Prime Minister John Howard has denied racism is characteristic of Australian society as he prepares for talks in Asia where the Sydney race riots are front-page news.
Mr Howard flies into Kuala Lumpur today for the inaugural East Asia Summit with the race riots front-page news in Malaysian newspapers.
The Prime Minister yesterday said mob violence was "always sickening".
"Attacking people on the basis of their race, their appearance, their ethnicity, is totally unacceptable and should be repudiated by all Australians regardless of their own background and their politics," he said.
"I believe yesterday's behaviour was completely unacceptable but I'm not going to put a general tag of racism on the Australian community. I think it's a term that's flung around carelessly and I'm simply not going to do it."
Mr Howard also dismissed any suggestion that his Government's warning about homegrown terrorists had fuelled the rampage.
Malaysian TV networks also aired graphic footage of Sunday's melee as the country hosted the annual ASEAN leaders summit yesterday and prepared for tomorrow's 16-nation gathering, which includes India, Australia and New Zealand.
Kuala Lumpur's leading English-language newspaper, the New Straits Times, featured the riots with the caption "Race riot Down Under", while Malay-language newspapers gave the story similar coverage.
The Philippines's media also followed suit. "Racial riot breaks out on Aussie beach", reported The Manila Times.
In Hong Kong, The Standard newspaper reported "Race riot flares in Sydney".
The story even featured in papers as far afield as London, where The Times carried the headline "Battle on beach as mob vow to defend 'Aussie way of life"'.
The Middle East-based al-Jazeera TV network showed footage of the mayhem and ran a story on its website headlined "Race riots spread in Sydney", with a picture captioned "Drunken thugs on the rampage".
The startling images of New South Wales police wielding batons at Cronulla went to air as thousands of officials and journalists converged on Kuala Lumpur for the annual ASEAN summit meetings and tomorrow's East Asia leaders meeting.
They also came a day after Singapore's Sunday Times ran a highly critical two-page probe into Australia's drug menace and light drug laws, with the headline "Haven for druggies and taxpayers pay for it".
The article in the government-controlled media comes just weeks after Australian media lambasted Singapore for its hardline stance on Melbourne man Van Nguyen, who was hanged for drug-trafficking earlier this month.
National leaders moved quickly to denounce the ugly spectacle at Cronulla on Sunday that has shocked most Australians, with New South Wales Premier Morris Iemma declaring them "the ugly face of racism".
"We'll give the message that that disgraceful cowardly behaviour will not be tolerated, and we're calling together the community leaders this afternoon to work to lower the temperature to get the communities together," he said yesterday.
Greens senator Bob Brown blamed Mr Howard for failing to take a tough stand on racism, saying his initial failure to confront Pauline Hanson and his mismanagement of immigration issues had "mired the issue of racism in Australia".
"Mr Howard is very slow to call a racist spade a racist spade ... he has taken Australia backwards from the last half-century which celebrated multiculturalism in our nation," Senator Brown said.
Mr Beazley said he had the same message for all Australians.
"It doesn't matter if you are Lebanese, or you are an Australian of an Anglo-Celtic background, or you are an Australian of Italian background. Core values which forge the cement of our society are respect for each other and respect for the rule of law," the Opposition Leader said.
Rejecting suggestions of nationwide inherent racism, Mr Beazley said that multiculturalism was "alive and well" in Australia.
Australian Democrats multicultural affairs spokesman Andrew Bartlett condemned the violence as "mindless racism cloaked as a distorted form of nationalism".
Federal liberal backbencher Bruce Baird, whose electorate of Cook takes in Cronulla, believed the tensions that exploded on Sunday had been building for at least six years.
"Cronulla is the recreation area for Sydney's southwest and we have always had a lot of Lebanese and other western suburbs residents coming in on weekends to what is a predominately an Anglo area," Mr Baird said.
"Since September 11 and the Bali bombings -- where a lot of people from down our way were killed -- and those high-profile rape cases, the tensions have been worse. The flashpoint for Sunday morning's riot was alongside the memorial on the beach to the local victims of the Bali bombing."
Victorian Premier Steve Bracks, who is of Lebanese descent, said he would do everything he could to ensure the riots were not replicated in his state.
"I don't think it matters what your background is. To see those sort of events is not what we understand Australia is all about," he said.
Islamic Council of Victoria spokesman Waleed Aly said there was less risk of Melbourne experiencing similar race-based violence, as it lacked segregated racial enclaves.
"My impression is Melbourne is a much lower-temperature city than Sydney -- and I don't obviously just mean that in weather terms," he told ABC radio. "In Sydney, it tends to be one of those places where there has always been a bit of tension between communities."
>Prime Minister John Howard has denied racism is characteristic of Australian society
lol - what about all those abbo jokes then?
>"Drunken thugs on the rampage"
Yeah. I blame the boOZe.
Oh, and it's Bush's fault, too. :)
http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/SYD272430.htm
""There is an increasing discourse of us versus them in Australian society which has been partly unleashed by the war against terror," said Melbourne University's language professor Michael Clyne, an advocate of multi-culturalism.
"It is very difficult to define a war against terror, so it means anyone can paint their own enemies.""
I don't know about Australia, but the basic idea behind the statement is not entirely false. With increased paranoia comes increased distrust in those different than you. There was, and in some areas, still is, increased racial and religious tension because of the events on 9-11, and the subsequent media flurry. The "War On Terror" is a part of it, but only a part.
Bush would certainly not be the first person to foster such a paranoia, deliberately or otherwise, and he certainly won't be the last. Besides, if Bush jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, should everyone else?
Man, I live in a suburb full of Lebanese (in Brisbane, not Sydney). Am I worried about all that ruckus south of the border? Hmm, no. See up here, we have your average middle-easten juvenile deliquints, but not the kind that go and bash white people at beaches, or cause the kind of crap that CNN would want to report.
Sydney appears to be really feelin' the heat this summer. I am glad though that elders in the ethnic communities have said that they wont tollerate this shit.
> if Bush jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, should everyone else?
No I think most people would be chasing him with falling bricks and bullets.