The Guardian 15 March, 2006
What sparked the Cronulla riots?
Tom Pearson
The Daily Telegraph headline in its March 9 issue, "Who are these thugs?" was appropriate. Anyone who saw the shaky video footage, shot from a balcony across the road, of people at a Cronulla service station carrying baseball bats and throwing objects at cars during the riots last year, will wonder how they could possibly be identified from that footage. Yet NSW Police Minister Carl Scully claimed that "Middle Eastern Australians" are harbouring "grubs" who "should be in jail".
Keysar Trad from the Islamic Friendship Association of Australia said in response, "The community leaders don’t generally mix with the criminal element and we don’t recognise these people."
In fact Scully was demonising the whole Middle Eastern community: and by extension, the whole of the white, Anglo-Saxon community must have known the Caucasians whose faces were splashed on the front pages of newspapers last week.
Scully’s accusations derive more from Liberal leader Peter Debnam’s rant that Labor and the police are "soft" on criminals of Middle Eastern background. On the other hand, the photo portraits of the Cronulla surf crowd — taken by journalists at close range during clashes with police — were sharp and easy to identify.
Furthermore, the officer in charge of Strike Force Enoggera, formed to deal with and follow up those involved in the riots last December, said that until the publication last week of the photo portraits, an equal amount of youths of Middle Eastern appearance and Caucasian appearance had been arrested.
While the riots were certainly stirred up by racists, it is possible that there was another cause that has not been raised by politicians, police or the media: word is out that the riot was sparked originally by another issue — drugs.
Here is the scenario: drug dealers of Middle Eastern background cross the border into surfer territory and start cutting deals. Can’t have that — it’s taking away customers. So the rival gangs, white supremacists included in their ranks, go on the attack to try and drive their drug rivals out of their area. The white supremacists take advantage of the situation and fuel the fires of racism, serving both their ideological agenda and protecting their turf — neo-Nazi groups are after all basically criminal gangs.
Enter the bikie gangs, who are also protecting their territory. Their beach-side hand shake celebration with the locals was more than a gesture of community solidarity.
Of course, the word out on the street might be wrongly informed. Or perhaps Debnam is onto something — maybe there is a connection between certain criminal elements and certain elements in the Labor Party. Would that surprise anyone?
And maybe for a change John Howard was in part actually telling the truth when he stated that the riots weren’t about racism, although no doubt that was always a part of it.