Never Let a Good Riot go to Waste

Three days before Sunday’s Cronulla “Aussie riots” in 2005, (see Parts 1 and II), the P&O cruise liner Pacific Sun boarded 1650 schoolies aged 17-19 – the bulk of them from Sutherland Shire.  They headed out for a nine-night Pacific “schoolies cruise”. In following days the kids got only some media versions of the “Aussie riots” and the “Revenge riots”, and during the cruise a shipboard version of the ethnic tensions played out on board. We can know about it thanks to ethnographer Judy Lattas, who later interviewed many of the schoolies for the Australian Journal of Anthropology.

Beth: Because we heard heaps of different stories on the cruise, we didn’t really know what exactly happened … people were walking around saying that, like, there was drive-by shootings at Northies [a pub] and places were getting smashed up, so, like, I was kind of scared that, mmm, getting all this different information, that some of it was really, like, people had guns and were shooting people, and it was like a bit blown out of [proportion].

Initially, most of the seagoing schoolies sympathised with the locals. The girls were long familiar with being hit on by swaggering Lebanese.

Donna: From the time we were twelve, I can remember it being like that.. .like it was always, the confrontation was always there …

One evening the ship happened to put on a “nice friendly” Lebanese comic in a talent show, and a group of guys shouted ‘F–k off!’ They chanted “Aussie pride! Aussie pride!” while the rest of the audience, particularly girls, indignantly supported the presenter. Later, a crowd of male teens set upon and punched 15 young Lebanese passengers. Crew security broke up the melee.

Part I: Cronulla, the complete story

Part II: Guns, baseball bats and Molotovs

By the time the Pacific Sun re-entered Sydney Harbour, the kids were convinced that armed Lebanese gangs were waiting to ambush them at the dock. Pumped-up teens were chanting ‘White Pride!’ and ‘Shire!’ as the cruise ship went under the Harbour Bridge. They mistook police who came on board for routine inspections as “SWAT” teams to protect them. Lattas writes,

Clearly these schoolies were spooked. A climate of fear turned up an unlikely spectacle: the prospect of an imaginary army of ambushing Lebanese, crouching at the wharves of the homeland; a sinister contingent of chanting, neo-fascist young Aussies, rising from this year’s crop of blonde haired, Cronulla surfer boys…

I submit that the schoolies I spoke to were savvy about the media, were anti-racist, and were not opposed to multiculturalism. They did not support the mob championed by the Right, but they reject the insinuation of the Left that the grievances of the mob have no basis. They recognised the part played by alcohol, by loutish behaviour and the party-time prospect of things turning ugly.

 P&O also was mightily spooked, and within months cancelled all schoolies cruises.

Lattas seems to me to have drunk the “Aussie riot” Koolaid, but none-the-less does a job in far better depth than the tribes of journos and feeble academics. She transcribed 36 taped interviews of Cronulla locals of duration 15 minutes to two hours. I’m less impressed with the papers of Associate Professor Scott Poynting, then of University of Western Sydney, who’s been taken for a scholarly authority on Cronulla.

His Howard-bashing study in Race & Class, “What caused the Cronulla riot?” is much cited, including by the Human Rights Commission, and it gained 4000 views.[1] The title of another of his papers is ‘”The attack on ‘political correctness’: Islamophobia and the erosion of multiculturalism in Australia under the Howard regime.’ [2] I can’t imagine any peer reviewed journal accepting studies on the “Julia Gillard regime”, the “Turnbull regime” or today’s Albanese “regime”. [3]

Some academic papers on Cronulla got side-tracked. For example, anthropologist Anthony Redmond tackled Cronulla’s beach-sausages syndrome (see Part I) as “Surfies versus Westies: kinship, mateship and sexuality in the Cronulla riot” – Australian Journal of Anthropology. He saw it as “a fantasy of sacrificial male homosociality produced around the barbecue.”

The cultural ideal of pitting together ‘men, meat and metal’ suggests a conscious recognition that such scenes elicit men’s aggressive devouring of each other. Although this aggression is mostly projected onto the meat and the various pieces of metal equipment (knives, tongs, scrapers and an iron-plate cooking surface), it also commonly involves men engaging in semi-jocular ‘ribbing’ (another carnivorous trope) of each other which may erupt into fights or arguments as the alcohol begins to take effect… (T)he mensa around which these men will later gather to eat is usually shared with their female kin, who traditionally provide the vegetable foods accompanying the meat … tending children and/or preparing salads or mixing drinks in a separate space.( My emphases).

