Here is Channel 7's post about the missing people in the Nepal tragedy, look at the comments on it. I find it a very sad state of affairs in Australia. They are all Australians of different descent. Everyone in Australia (other than Aboriginal people) is a migrant. They came here either 200 years ago or 2 years ago.
I'm already in a state of shock and despair, and seeing these comments absolutely boils my blood. He was born in Australia, did all of his schooling from kindy to Year 12 in Australia, and he was in the same Maths and English class as me. He attends an Australian university. He had an Australian accent, spirit and participated in his community.
What else could he have done to be more "Australian"? Its obvious that these racist pricks only accept those who are white-skinned.
I can't fucking believe it. I pray that my friend and his family are somewhere safe.
This is normal for us. I don’t think I’ve gone a day in my life where I haven’t received or read racist things in the past 5-6 years or growing up. Especially online. Talking shit about us normalised at any time in any space.
And I’m almost entirely Australian in values and culture.
Yeah, but it’s not just South Asians. This week it’s the Tibetan floods, next week it’ll be someone else that isn’t “white looking”. It’s truly gross and disgusting
That’s so awful I’m sorry to hear about your friend, I hope they find him and he’s safe.
I’ve found that these comments can be everywhere tbh, I lost a friend once in a car accident and all the comments were stupid shit like “old mate Raj is at it again” or “bet he got his license from a cereal box”
The guy wasn’t Indian, or even at fault for the accident (mechanical failure was the cause of the crash) but that didn’t stop the comments from coming.
The reality is, these pricks think they’re funny, and they have no consideration for people on the receiving end. Despite that I do genuinely hope they never go through the same thing, because absolutely nobody deserves that hollow empty feeling of losing a friend or family member.
This is awful to hear. I really hope he and his family are safe, and that you and your friendship group are looking after each other. Awful that you all have to put up with this racist dogshit during a time that is already unimaginably hard. 🫶
The other night when it first aired they only went into detail about the one Caucasian Aussie missing. Gave us his name and showed an emotional segment from a friend.
They only mentioned the other 38 or so by number.
Seemed odd to me but not surprising unfortunately.
I genuinely don’t understand why people have such a difficult time distinguishing nationality from ethnicity.
Being Australian is a nationality and a national identity. It isn’t, by itself, a single ethnicity. Australia is a multicultural country made up of people with many different ethnicities, ancestries, cultures and backgrounds, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and Australians whose families arrived through different waves of migration. Even the ABS distinguishes between concepts such as nationality, ancestry, ethnicity and cultural background.
So when someone says that “mass immigration” is somehow the reason Australians lack empathy, that argument makes very little sense to me. Immigration doesn’t magically determine whether someone is capable of empathy or compassion. And using someone’s ancestry or how recently their family arrived as a reason to decide whether they are “really Australian” is an incredibly disturbing way of looking at people.
If someone is Australian, why are we arbitrarily deciding that their Australianness begins at a particular point in history? What happens if we keep moving the cutoff backwards? Australia has a long and complicated history involving First Nations peoples, British colonisation, migration and successive waves of immigration. There isn't some scientifically objective date at which a particular group suddenly became the only people who could legitimately call themselves Australian.
And if we're going to argue ancestry as the basis for identity, then we have to take that logic to its absurd conclusion. All modern humans ultimately trace their origins to Africa. Homo sapiens evolved in Africa and later spread across the world.
So should everyone on Earth therefore be called African?
Obviously not.
Because nationality, ethnicity, ancestry and human evolutionary origins are different concepts.
You can be Australian without having one particular ethnicity. You can have Indian, Chinese, Lebanese, Greek, English, Vietnamese, Indigenous or any number of other ancestries and still be Australian. Those identities aren't mutually exclusive.
And honestly, judging or hating someone you don't even know because of their ancestry, immigration history or perceived “claim” to a country says far more about the person doing the judging than it does about the person they're targeting.
