THE CRONULLA RIOTS – THE INSIDE STORY – CARL SCULLY

In The Cronulla Riots – The Untold Story, Mark Goodwin and Craig Scully, retired NSW Police Assistant Commissioner and former NSW Police Minister respectively, explore what really happened as opposed to the press and media versions of the events.  As the key figures tasked with restoring order during the chaos, they have revealed that much of the media reporting was “fake news”. They have challenge the popular media and academic driven narrative, which has shaped public opinion over the years, that these events were solely driven by Caucasian xenophobia. On Monday 4 November, Carl Scully and Mark Goodwin addressed The Sydney Institute to put their case

 THE CRONULLA RIOTS – THE INSIDE STORY

 CARL SCULLY

Thank you to Gerard and Anne Henderson for the opportunity to address you on our new book.

It is now nearly 20 years since the Cronulla Riots and time in our view, to reflect on what happened all those years ago, and why. Much has been written on the matter, but very little if any, has been from the perspectives of the two individuals tasked with quelling dissent and restoring peace to the streets, suburbs and beaches of Sydney, the Minister for Police and the Police Commander.

My co-author of this book, Mark Goodwin, has dealt with the riot and revenge attacks, the police response, and the unwarranted inquiry into police performance.

I will deal with the second half of the book which challenges the description of it being a Cronulla race riot and then seeks to explain the real reasons for the event occurring. We challenge the three notions which this constantly asserts.

Was it just Cronulla?

In late 2005 there was another riot in France which became known as the Paris Riots of 2005. This one began just two weeks before the events at Cronulla, in a Paris suburb called Clichy-sous-Bois and spread quickly across Paris. They are correctly known not as the Clichy-sous-Bois riots of 2005, but the Paris riots. Likewise, the events in Sydney in late 2005 also commenced at a particular point at North Cronulla Beach and Cronulla Railway Station.

However, the revenge attacks which quickly followed the protest day at Cronulla, emanated and unfolded across Sydney from Lakemba, Punchbowl, Arncliffe, Maroubra, Castle Hill, Brighton-le-Sands, Miranda, Woolooware and Cronulla. But few know about that, and many assume incorrectly that it all began and ended in the Sutherland Shire. So, whilst being historically inaccurate, the locational name of “Cronulla” has stuck.

Was it a riot?

We found that relative to some of the almost insurrection levels of violent protests in the last several years in Europe, Africa and the USA, what happened at Cronulla, was so much milder than all those comparator conflicts, that the event certainly on the first day, struggles to satisfy any reasonable notion of what is required to warrant the term “riot”: mass protest, significant violence and often many deaths, huge property damage, mass arrest numbers and great difficulty in restoring order.[1]

What could have transpired if police had not acted quickly on intelligence, taken guns and weapons off the streets, confiscated vehicles and mobile phones, detained potential offenders and locked down whole swathes of Sydney, might have led to events closer to a real riot, but it didn’t, due to mostly unknown and unrecognised great police work across Sydney.

As is often typically the case in any protest, journalists, videographers, and editors, at the first image of a noisy crowd with a bottle being thrown, or a police car being shaken, or a few bloody noses from a punch up, quickly pen the word “riot” to what has unfolded. The description usually sticks, despite the lack of any attempt or interest in considering how apt the term may be. At that point, little can change the view that a riot has occurred.

There were injuries and a few significant assaults, limited property damage and assailants on both sides limited to a few hundred. It could have been a lot worse, yes, but it wasn’t. On relative terms to riots elsewhere, we could call this the “Sydney Breaches of the Peace”. But the term “Cronulla Riots” endures.

Was it racist?

This is the question which in our view has never been adequately addressed by thinkers, scholars and commentators. We had assumed upon enquiry that we would find something much more evaluative than basically “we saw it on TV so what we say must be right”. Almost none of the scholarship on this matter included primary participant interview research and is mostly limited to academic opining about how awful were the Cronulla locals. We expected better, but possibly unsurprising given the one-sided available material.

