The government is committed to preventing attacks against Indian students studying in Australia, which are harming relations with India and damaging the nation’s reputation, Foreign Minister Stephen Smith said yesterday, while conceding that some assaults appeared racially motivated.
He offered his government’s condolences to the family of Indian nationals attacked in Australia, telling lawmakers that repairing the subsequent damage to the country’s image was an “essential priority.”
“Recent contemptible attacks on Indian students and others of Indian origin in Australia have cast a long shadow, not only over our education links, but across our broader relationship and bilateral agenda,” Smith said in an update to parliament on relations between the two nations.
“We also need to accept and to understand that it has considerably damaged Australia’s reputation in India and among the Indian people; indeed it has been widely noticed beyond India and south Asia,” he said.
“If any of these attacks have been racist in nature — and it seems clear some of them have — they will be punished with the full force of the law. Such attacks affront our values and are anathema to our view of modern Australia,” Smith said.
“While Australia is one of the world’s most tolerant countries and one the safest, we cannot promise to stop all urban crime. No government can credibly do that,” he said.
“What we are promising is to make a whole-of-nation and whole-of-government commitment to do our best to address this problem and minimize it,” he said.
Smith said his government would report to Indian Foreign Minister S.M. Krishna this week on what progress police have made over the attacks in Melbourne.
Indian students staged street marches following the near-fatal stabbing of an Indian student at a party in September, and attention to the issue intensified after a 21-year-old Indian graduate was stabbed to death last month.
Smith said police in four states had recently made arrests for violent crimes against Indians, including 45 arrested in Victoria.
Australia has been criticized in the Indian media for playing down racism as a motive for the violence.
Police maintain that there is no statistical evidence that Indian students are being targeted by violent criminals.
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