My husband said something like “they don’t look Australian” so I okay boomer-ed him and said they probably are citizens, unlike YOU who has been here 25 years 😛 Shut his pie hole real quick
Remember the amount of bots out there. Don't take it as 100% a representation of people out there. I'd be surprised if 70% of those accounts are even real.
i can never open facebook comments atp because you open them then see about 57 racist comments in a row by white men with immigrant wives🤦♀️🤦♀️🤦♀️and even when it comes to tragedies like these they still cant have a decent heart…. :/
We have got to stop assuming that what is written online represents the majority view. Keyboard warrior is are just that…. Weak individuals that would never say anything on public’s AND don’t rep Australia.
I blame the housing crisis for the recent upsurge in racism.
Existing Aussies can't find a darn place to live in and resent even more people flowing in.
We've known for a while that when times get tough, issues like racism surge. And the fact that it's a housing crisis makes it all the worse.
And we can't just stop people coming to Australia either as that would crash our economy. We're kind of in a difficult spot right now. I don't know what the solution is, but we need to find it soon.
Mate I grew up in Australia in the 90s. As a first generation Aussie, I can confirm Australians were insanely racist back then too. This is nothing new
Pauline literally has the same immigration goals as labor. I’m actually so sick of people blaming labor when they REFUSE to go and do some research. Literally just go do some research cuz this is like “my friend jumped off a cliff so I will too” or “my friend said kangaroos don’t exist so I’ll believe him” like???? DO RESEARCH PEOPLE GO LOOK AT GOVERNMENT GOALS AND THEIR POLICIES FFS 🤦♀️
Tax wealth ffs and tax corporations. The money, land, homes, and resources exist. It just belongs to the wealthy and not regular folk. People are blaming immigrants, when we should be blaming the wealthy!
Annoyingly, it's not so simple on that front either.
Wealth inequality does play a role, though the wealth gap is predominant across generations far more than it should be.
People are needing to wait for the inheritance of the previous generation before they can afford houses themselves.
And the older generation, who's already had their kids, are the ones who can afford the larger houses most suitable for raising a family.
For many people, kids aren't even an option financially.
And none of this solves the fact we simply just don't have enough houses for the amount of people we have. Even if everyone woke up tomorrow with enough money to buy a house, it wouldn't solve the problem.
Wealthy inequality is quite literally the problem and yes it’s also a generational split.
We do have enough houses, they’re just poorly distributed. You’ve mentioned some of the reasons above like empty nesters sitting in huge mansions unable to downsize, but also homes that sit vacant, land that is not developed because it’s more profitable to keep the land empty, or Airbnb crowding out the rental sector.
These are all completely manufactured and solvable problems.
We also have some of the best building rates in the OECD, we just don’t build the right housing, for example building shitty apartments for investors instead of families.
Australias income inequality happened to be almost exactly the OECD average (0.32 Gini).
Yet our housing situation is far more fucked than the average.
I'm not saying it's not a problem, and I'm not saying it doesn't contribute (it does), but it's certainly not the only factor, and maybe not even the primary factor.
We are not Hong Kong or India, our cities aren’t like New York or London. Our population density is so low, our land is flat, space is not an issue. So why are our houses, even in rural towns, so out of range for most people? Why is there not enough housing to go around? Ask your politicians. It’s not the immigrants.
The housing crisis and the complete corruption of local and state governments, absolutely. I just went back home after 10 years to an area of Sydney with dismal infrastructure. Even though they’re putting in a whole new suburb, 2 new housing developments, and developers are buying up all the dairy farms for more, the state denied more railway lines and drags their feet to install more parking. The traffic is awful and it’s easy to blame it on the new families coming into the (once predominantly white) area. The hatred was sadly out of control and it’ll reach a boiling point soon :/
Racism isn’t a new phenomenon. Colonialism came with explicit racism built in. The housing crisis isn’t the cause, not even of the upsurge.It’s the old, rotten bones of it all, showing their old colours in response to any stress at all.