Invited to a BBQ in Redmond’s own back yard, I’d take the prudent option and beg off.

More seriously, the Cronulla coverage even suggests an Australian “Deep State” at work. Leftist media led by the billion-dollar ABC create a narrative promoting Islam-favourable multicultural policies which benefit Labor candidates. This is recycled and amplified by academia. In its now-respectable academic guise, the narrative is adopted by the State apparatus and education’s “progressive” bureaucracy to mould kids as “progressive” voters.

It’s not as though modern-day rioting is anything rare in modern Australia, although only Cronulla has been permanently labelled as “Australia’s shame”.

♦ In 2004, a year before Cronulla, a mostly-Aboriginal mob rioted in Redfern with weapons including Molotov cocktails, causing trauma and injuries to no fewer than 42 NSW police officers. One was knocked unconscious when a brick bounced off his helmeted head. Rioters set Redfern Station and a church partially alight and torched a car. The 42 officers hurt, with eight hospitalised, compared with what appears to be at most a handful of cops hit by bottles and missiles in the three days of Cronulla riots.

♦ In 1996 several thousand “progressives” — trade unionists, Marxists, Maoist ferals, and Aboriginal activists — for two hours crashed lines of 250 police and stormed and looted Canberra’s then-Parliament building, using rocks, sticks, cans, paint bombs, stanchions, a sledge hammer, a wheel brace to smash glass partitions, a steel shop-trolley and diluted acid. Ninety (yes, 90!) police and security staff were injured, blood spattering marble floors and walls, with some hospitalised. A female officer was abused and kicked while on the ground. Another female was crushed and hurt. The riot was led by full-time paid union organisers. Some distance down the road the ACTU choir sang Solidarity Forever and the Internationale. On an empty beer can from the scene was written, “Time to f**k the system that’s been f***ing us”. The Senate President called the riot “one of the most shameful in this nation’s political history.” Aborigines rioted there again next day.

♦ In 2012 mainly-Aboriginal rioters besieged The Lodge restaurant in Canberra forcing federal police and bodyguards to carry a dishevelled Prime Minister Gillard to safety through the howling mob. She lost a shoe, Evdokia Petrov-fashion. The riot was instigated by a staffer in Ms Gillard’s own office whose intention was to sool the rioters onto Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

♦ In Kalgoorlie six years ago, around 200 young Aborigines rioted in the main street, attempting to break into a courthouse to attack a white male accused, who was later convicted of dangerous driving causing the death of the 14-year-old riding the man’s stolen motorbike.[4] A dozen police were injured by rocks and bottles. Five police cars and a business were trashed and police donned riot gear to regain control. The accused’s home was burnt down and his family had to flee the State.

♦ Wadeye, NT, in April 2022 must have resembled Gaza, after inter-family rioters torched nearly 40 homes, along with cars, forcing 400 famished residents to sleep in the bush. (Read Patrick McCauley’s account of life in Wadeye in Quadrant‘s archive.)

As for Cronulla, the Australian Human Rights Commission seized upon it to justify its useless or, more accurately, pernicious existence promoting UN-driven multicultural and open-border agendas.[5] In regard to “human rights leadership” by the UN, Iran last year chaired the UN Social Forum of its Human Rights Council. Last week Iranian authorities gave a defiant woman 74 lashes for not wearing her hijab.

Note that in today’s historically unique wave of anti-Semitism, AHRC President Professor Rosalind Croucher AM’s only comment on the AHRC website dates from October 13, tut-tutting about “anti-Semitism and Islamophobia”. She makes no mention of Hamas’ October 7 massacres, the greatest pogrom since the World War, and seems more concerned with Jew-haters’ rights to continue their professed peaceful protests.[6]

In contrast, the AHRC in 2014 worked up an enormous 23,000 word “human rights” course for Year 10 teens involving all-out indoctrination in multiculturalism. It’s on AHRC’s website but possibly now inoperative. It’s derived exclusively from the ABC, UN and leftist media and academia. Its personal targets are then-PM John Howard and One Nation leader Pauline Hanson for criticising multiculturalism and boat people aka people-smugglers.[7]

