I love my hairdresser. I love her not just because my head is in her hands but because she’s a compassionate, funny lady who treats members of her staff as family – and that’s only partly because some of them are. She is also a loving wife and mum who cares deeply not only about her own kin, but her community.
Whenever there’s a cause to be supported she’s there: flyers in the window and collection tin on the counter; first table booked for the fund-raising ball. It might be a child with a chronic disability who needs an expensive piece of equipment, a dying single mum, a teenager with a rare disorder that can be treated only by one very special specialist in the US.
Warm-hearted is this woman’s middle name, and yet I’m afraid she’s the start of something very ugly.
People wonder where hate begins … it begins with fear-mongering: a viral bullet moulded by pragmatism and political expediency shot into a crowd with utmost disregard.
My hairdresser, who would cheerfully admit she wouldn’t know the difference between a dirndl and a drachma, has been listening to the news with her family and is now concerned about ISIS and burqas. “Ruby [her nine-year-old daughter] asked me if they [Muslims] were going to kill us,” she said as she rubbed shampoo into my hair a little vigorously. “I mean, it seems unlikely but …”
It doesn’t help that Public Transport Victoria has removed the rubbish bins at city and major country stations in response to the “heightened terror alert”.
Fear is creeping across the countryside like a cancer. A colleague, Melissa Cunningham, who works for The Courier in Ballarat, reported how a woman crossing the street was yelled at by a ute driver spewing profanities and racist slurs and demanding she “go home”. The woman was mystified until she realised she’d been mistaken for a Muslim because she’d wrapped a scarf over her head during a sudden downpour.
Then last week, another colleague, Virginia Millen, reported how a Muslim woman’s arm was broken after she was pushed to the road in a sickening, unprovoked racist attack.
Our federal government seems to be encouraging people to turn against their neighbours with increasingly hysterical rhetoric. But Tony Abbott buddying up to the big boys as some kind of anti-terrorist hall monitor is a distraction. It’s a distraction from people dying in detention centres, from a budget that punishes the poorest, from the contradictions between what this government claims to stand for and what it does.
We have a government that doesn’t hesitate to spend $500 million a year to send Super Hornets to drop bombs on Iraq, but awards the contract to supply boots for our troops to an Indonesian company, ahead of the Australian firm that has kitted them out since World War II, to save a few dollars.
Noisily repatriating bodies from the wreck of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 and chest-thumping in the direction of Russian president Vladimir Putin might win approval at home, but won’t stop the world from noticing Australia’s refusal to help fight ebola or how we push boatloads of refugees back into poorer countries’ waters.
Why have we become so small and mean?
Follow Sarah on Twitter @1SarahHarris
Virginia Trioli will return next week with Mouthing Off