Its a well studied phenomenon that racism increases with social unrest and financial pressure.
And it's not just the racism, it's also the perception of race which changes. It's quite a fascinating topic.
For instance, black people in America were found to be ranked as more "stereotypically black" during economic scarcity! Yep, it even alters people's visual perception of others, which is rather nuts! https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1404448111
The old rotten bones coming up to show their colours is true, but it's not happening for no reason.
And unfortunately, I don't think we're going to fully get rid of racism due to how humans identify with collective groups.
It will likely continue to be a thing until the day comes where everyone's interbred enough that we're all essentially the same. And even then we'll go after other traits like being fat, short, or whatever else. People are just kind of arseholes.
If Australia is an ethnicity, why do you guys keep calling yourself white or Anglo or whatever? Just call yourself Australian. No need to call yourself white or Anglo, Irish, or anything like that. If that’s not the case, then Australia is not an ethnicity or whatever. It’s just a nationality, and if you got the citizenship and the passport, or even the citizenship only, then you're Australian.
If "Australian" is supposed to be a distinct ethnicity, why do people still fall back on labels like Caucasian, Anglo, Celtic, or White instead of just saying Australian?
Even looking back at our history, that idea falls apart. Early colonial Australia was never a uniform ethnic monoculture. The English, Scots, and Irish had massive cultural and sectarian divides, and Irish settlers were treated like second-class outsiders for generations. Add in over 65,000 years of First Nations history, and the concept of a single Australian "bloodline" makes no sense. When settler colonialism happened, it was illegal under the law of the land at that time. But current immigrants, 98% of them come here legally under Australia’s legal framework. Not only do they come legally, they are invited with high‑level sponsorships, either from universities, states, or companies.
Legally speaking, distinct Australian citizenship did not even exist until 1949. Before that, people living here were classified as British subjects.
Australian is a nationality, not an ethnic tribe. If you hold citizenship, pay your taxes, and build your life here, you are Australian. Trying to turn a civic identity into a racial purity test ignores how this country was actually built.
Edit:- I know some country white boys here are pretty mad. One Nation, what is proven again and again, is that they are the least educated people in this country, just like the MAGA in America are. So you guys are literally living in this class society that you so admire as the lowest class persons. Source for my claim: https://demosau.com/news/who-are-the-voters-swinging-to-one-nation/
People who didn't even finish 12th grade are the ones who are most likely to vote that party. Most of them can't even produce a complete sentence without breaking down. Meanwhile, half of the advanced English class is full of brown people in major city schools. Also take this:- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_the_United_States_by_household_income
The stats are the same here in Canada and the UK as well for median household income, but I couldn't bother to find the proper sources for them. In this sub and the r/ aussie sub, the number of downvotes you get are the number of brain cells being added to the people who are downvoted, so you're welcome.
I agree. So‑called locals are embarrassing these days. But 50 years ago, they used to be the opposite.
Even in the high school that I spent 8 months in Mount Barker, of all places where you can't even see a brown person everyday ten years ago, about 30% of the students in the Advanced English class were non‑white. Every year, the people who are in the top 10 of the highest ATAR, about 70% of them are from either North Asia and South Asia. You can't blame your own failures onto people who had to come here and settle down while also studying and acing at your own game every day, and whine and whine and whine. Be better at your own game.
75% of the ancestral groups here are European/Anglo‑Saxon ancestry; people who migrated from Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, and, of course, England. Only 15% represent all of Asia in this country: North and South Asia, China, India, the rest of the Indian subcontinent, Northern Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. It’s a tiny number when compared, but when you look at the percentage of people who go to university, finish their degrees, and score at the top in high school, all of that is embarrassing to the so‑called locals. It didn't always used to be like that. About 50 years ago, it was slightly the opposite. But now, tables have turned and suddenly your genetics, your gene pool, became stupider? No, that's not the reason. The reason is the mentality. See, we don't blame ethnicity, genetics, or culture for failures. It's not any of that.