It’s a tough call to challenge what everyone sees when they Google “The Cronulla Riots”. There are no images or video of the far more violent revenge attacks across Sydney. Just what happened on one day of a conflict which endure for weeks. The spliced and editorially joined images are real and rightly appear shocking to anyone who views them even now, but whilst real, do they present the enduring truth for many: That we are Caucasian dominated racist Australia with an enclave of White Supremacists living in the Southern suburbs of Sydney. This is the “fake news” which many academics and social commentators project and argue is proven by the record. But is it? We argue it is not, and in our book we have sought to call this false claim out and correct the record.

We admit that this is a tough task, and a challenging one for many to engage in, as the so called proof from photographic and videographic evidence of this being a racist event initiated and enacted out by Muslim Arab hating Christian white people, is so pervasive and so convincing, as to have made it an almost impossible task to challenge and present a far more accurate truth in the face of the long accepted narrative. We have tried hard to push the tide back.

Truth as we know, is contextual and must be seen in the light of the wider circumstances in which it is asserted, and must depend upon the robustness and stability of the facts and evidence upon which it sits. In other words: how provable is the claim which the alleged truth asserts?

The photo on the front cover of our book was literally the only one we could find which reflected what happened for almost all the day; police and onlookers looking at everybody looking at each other. Every other photo or video presents a marauding pack of violent intolerant racists.

Were racist things said and done? Yes. That is undeniable. The thousands of texts sent by both sides to their tribe would satisfy any definition of racist or bigoted language. Likewise, so would the taunts, tattoos and chants on the day, as would the behaviour of perhaps no more than 200 on the first day seeking and trying to harm anyone looking Middle Eastern. And likewise, the revenge attackers seeking and wishing to harm people who didn’t look like them.

But that is where inquiry stops from journalists, editors, social commentators and academics; they see and hear what are clearly racist things and quickly conclude it was awful racist event with Australia displaying its worst. However, we sought to peel the layers a little deeper on this, with two key approaches.

Challenging the claim that only the Caucasians were racist

We reject this notion as simply unsustainable, and in our view, provides a clear example of the belief of some: that only white people can be racist.

It simply didn’t make sense to us that only the excesses on the initial day at Cronulla were labelled and permanently stigmatised as racist when, upon closer scrutiny, the verbal texts of young Arabic men, and the subsequent revenge attacks were no less racist or bigoted than the Caucasians ones, but far more violent, with much greater  property damage, far wider spread and way more fear inducing of a city, than anything like what happened at North Cronulla.

And that is not only what actually occurred in those revenge attacks which didn’t just last for a few hours on one day, but went on for days and weeks. Once the threats of significant violence revealed in police intelligence is added in to the analysis of what could have happened but was stopped in its tracks, then the claim of otherwise well informed scholars, commentators, community leaders, and policy makers, of one sided racism by whites only, is left as simply unsustainable.

The claim of one-sided racism, when pitted against the actual events of this time, is a racist one in itself. It really does reveal what ought to be regarded as an offensive belief; that only Caucasians can be racist, and excuses the far more abhorrent behaviour of young Muslim men which followed the events at Cronulla.

We argue that racist things were said and done by both tribes throughout this sorry saga in our city’s history. To argue to the contrary, as many scholars and thinkers will continue to do, defies the reality of what actually happened, but they can continue to claim: “We watched it on TV and saw the pictures in the newspaper”, but without having been there or conducted primary research as we did.

As the conflict came and went, how could it be explained as just racist?

If the taunts, the messaging, the violence and property damage by each side upon the other was not just racist and bigoted in appearance, but driven inspired and motivated by a deep seated White and Arabic notion of religious and racial supremacy, then why and how could the conflict have come and gone never to return?

We make a significant case for another explanation of this errant and troubling behaviour of nearly 20 years ago: that whilst much of what was said and done certainly satisfy any definition of racism, we argue the critical factor here is, that these acts were badged and symbolised in an offensive way, not to racialise for the sake of it, but to corrale and encourage tribal members to respond to the threat of the other. This is a nuanced yet important finding on what inspired and motivated such inter community offensive conduct: That each felt threatened by the other for a short period, which ignited into a defence of one against the other. It was not, in our view, an expression of suppressed hatred of the other.

