Progressives can learn from Rishi Sunak – be less reductive when engaging with migrant communities
I’ve been brown, short and male my whole life, and it really is something to see one of our own ascend to the prime ministership of the United Kingdom.
For many of us on the progressive side of politics, however, Sunak’s private school education, work history and bank balance sits a little uncomfortably – although not as uncomfortably as his ultra-conservative politics, including the cringeworthy clip of a young Sunak protesting his egalitarianism and failing: “I have friends of all classes. I have middle class friends, I have working-class friends. Well, not working class”.
South Asian immigration to the UK, Australia, and the rest of the anglosphere started over six decades ago. In Australia, we’ll soon celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of the White Australia Policy.
It shouldn’t be a surprise then, that a person born in the UK or Australia, with subcontinental heritage, might make it to the peak of political power.
Nor should it be a surprise that such a person would be a conservative.
I grew up in an era when the most significant representation of brown people in our cultural life was Apu Nahasapeemapetilon on The Simpsons. Regrettably, I worked in a convenience store at the time, so obviously hilarity ensued at every party I attended. These days the joke might extend to your Uber delivery guy.
People from migrant communities make up a big and often invisible part of Australia’s working class, to be sure. Last year’s lockdowns in western Sydney intensely illuminated that fact.
But for multiple generations now South Asians have come to Australia and taken up jobs in banking and finance, engineering, IT and consulting too. Some are social workers, and some are educators. They’ve set up small businesses, and some of those businesses have turned into big businesses. Some are millionaires and some are billionaires.
Their kids have grown up here, and this is the only home they know.
Some have deeply held progressive
values. Some are avowed conservatives. And some, like every other community, look for ideas, integrity and inspiration in their political leaders.
But attend any kind of campaign planning meeting for any kind of progressive cause, and in far too many cases the discussion about engaging with anyone who does not fit an anglo-Australian mould will go something like:
Engagement with people of colour is too often reduced to a decision to have the campaign materials translated, as if migrant communities are made up exclusively of non-English speaking elderly grandparents here on a family reunion visa, or – more recently – trite social media posts about religious and cultural festivals (“But she’s wearing a saree, she MUST understand us!”). The days when people of colour could be relied upon to vote Labor because of Whitlam or Hawke are well and truly over.
We saw it in 2013, 2016 and 2019 when large numbers of voters with Chinese, Indian and Nepalese heritage swung to the Coalition. Labor’s 2022 federal slate is trying to turn things around, but there is so much more work to be done.
People of colour are not an interest group. If politics is a battle for the hearts and minds of the people, we would do well to see and hear all the people as they are, as complex human beings.
Rishi Sunak will govern Britain, for better or worse, according to his values and interests. The strength of diversity is that it helps draw out the talents and contributions of everyone, irrespective of characteristics that may have previously been disqualifying.
As we have learned this week, that is not the same as advancing a progressive agenda in the public interest. Only listening and organising can do that.
Chris Gambian is a Sydney-based campaign and community organising consultant, the former CEO of the Nature Conservation Council and a former federal Labor marginal seat candidate