Amidst colourful lion dances and whatnots, many Chinese community leaders will, once again, fete their white guardian angels at fanciful Chinese New Year banquets, at one venue or another, throughout this wide brown homeland of their heirs. These felicitous communions no doubt lend weight for many Aussie pollies to boast about ours being the most successful multicultural nation on earth.

If only.

Sadly, for the Chinese in Oz, many have yet to feel as if they have finally got to “Somewhere over the rainbow”.

Instead, they often have cause to feel that they will never get out of their probationary status.

The Chinese, some 1.4 million, are bona fide citizens. A good half have come in the last 35 years or so, dominated by settlers from PRC, and almost all have come since 1973.

When the Chinese first came as indentured labourers in 1848, their dream was to make wages and return in glory to Amoy which was beset by chronic famine. Few if any did. And they suffered terribly under the Master and Servants Act. The Chinese next came in huge numbers for the gold rushes, 1850s till 1900s. Among them a good half made it home, some with unimagined riches. But these gold seekers too suffered, unforgettably in the Lambing Flat Attack on 30 June 1861, which ended with 1,200 of them driven far from their diggings and severely beaten up, some with open scalps where their queues had been sliced off from the skull, camping in open paddock in James Roberts’ farm with nothing more than the clothes they had on. It was the dead of winter, and it rained heavily that first night.  This historical event signposted the bumpy road to the White Australia Policy at Federation in 1901. By then, for a good half-century, the Chinese had been treated as vermin, to be got rid of by hook or by crook. Those who could had left.

At Federation, the remaining Chinese, about 30,000, were permitted to stay, by the grace of the Colonial Office in London, as tolerated aliens, at the pleasure of the Commonwealth of Australia.

But they were destined to die out, as under the infamous Dictation Test no more Chinese could come in, and as there were very few women amongst them.

Yet the remaining Chinese survived, doing work that White Aussies did not want. Some even prospered in hand-based agriculture. In time they were rehabilitated as reliable labourers, and accorded acceptance, provided they knew their place.

Then WWII brought about the end of the old European empires. Human rights became fashionable. In 1973 the White Australia Policy was buried, quietly. Yet despite the enactment of multicultural policies and continual carnivals for multiculturalism, the White Australia virus has erupted every time an existential threat could be politically re-birthed to awaken the darkest fear in the nation’s psyche – being swamped by the Yellow Peril.

In 2020 Senator Eric Abetz, at an open Senate Committee hearing on the Issues facing diaspora communities in Australia, posed what he said was “not a difficult question”, entirely outside the terms of that Committee’s undertaking, to the three Chinese Australians appearing before the Committee:

“Can I ask each of the three witnesses to very briefly tell me whether they are willing to unconditionally condemn the Chinese Communist Party dictatorship?”

Osmond Chiu, one of the three “witnesses”, refused to answer the question.

In an opinion piece for the Sydney Morning Herald, this research fellow at the progressive think tank Per Capita said he was born in Australia and would not reply to Senator Abetz “because it was demeaning and I would not legitimise his tactic with an answer”.  Sadly, the Chinese are usually hesitant about standing up to bullying and malicious salvos from the rearguards of White Australia - ideologues, opportunistic politicians, and entrepreneurial academics.

Chiu is exceptional.

And regrettably too many Chinese leaders, young and old, are still focused on mendicancy while putting their best foot forward to maintain their place amongst the white elite. Some seem to hanker for the award of a modern-day equivalent of “King plates” once bestowed upon Indigenous individuals considered useful for the white colonists to bolster their position of avaricious dominance.

In 2020, a “national roundtable” was convened, online, to talk about how we have been picked on in public places and at work for being Chinese, after Prime Minister Morrison’s public bugling for an international inquiry into the origin of Covid19.  But nothing came out of it, other than victimhood stories. A lone voice asking for an appointment with the Prime Minister to demand an apology for the conduct of the unrepentant Eric Abetz was not given air time by the convenor.  This, despite Eric Abetz having been condemned in the media for his McCarthy-like interrogation of the three Chinese Australians.

A second roundtable followed, but the request to do something positive and practical did not even make it to the agenda.

So why do the Chinese feel as though they have been cut off at the knees?

The colonised mindset of the huayi, descendants of generations of Chinese compradors to their White colonial masters in Nanyang, the Southern Oceans, is likely to have played a significant part. Hear no evil, do no evil, speak no evil.  Put your head down, make money, and climb up the social ladder without stepping on anyone’s toes.

As for the PRC settlers, they are a lot more confident about exercising their rights in Australia. Many however have inadequate acculturation to be effective spokespersons for Chinese Australians, having grown up in a confident well-fed post-Deng authoritarian China and not having been here very long. There are a few wonderful exceptions. It has been said that they were active in social media and were instrumental in losing the Liberal Party six seats in the 2022 Federal Elections.

Aye, at last, we have the political muscle to do something iconoclastic, for the homeland of our heirs!

The primary votes for the two old Parties are falling, falling, with Labor inching towards the 30% mark. The Albanese Labor government needs only to lose three seats to herald the predicted hung parliament later this year.  The Chinese could easily grasp this moment: revolt against the entrenched Two-Party Preferred electoral system that has continually employed race in one form or another in their adversarial campaigns, often scapegoating the Chinese.

There are twelve or more seats in which Chinese votes could be pivotal. If the Chinese were to find our voice and campaign to promote those candidates, in these target seats, who would commit to demanding Proportional Representation in support of a minority government, the electoral outcome in 2025 would be even more ground-breaking than the 2022 results.

Proportional Representation would banish the entrenched winner-take-all gladiatorial political culture. A second, or a third party, will always be at the governing high table. And more civilised and stable governance will endure, from election to election. Not only that, it would allow commendable Chinese candidates to get into Parliament without being indentured to the two old mafia-like Parties. Think of the Teals! But more importantly, it would also provide the critical balance of power to reform our War Powers to prevent a future Prime Minister from unilaterally deciding to send our heirs to foreign wars, say one in the South China Sea. That was what Sir Robert Menzies did to thousands of Aussies, drafted in their prime to kill or be killed in the war against the commies, now regarded as nationalists, in Vietnam.  Both the UK and the USA have already abandoned these anachronistic monarchical war powers that we still hang on to – a cancerous symptom of our duopolistic polity.

I have prepared a practical proposal for this iconoclastic, yet entirely feasible project, but hardly any Chinese leader in Oz has taken it up.

So, what will the Snake bring to Chinese Australians in 2025?

In April 2020 Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who sought to win another term through the Covid19 outbreak, insidiously maligned China, thus effectively incited the populace to treat Chinese Aussies as punishable undesirables, escaped any censure from the Labor Opposition, and most of the media.

A few months later Senator Eric Abetz, calculatedly, and implicitly maligned the character of all Chinese Australians. He got away with it. In passing, my submission to that Committee which was critical of how multiculturalism had been commodified for partisan votes, was not deemed appropriate for me to appear before the Committee.

And all the while Chinese Aussies remained incapacitated to find our voice, to stand up, or to demand better from our government.

Aye, no federal Envoy for Sinophobia, notwithstanding the ruinous success of a series of coordinated fire-bombing of Chinese restaurants in Perth in 1988 and 1989!

It seems a safe bet that to be Chinese in Oz is to be docile useful minions - in businesses, in the public service, in hospitals, in schools and universities, in research organisations, in the arts, etc - and not risk the displeasure of the power wielders of White Australia, lest our probationary status be called into question.

Hopefully, the Snake could be invoked to change all that in 2025, an election year like no other.