The rise of anti-Muslim racism in Australia: who benefits?

Abstract

Since the mid 1990s, Australia experienced a cascade of moral panics and racist campaigns against Aborigines, Arabs, refugees and Muslims. The targetting of Muslims in Australia by the Howard government intensified dramatically from mid 2005. The paper outlines this offensive, the circumstances in which it occurred and answers the question ‘who benefits?’, using a framework neglected in even some of the richest contributions to the recent critical literature on racism in Australia.