It pushes at schoolkids an ABC hit-job video on Pauline Hanson (730,000 first-preference votes 2022). She’s mocked as a semi-lunatic fish-shop proprietor (I wish current federal ministers had equivalent commercial experience). The ABC, whose misogynist comedians christened her “Pauline Pantsdown”, shows (at 5mins.08) half a dozen mockers giving her a “Sieg Heil” Nazi salute, while chanting, “Pauline, you are evil up to here … Pauline Hanson, time to go! Hey-hey! Ho-ho! … Racist!” Under federal counter-terror legislation this week, display of Nazi salutes is banned, especially I imagine to Year 10 children, even inadvertently.  But I’d prefer to see HRC Commissioners and ABC directors counselled rather than convicted.

The AHRC badgers kids, “Why do you think some people viewed Pauline Hanson as a political icon while others viewed her as a figure of ridicule?”[8] As a thought experiment, try substituting in that question Albanese’s fashion-conscious Minister “Linda Burney” for “Hanson”.

The AHRC guide for teachers about multi-culti magnificence abounds in ironies, such as

Ask students to read the booklet ‘Australia’s Multicultural Society’ by Whitlam’s minister Al Grassby AM, published in 1975.

Pose the following questions:

♦ What are the benefits of multiculturalism being put forward by Minister Grassby

♦ What does Grassby mean by the term ‘Family of the nation’?

♦ How does Grassby see national pride and values relating to multiculturalism?

AHRC, please note: Grassby’s “Family of the nation” was actually the Calabrian Ndrangheta. After he died in 2005 (seven months before the Cronulla riots), Giafranco Tizzoni, a Mafia supergrass, identified Grassby as being at the “beck and call” of the Calabrian Mafia for at least 40 years, including funding his election campaigns. One of his closest associates was the Mafia leader who ordered the execution of Griffith reformer and Liberal candidate Donald Mackay. The AHRC then suggests students

read the ‘Australia as a Multicultural Society’ submission and briefly describe in their own words the three key issues identified in the report (social cohesion, equality of opportunity and access, and cultural identity) in a short, one page summary.

It describes as “a clear definition” how the “Hawke government’s multicultural policies aim to realise a better Australia characterised by an enhanced degree of social justice and economic efficiency.”

For the AHRC, the “small fishing boat” precipitating Howard’s Tampa crisis was somehow carrying “438 asylum seekers who were travelling to Australia to seek protection as refugees.” No mention of the intimidation and threats of violence aboard the Tampa. The Christmas Islands drowning affair of 2010 (50 boat people lost), likewise to the AHRC involved “the desperate lengths people seeking protection from persecution would go to in order to gain refugee status”, as if no people smuggling nor passports-overboard identity faking were ever involved.

On the Cronulla riots, the AHRC narrative is entirely on the Aussie violence of Sunday afternoon, with the horrific two-night Lebanese revenge riots going unmentioned.[9] The AHRC links to the Four Corners “Riot and Revenge” video but suggests teachers shorten it (doubtless to censor the video’s interview with unrepentant Lebanese thugs). It links to the police Strike Force Neil report on the three-day riots but refers students only to pages 38 to 44 dealing with Sunday’s Aussie racism, not the harrowing details of pages 45 to 56 detailing Lebanese rioting “unprecedented in public disorder anywhere in Australia” (p49) and “on a scale far greater than the Aussie riots” (p32). The 112-page report is heavy and dense reading and I’d be surprised if many high-schoolers got well across it, they’d prefer the AHRC’s exclusively leftist cherry-picks from the ABC, Age, SMH, The Monthly and AHRC itself.

The AHRC’s Cronulla section concludes:

Based on the information gathered from their investigations ask students to answer the following questions:

♦ What do the Cronulla Riots tell us about Australian society in 2005?

♦ What part did racism play in the lead up and events at Cronulla in 2005?

♦ What do the Cronulla Riots reveal about racism in Australian society?

After the riots, feel-good and cosmetic initiatives abounded. Within a week, actress Cate Blanchett, in a sun-hat, brown jacket and designer jeans, was leading a “star-studded” demo of actors and celebrities to Coogee Beach. They held a banner punning for a “wave a tolerance”. Even the leftist SMH called it “stage managed”. On Australia Day a month later, police mustered 800 guardians but all was peaceful. The Commonwealth gathered schoolkids, both Lebanese and Aussie, for a “goodness and kindness campaign”, assisting with $600,000 from taxpayers.

