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Dear Runner,

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Thanks for the link but, unfortunately, it didn’t work.

However, I managed to find Miranda Devine’s Daily Telegraph article “Reverse racism is now acceptable in Australia” from the address in your link.

I also looked-up the Alexandria Park Community Centre on its web site. It looks nice and the idea of a multicultural playground and garden is great. But the centre’s “facilitator”, aka manager, Jo Fletcher, seems a bit stupid, or perhaps psycho-rigid in his interpretation of the term “multicultural”. Apparently, he thought it meant “all world cultures other than Australian”.

As he doesn’t seem to have had any problem welcoming families from around the wold in his “multicultural” community centre, he doesn’t appear to be the least bit racist. Also, there is nothing to indicate that he is not an Australian of European extraction, himself.

If he had been Aboriginal, African, Chinese or anything other than Caucasian, you can bet your boots that Miranda Devine, who is a notoriously controversial, conservative, right wing, social and political journalist, would have made it quite clear in her article.

Presenting as racist the act of a white Australian (the centre's “facilitator”, Jo Fletcher) in refusing access to the centre to two other white Australians (a mother and her child) on the basis that the centre is exclusively “multicultural”, is just as stupid as the act itself. His refusal has nothing to do with “reverse racism”, as Miranda would have us believe.

At least she had the honesty to indicate that, alerted to the problem, the “Education Minister, Rob Stokes, and his department, to their credit, instructed Fletcher to allow all families to attend the playgroup”.
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That said, Runner, 18C applies to everybody in Australia, not only Australians and not only to “whites”. Nobody has a monopoly on racism. Some of the worst acts of racism that I, personally, have witnessed occurred in Africa, among people of different ethnic origins.

I see no reason to privilege any particular community as more (or less) racist than any other, whatever its colour, ethnic origin, religion or nationality.

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