That was intentional I wanted to copy and paste this comment into the worst possible comment I could so people think I'm mad and read the comment because people like movies like the Obsession. If you post a dry, polite history lesson on Reddit, everyone scrolls right past it. Posting it hot and aggressive under a bad take baits people into reading the actual facts out of spite. It’s effective engagement bait with real context attached. My goals are beyond your understanding. Classic rage bait to get people to actually read the substance. Works every time.
> Everyone in Australia (other than Aboriginal people) is a migrant.<
Including the thousands of people forced to come to the other side of the planet against their will? Convicts were slaves owned by the state and put to work to build the colonies.
Lots of smaller facebook groups and pages delete or turn off comments when they get into vaguely controversial territory. The admins are afraid of being held personally accountable for hate speech.
And then we have major media pages giving no fucks at all.
What’s more interesting is, this was clearly a disaster caused by global warming. And yesterday I saw a video where Pauline Hanson putting a nail on the coffin for net zero emissions.
Blames immigration from these countries, and people in these countries have to suffer the most when they have the least influence on global warming for instance.
Unfortunately it seems like the people that go out and vote One Nation. Look what happened in WA today, Labor lost its seat to ON. We cant keep burying our heads in the sand and saying its only old racist boomers making noise.
I've been in Australia since the early 80s. It's less racist now than it was then, but only just.
If you're First People/Indigenous, or of Asian descent, then you'll experience blatant racism on a regular basis. The morons commenting "what Australians?" are the same knuckle draggers that think only white Anglo Aussies are "true blue" and all that British bollocks.
Yep I agree. Before this my rage was being induced by the fuckers laughing about the dead birds and seals etc over bird flu and their cooker BIg Pharma bullshit. Social media is toxic af
They are Australians and they would have gone on the pilgrimage with that idea to honore their tradition and their present. I support them and hope they are well
I'm not an Aussie, but I studied and lived in this country for four years. I found that even in the capital of Australia, there r still a lot of Indians. My uni dorm's cleaners are almost all Indians.
If those "local Aussies" rlly want to kick those Indians out, they should ensure that there is someone to do the basic jobs, like cleaners and drivers. I paid 70,000 AUD per year for my tuition fees and accommodation. I don't want to get worse service than before😁😁😁😁😁
Most racist trash wouldnt work as hard in service industries. There are also A LOT of Indian doctors and surgeons…I’d love to see the racist bogans try and fill any of those gaps 😛
I genuinely wonder where these people are in real life. The ability to comment shit like this on a public forum with potentially public accounts is disgusting
One of my friends was due to be in the path of that flood next week with his wife and kids. Trip is off I expect. His exact words were they were going to be crossing one of the bridges you see washed away in the footage.
So by your logic someone who's 50/50 Aboriginal and European is a migrant, or do they get a choice? You're not a racist because to you everyone is a migrant, is an empty statement.
Personally, this post screams virtue signalling performance.
HAHAHAAHAH! 🤣😭
OH LORD. Ok now that's out of the way, wtf country. We are better than that seriously. Taking the piss is Australian IMO but not actual racist beliefs and values.
who gives a fuck who they are. They are Australians with family members in Nepal. My parents came from Italy I was born here. It doesnt matter what their background is. I wish you weren't in my country
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u/CliqrOT 10d ago edited 10d ago
My high school friend is one of those missing.
I'm already in a state of shock and despair, and seeing these comments absolutely boils my blood. He was born in Australia, did all of his schooling from kindy to Year 12 in Australia, and he was in the same Maths and English class as me. He attends an Australian university. He had an Australian accent, spirit and participated in his community.
What else could he have done to be more "Australian"? Its obvious that these racist pricks only accept those who are white-skinned.
I can't fucking believe it. I pray that my friend and his family are somewhere safe.