'Racist' charge lost in the confusion of political labelling

MOST TALKED ABOUT
FRASER V WINDSCHUTTLE

KEITH Windschuttle has damaged his reputation as a careful researcher and fact checker by his disregard for truth in his attack on my "old-fashioned leftist" racism ("Racist essay is from the Left, not the Right," Opinion, 29/9). Far from being a Marxist and a devotee of "critical legal studies", since the early 1980s my scholarly research and writing has sought to adapt the political theory of classical or civic republicanism to the modern world.

Windschuttle's other piece of "evidence" for my alleged leftism is what he refers to as "one of my recent academic articles, 'Reinventing Aristocracy' , " which, he claims, "advocates the creation of a new corporate elite from the stakeholders in public companies". He suggests that "instead of corporate boards solely representing shareholders", I want "them to be dominated by trade unionists, consumer advocates and greens"

Windschuttle does notice that the title "smacks of reaction". Had he glanced at the book's dust jacket he would have seen that I advocated "a republican solution to the problem left unsolved by democracy and the markets". I wanted to vest responsibility for corporate control "in a new political class of shareholders", a sort of self-selecting aristocracy designed to counterbalance the irresponsible power of corporate managers.

Much like the managerial multiculturalism characteristic of multi-racial societies that I criticise in "Rethinking the White Australia Policy", the stakeholder model would further "entrench a managerial oligarchy empowered to mediate between competing stakeholders like a feudal baron holding court before his squabbling vassals".

Now, I don't know whether Windschuttle deliberately lied about my book and my supposed long-term love affair with Marxism and critical legal studies. Perhaps he really doesn't care whether what he says is true or false. But Windschuttle's casual disregard for facts central to the case he is making suggests that the rest of his argument need not be taken too seriously.
Andrew Fraser
Macquarie University

SO, Keith Windschuttle agrees with me and the vice chancellor of Deakin University, that Andrew Fraser's "racial realism" theory deserves to be consigned to the dustbin of history, along with the ethnic separatist policies that underpin it. Windschuttle also claims, in a Lathamesque attempt to smear his former colleagues on the Left, that Professor Fraser's views are "uncannily similar" to those of the long dead Queensland socialist thinker William Lane, who Windschuttle says was a "genuine" racist.

If you follow his arguments, Windschuttle actually supports the proposition that Professor Fraser's racist nonsense should never have been considered for publication in an academic journal. But what is totally illogical is Windschuttle's conclusion that, whilst Professor Fraser's manifesto is uncannily similar to the views of genuine racists, it is not racial discrimination or vilification. These inferences cannot rationally sit together.
George Newhouse
Queens Park, NSW

(Mr Newhouse is pursuing a Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission claim against Prof. Fraser on behalf of the Sudanese Darfurian Community Union in Australia)

KEITH Windschuttle does us no favours by trying to re-label Andrew Fraser. Windschuttle declares that extreme right-wing views such as Professor Fraser's are actually "left". And that multiculturalism (that convenient scapegoat for all society's ills) is to blame, because multiculturalism emphasises separate ethnic interests.

Windschuttle needs a few basic lessons in definitional precision. Multiculturalism is a policy which recognises difference, but is simultaneously based on accepted shared values and norms which uphold basic standards of human rights.

To describe Professor Fraser as left-wing is absurd. He is an extreme right-winger. The real task is to answer his views, to explain why and how they are so wrong. This could be done by subjecting his article withdrawn from publication by the Deakin Law Review to analysis. I have read his piece in its entirety. It is full of exaggeration, claims unsubstantiated by proper evidence, leaps of logic where the evidence does not lead to the conclusion drawn by the author, over-generalisations of argument, opinion instead of argument, and selective use of sources. In the end, he doesn't have an argument; he has a belief. And it's a racist one.
Katharine Gelber
School of Politics/International Relations
University of NSW

KEITH Windschuttle's attack on Andrew Fraser serves to demonstrate the futility of continuing to use traditional Left-Right labels in this modern age of borderless economies and multiculturalism. Windschuttle acknowledges that the old Left and the New Left approach the legitimacy of the White Australia Policy differently: the old Left supporting it, the New Left rejecting it. In reality, race is one of those issues that transcends conventional Left-Right divides. A good example of the breakdown of Left-Right understandings of politics has been the ALP's adoption of free-market policies during the 1980s, one of the unchallengeable pillars of belief for the Right. We are currently in the midst of witnessing another breakdown of the traditional divide with the politics of Christianity (encompassing universal brotherhood and the redundancy of borders – two rallying cries of the Left) beginning to dominate the Right in the Liberal Party.
John Markovina
Maroubra, NSW