A
suburb bearing the scars of everyday crime is fertile ground for the politics of protest. Paul Sheehan writes.
May 26, 2001 Sydney Morning Herald
To see why One Nation
continues to attract a following in Sydney despite the endless blow-ups surrounding Pauline Hanson, one only needs to walk through Sefton shopping centre.
What's left of it.
Store after store sits shuttered. One
block of shops is completely closed except for a locksmith, which does a healthy trade.
"We're going to sell," said Christy, a Chinese immigrant whose takeaway was robbed by three armed women on Thursday
morning last week. She noted the women, armed with knives, were Pacific Islanders. Hers is among many cases of perceived ethnic-based crime in the suburb.
Bob Vinnicombe, the likely One Nation candidate for the
Federal seat of Bankstown - Paul Keating's old seat - in this year's election, lives one block from the Sefton shops. He has been burgled twice and believes in "zero tolerance" for drugs, and mandatory
sentencing for repeat offenders.
The Sefton shopping centre felt the glare of publicity last month when the local newsagent, Les Clark, was robbed for the 19th time on April 23 and his sister was shot. Mr Clark
had been prevented from moving to a safer site by government bureaucracy and Bankstown Council. The sense that both Labor and the
Liberals are indifferent to the problems of the western Sydney melting pot, and downplay ethnic crime, has kept Ms Hanson popular in parts of the area, despite her problems.
She attracted a crowd of 550 people to a
$25-a-head supper at Club Marconi last week. "When we put an ad in [the Italian-language newspaper] La Fiama, advertising the Marconi event, we were inundated with calls," said Mr Vinnicombe. He placed ads in
other non-English newspapers and the event attracted a mostly European immigrant crowd.
Ms Hanson used the night to extol the achievement of a multiracial society while condemning the ideology of multiculturalism, an
appeal that has crossed ethnic boundaries in places where crime is high.
"My last hold-up was Pacific Islanders - before that it was Lebanese," said Bob Anderson, whose bottle shop next to Sefton station had
its metal door battered by a sledgehammer two weeks ago. He has had four armed robberies in two years, plus attempted break-ins. "Criminals don't worry about getting caught because nothing happens," he said.
"After one robbery I gave the police a description of the car and the occupants, and the three letters of the numberplate,
and they didn't even write it down because it was only an attempted robbery.
"I think we should be allowed to carry arms. People say I'm mad to stay but I don't see why criminals should control the streets."
Sefton itself is not a derelict place, but a suburb of well-kept homes. And although the bleak Sefton shopping centre looks like a prison, it has plenty of economic activity behind some of the shuttered storefronts,
where garment sweatshops operate.
"The workshops here go night and day," said Natalia Turner, proprietor of the Bird Shop, which offers a rich array of parrots, finches and budgies in a shopping centre that
offers not much else (funeral parlour, lawnmower shop, fruit and veg, chemist). "You pay $300 for a Country Road jacket and
it's probably been made in a place like Sefton."
