MUMBAI:
The recent spate of "curry bashing'' in Australia has led several immigrants to
complain that Australia has been a deeply racist society for long. So it may
come as a surprise that the country's main statistical agency, the Australian
Bureau of Statistics (ABS), compiles no data on instances of race-related
crimes.
Set up in 1905, the ABS is a constitutional body whose
mission is to help the Australian government take policy decisions by providing
accurate data on virtually everything under the sun. Its head is called the
Australian Statistician. It compiles a host of numbers on detailed topics,
including social trends of how many Australians are living as couples, the
annual alcohol consumption, the composition of labour force, etc. Its crime
database looks at violent crime and theft statistics to predict "how safe
Australia is''. Yet, it does not tell you how frequently immigrants have been
attacked.
A part of the ABS' mandate is to guide researchers through
its National Information and Referral Service (NIRS) to other agencies if it
does not compile statistics on a particular topic. Antio, a spokesperson for
NIRS, told TOI, "The ABS had never collected data on racism. In fact, I don't
know anybody in Australia who does.''
Australia does have special
laws such as the Race Discrimination Act to deal with racism, but no effort
seems to be made to find out how many crimes are reported under them across the
country. "Individual states register crimes of racism, but the numbers are not
sent to the ABS,'' Antio said.
The Australian Institute of
Criminology (AIC) also does not keep track of violent instances where an
individual was targeted for being ethnically different.
NIRS
suggested that TOI seek information from the Australian Human Rights Commission
on race-related violence. Race Discrimination Commissioner Tom Calma admitted
that over the last four years, they had received "anecdotal information'' on
"increasing levels of hostility against international students''.