At present there is a palpable anti-Australianism, particularly around Cape Town.
This is a convergence of the ball-tampering scandal and Peter Dutton’s dog-whistling.
South African citizens unfortunately believe what Dutton says represents what Australians think.
It is a headache for Foreign Minister Julie Bishop and worse for Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull (he cannot afford to publicly rebuke Dutton for dog-whistling because Dutton is the most senior conservative still in his camp).
Dutton’s statement about white South African farmers deserving special refuge in a “civilised country like Australia” has provoked ill-informed comment in Australia.
Tony Abbott has even made wildly inaccurate claims that “something like 400 white farmers have been brutally murdered over the last 12 months”.
The most recent official South African Police statistics show 74 people were murdered on farmlands in the year to March 2017. This includes all farmers, workers, families and visitors.
It does not divide victims by race or by motive. There is no distinction between domestic violence, neighbourhood disputes or politically motivated assassination.
It is ironic that it has just come to light that Dutton’s own department knocked back a white farmer’s 2015 asylum application, arguing there was little evidence of racially motivated crime against white farmers.
Even on appeal the tribunal ruled “the motive of the perpetrators of crime are more likely to be based on economic need rather than race”.
These murders have occurred in the context of a violent society. Violence stemming from 50 years of apartheid-created inequality has been difficult to address.
And years of inadequate action by former president Jacob Zuma didn’t help.
If Australia was serious about offering a haven to victims of violence, it should take young black males from the townships where deaths per population are 200 to 300 per 100000.
Land ownership is crucial to the debate in South Africa. White commercial farmers control 73% of the arable land yet whites make up only 8.9% of the population.
Previously the government has had a “willing seller, willing buyer” policy, but ownership figures have hardly budged from 85% ownership at the end of apartheid.
There is little evidence that white farmers are queueing up for Australian visas.
In frustration and under pressure from impoverished rural workers, the South African Parliament eventually passed legislation which encompassed the possibility of land expropriation.
However, President Cyril Ramaphosa reassured the citizens “there will be no smash and grab of land in our country”.
There is a belief in Australia
that farm invasions and murders are taking place as part of
government policy.
South Africa is not Zimbabwe, where an ideologically driven and corrupt Robert Mugabe encouraged violent home invasions.
South Africa is a functioning liberal democracy with respect for the rule of law.
Not only will the expropriation legislation have to be agreed to by the provinces but it will have to be tested in the courts upholding the constitution.
Dutton’s Queensland seat of Dickson is a marginal 1.5%, with a higher-than-average population of white South African residents around Albany Creek.
A couple of thousand Dickson voters with relatives to bring out is a huge incentive for media-magnet rhetoric.
Dutton’s two Western Australian supporters, MPs Andrew Hastie and Ian Goodenough, have similar electorate issues.
Perth is home to large white South African and “Rhodesian” communities. A right-wing Australian Liberty Alliance protest outside Bishop’s office delivered a petition for 80% of humanitarian visas to go to white farmers.
Bishop, the most senior coalition parliamentarian in Western Australia, saying sensible things
about non-discriminatory immigration is not helpful to this right-wing narrative.
“White farmers” seems to be our issue, not South Africa’s.
* Burgmann is a former leader of the Anti-Apartheid Movement and a former labour president of the NSW Legislative Council. She has worked on the ‘Australians Against Apartheid’ exhibition, which will open in Cape Town in September after showings in Sydney, Canberra and Joburg.