This then leads to our main finding on the riot and revenge attacks: it was differenceism not racism which motivated the conflict at Cronulla and beyond. The many who protested and the few hundred who took it to a violent conclusion were not inspired by a racial or bigoted hatred or disregard of the other, but by a response to a perceived threat which presented something threateningly different to their world.

It was a perceived and actual threat to each tribe’s sense and comfort of how things should be, how the beach space should be used and how people ought to behave in public which simmered for years, ignited the fuse with the assault on the lifeguard which then with media beat up and moral panic, led to what for Sydney has been its worst public disturbance in history. Cultural clashes on the beach which we call ‘the towel versus the soccer ball’, simmering incivility and rudeness, and the clash with the lifeguards ignited a conflict far more because of differenceism, not racism.

Locals and visitors, in our claim, felt their notions of how things ought to be done were threatened by a different interpretation from what was then seen as the “other”. When that happens the universal sameness of “us” quickly gets divided into “us” and “them”, requiring each to protect itself.

This invites an important question:

What is differenceism?

We draw on the work of political psychologist Karen Stenner, who in mid-2005, just a few months before the Cronulla Riots, released a seminal work which analysed this

very kind of conflict amongst human groups, and which presented a deeper explanation for us than anything locally provided by our own scholars.

Stenner argued after extensive field research in the USA that:

… much intolerance of different races, beliefs, and behaviours is driven primarily…not by animosity toward any specific target…but rather by a fundamental and overwhelming desire to establish and defend some collective sense of oneness and sameness.[2]

In other words, most people want to seek and attain amongst their “neighbours” and community, a sense that we’re the same, with a common purpose, of a communal oneness, rather than wanting to celebrate the wonders of diversity and difference. This questions the way in which our multicultural society ought to be acknowledged rather than paraded, as we preferably seek and promote what we have in common rather than what makes us different.

Stenner concluded that:

…a good deal of what we call racial intolerance is not even primarily about race, let alone blacks…and their purported shortcomings…my contention is that much of what we think of racism, likewise political and moral intolerance, is more helpfully understood as “differenceism”.[3]

A central claim emanating from her work is that most people are not intolerant per se but intolerant to difference. This does not mean people will never utter or do racist, misogynistic, political or morally deviant things, just that they’re unlikely to do so until their sense of comfort and sameness is threatened.

The challenge of western suburbs youth to assert how, when and where it wants to use Cronulla Beach has endured for decades and when it was Caucasian Westies versus Caucasian Surfers, no-one battered an eye lid, but once it became a Skips versus Lebs scenario, then the racial tarring brush came out in full force.

We believe we have provided a good theoretical underpinning of both why the conflict, whilst superficially racist was not inspired by racism, and why as such it came and went never to return.

Testing our approach

To ensure the credibility of our findings we conducted twelve in depth interviews with key stakeholders at the time; MPs, police officers and Lebanese community leaders. We expected to have our views contested and we were more than surprised to find that in every interview they were confirmed. None, including four Muslim interviewees believed it was a racial conflict.

All four Muslim interviewees spoke fondly of partly growing up on Cronulla beach as they visited the area every Sunday with families and friends, over years and even decades. None ever experienced any racist interaction at all.

I believe Mecca Laalaa, the young lady who brought the Burkini to the Muslim world, best sums it up. When asked whether or not Caucasian and Lebanese men had been driven by racism, she replied:” No. There’s always an underlying issue, whether it’s an anger whether its feeling unsatisfied in your life. I wouldn’t say racism forefront of somebody’s life”.[4] And perhaps the last word on this is best given to Christian Lebanese Stephen Stanton: “It may not have been racially inspired but it was racially hijacked…to put a badge on it”.[5]

Endnotes

[1] See A. Scacco, Anatomy of a Riot Participation in Ethnic Violence in Nigeria, WZB Berlin Social Science Centre, April 2021.

[2] K. Stenner, The Authoritarian Dynamic, Cambridge University Press, 2005, at p. 276.

[3] K. Stenner at p. 276.

[4] M. Laalaa, Transcript of interview, December 14, 2020

[5] S. Stanton, Transcript of Interview, February 16, 2021.