An opinion poll this week showed Prime Minister John Howard out of step with the three-quarters of Australians who believe that underlying racism helps explain last week's ethnic violence on a Sydney beach.
"I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country," Howard said in a week which saw a crowd of 5,000 white people cheer on youths beating up any dark-skinned visitor to Cronulla they could find.
Howard is in good company: the Labor Party's Kim Beazley, leader of the opposition and the alternative prime minister, also refused to subscribe to the view that racism runs deep in a country where one quarter of the 20 million population was born abroad and six million have been settled since the end of World War II.
Of the mob violence and equally vicious retaliatory attacks by ethnic Arabs, Beazley said: "It's just criminal behavior, that's what this is."
Howard used the same poll -- an ACNeilsen survey commissioned in the wake of 162 arrests and dozens of people injured in the worst ethnic violence on record -- to back his argument that tolerance is more prevalent than intolerance.
The poll showed 81 percent of people supporting the 30 years of a color-blind immigration stance that has constituted a multi-racial society and only 16 per cent wanting to go back to the all-white world before 1973.
If Australians were racist, Howard asked, "why would we have accepted people so well?"
In 1988, as he is often reminded, Howard said that the rate of Asian migration might be too high. It was a remark he now regrets.
Since becoming prime minister in 1996, he has presided over an increase in immigration and has gone out of his way to praise Asian immigrants for the entrepreneurial flair they bring with them.
It wasn't Asians that the rioters in Cronulla targeted. Those draped in the national flag did not demand a cut in immigration. What they were enraged about was having to share a beach with Muslim youths of Lebanese background who they claimed arrived in gangs and behaved badly.
But as Stepan Kerkyasharian, the president of the state-financed Anti-Discrimination Board, warned: "Once you let the racist genie out of the bottle you get violence, and you get retaliation from other racists."
The worry is that, just as when right-wing rabble-rouser Pauline Hanson let the genie out of the bottle in 1996 with her claim in parliament that Australia was in danger of "being swamped by Asians", the stopper is going to be hard to get back in.
Only one-third of those polled by ACNeilsen thought that immigration was too high. That, and the generalized support for a multiracial society, have commentators saying that the Cronulla incident was symptomatic of the majority's frustration with a perceived reluctance of Sydney's Muslim Lebanese community to fit in.
Andrew Bolt, writing in the Herald-Sun, said "Middle Eastern immigrants have brought with them a religion that too often preaches rejection of the very society they've joined and too often glorifies violence."
His argument is that earlier waves of settlers -- Italians, Turks, Greeks and Vietnamese -- were keener to assimilate and get on and that their experience informed the embrace of multiculturalism.
Nadia Jamal, herself of ethnic Muslim Lebanese stock, denies a religious component to the beach suburb rioting or that Islam is an impediment to Middle Easterners fitting in.
Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Jamal nevertheless noted that "some men of Australian Lebanese Muslim background seem to be so aggressive and violent ... This has everything to do with culture and patriarchal attitude, and nothing to do with religion."
But there can be no doubt that recent arrests in Sydney and Melbourne of supposedly home-grown Islamic terrorists, nightly pictures of the mayhem in Iraq and the bombings in New York, Bali and London have heightened suspicion of all Muslims in Australia.
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