Uncertain lives: culture, race and neoliberalism in Australia

Stratton’s latest collection Uncertain Lives: Culture, Race and Neoliberalism in Australia brings together essays written over a 5-year period between 2006 and 2011. Each essay is concerned with changes to immigration policy (‘legal’ and ‘illegal’), multiculturalism and the political and social landscape during the Howard-led Liberal-Coalition government through to the Rudd and more recently Gillard-led Labor governments. This book contributes to a critical dialogue on race, neoliberalism and Australian border ‘management’ which has been gaining momentum in academic circles since the early 1990s. It is both a useful teaching resource and a call for policy makers to take account of the implications of their actions. While the critique is strong, I would have liked to see Stratton develop a position which counters these institutional, structural and everyday forms of racism. Is an ethics and politics of difference the answer? What does an ‘ethics’ of the border look like? How do we disentangle neoliberalism? Stratton essentially argues that forms of ‘everyday racism’ operate in Australia, infiltrating everything from the news and popular culture to the regulation of the border and production of policy and law. The phrase ‘everyday racism’ is borrowed from Philomena Essed who, as Stratton notes, traces the ways in which racism is more than the ideological and institutional but also the ‘routine’ action and thought of individuals and societies (Essed in Stratton 2011, 34). Importantly, this book contextualizes these latest legal, social and cultural issues in a much longer history, specifically the setting of Australian race relations since Federation. Stratton argues that fundamentally, despite the changes in government policy and legislative structures: