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Aussie car flags spark racism debate

Cars that don the Australian flag for Australia Day celebrations belong to "racist" drivers, says new research from UWA

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29 Jan 2012

Cars that don the Australian flag for Australia Day celebrations belong to "racist" drivers, says new research from UWA.

Professor Farida Fozda, sociologist and anthropologist at the University of Western Australia - alongside a team of assistants surveyed 513 at Perth's Australia Day fireworks last year, to see if there was a link between the flags and racist attitudes.

Of the 102 people surveyed who had flags on their cars, 43 per cent agreed with the statement that the now-abandoned "White Australia Policy" had "saved Australia from many problems experienced by other countries".

Only 25 per cent of the people who didn't fly the Australian flag on their car, agreed with the statement.

56 per cent of people with car flags feared for Australian culture and believed that the country's most important values were in danger, compared with 34 per cent of non-flag flyers.

Thirty-five per cent of flag flyers felt that people had to be born in Australia to be truly Australian, compared with 22 per cent of non-flag flyers.

Over 90 per cent of the drivers of cars with Australian flags said that people who move to Australia should adopt Australian values, with 55 per cent of them believing that all migrants should leave their old ways and culture behind.

"What I found interesting is that many people didn't really have much to say about why they chose to fly car flags or not," Professor Fozdar said.

"Many felt strongly patriotic about it - and for some, this was quite a racist or exclusionary type of patriotism - but it wasn't a particularly conscious thing for many."

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