The Cronulla Riots and the Myth of Rampant Racism

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Join us in Sydney on Thursday, 12 November, for the untold stories of the Cronulla riots with Carl Scully and Mark Goodwin, the key figures tasked with restoring order during the chaos of December 2005.

In the eyes of much of the world, Australians are a most diverse, tolerant and egalitarian people. But if you read some local writers in the week following the Cronulla riots in December 2005, you would have been forgiven for thinking that we are, as one newspaper columnist put it at the time, “a backwater, a racist and inward-looking country.” Academics and pundits blamed the riots on “John Howard dog-whistling on immigration” and “Bob Carr singling out the ethnicity of rapists.”

Was all this really true? Did the Cronulla riots reveal a racist underbelly of Australia? Was the unrest fuelled by Caucasian xenophobia? What is it to be “Australian” or “un-Australian”? What is Islamophobia? In the two decades since the tribal tensions on the beach, how do race relations look today?

In their new book The Cronulla Riots: The Inside Story (Connor Court), Carl Scully and Mark Goodwin provide a more nuanced account of the events, examining the complex dynamics that led to the unrest and the law enforcement efforts that ultimately quelled it.

Carl Scully was NSW Police Minister during the Cronulla riots.

Mark Goodwin was Assistant Commissioner of Police during the Cronulla riots.

Tom Switzer is executive director of the Centre for Independent Studies. During the Cronulla riots, he was opinion editor and editorial writer at The Australian newspaper.