Are Smiling, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 1996, p. 85

24 I. Moss, op. cit.

25 ibid., p. 257

26 FECCA Congress Report, op. cit.

27 Achieving Access & Equity, op. cit.

28 Letter C. Sidoti to author, 6 December 1996

29 Racial Discrimination Act: A Review, op. cit.

30 The Economist, 21 December 1996, p. 14

31 Federal Race Discrimination Commissioner, State of the Nation: Report on Peoples of NESB, AGPS, Canberra, 1994, p. 102

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