A Lebanese medico from Lakemba won a Human Rights Award for community-building, after mobilising 21 local teens to earn Cronulla certificates as lifesavers. This project, called “On the Same Wave”, got a federal $400,000. It became an international PR triumph when a plucky girl, “Fatima”, enrolled with her “burkini” swimsuit from head to toe, becoming the world’s first Muslim life-saver woman after overcoming her initial weakness as a swimmer.[10] See it all on SBS’s Race for the Beach. But when the grants, PR and enthusiasm evaporated after two years, all participants dropped out. The medico leader got some pushback because of his adamant demands that Fatima complete the course as a Muslim-community role model and “as her jihad”.

As for the Lebanese teen who stole the RSL flag (see Part 2), he was contrite and RSL heavies invited him to carry a flag at the 2006 RSL march. RSL members were outraged at the idea and he walked the Kokoda Track instead, to ABC acclaim.

However, any community harmony frayed when the Grand Mufti of Australia at Lakemba Mosque, Egyptian-Australian Jew-baiter Sheik Hilaly, in June 2006 delivered his notorious sermon likening women without shapeless Muslim garb who enter public spaces without male escorts to be like “uncovered cat’s meat” inviting rape. A few months before the Cronulla events, Hilaly had been named “Muslim Man of the Year” at the first Australian Muslim Achievement Awards.

Some months later the police’s taped evidence emerged of notorious terrorist and Muslim cleric Abdul Benbrika allegedly conspiring to assassinate Prime Minister Howard.[11] This further eroded goodwill:

♦ Alleged accomplice M: For example, if John Howard kills innocent Muslim families do we…do we have to kill him and his family…his people, like at the football?

BENBRIKA: If they kill your kids we kill little kids.

M: Innocent ones?

BENBRIKA: Innocent ones.

M: We send a message back to them.

BENBRIKA: That’s it, an eye for an eye.

It would be nice to end this series on a hopeful note about the growing success of multiculturalism since the dark days of the 2005 Cronulla riots. This has not eventuated and the Albanese government’s approval for 860 unscreened Palestinian arrivals bodes even worse for Australia’s future. 

Tony Thomas’s new book from Connor Court is Anthem of the Unwoke – Yep! The other lot’s gone bonkers. $34.95 from Connor Court here

[2] Social Alternatives, vol. 27, no. 1 (2008). Abstract: John Howard’s culture war on political correctness and multiculturalism included direct and indirect encouragement for Islamohobia in Australia. This article explores the manner in which this war was waged against the ‘Muslim Other’.

[3] Definition: “A government, especially an authoritarian one.”

[4] In one two-week period in the small town of Kalgoorlie 200 vehicles were stolen.

[5] The AHRC’s piece de resistance was spending four years destroying the lives of three QUT students who had mildly objected on Facebook to being thrown out of their campus “Aboriginal only” computer room. Previous HRC chair Gillian Triggs famously complained in 2017, to a standing ovation, “Sadly you can say what you like around the kitchen table at home.” Triggs described the Racial Discrimination Act as “a sword for enforcement of human rights rather than a shield”, apparently unaware the East German Stasi secret police had beaten her to it with their “Sword and Shield” logo. Through heedless overstaffing the AHRC commissioners, with the President on $493,000 a year, last year drove the AHRC into insolvency, requiring a $16m federal bailout. Also see HRC Annual Report 2022-23, p17.

[6] “In addition, President Croucher raised concerns of reports that people’s right to peaceful protest may be blocked in certain states and territories. ‘The rights to freedom of assembly and association are protected in articles 21 and 22 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, a core international human rights treaty to which Australia is bound.'”

[7] Under Howard’s government in January 2007, the Department of Immigration and Multiculturalism even changed its name to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.

[8] The ABC wrongly assumed Hanson’s career was finished by 2014.

[9] For example, “Have students work in groups to piece together the way the day [not the three days] developed, from the beach protest rally to Cronulla railway station [Aussie riots alone] and the shopping area. Have students consider evidence of racism and violence [by Aussies only], and the role of police and ambulance crew [who got hurt not just on Sunday but during the nightly revenge riots].

[10] It was never explained whether Fatima’s religion allowed her to man-handle and rescue skimpily-clad males in distress.

[11] Benbrika was released late last year after serving nearly 20 years for a massive terror plot.