By Kevin Sullivan
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, December 6, 1997; Page A1

CABRAMATTA, Australia – Danh Ngoc Phung fled her native Vietnam by boat 20 years ago and eventually found her way to this busy suburb south of Sydney, where she opened a pharmacy and raised six children.

Now 65, she is a classic immigrant success story: She owns two pharmacies; two of her children are pharmacists, one is an architect, and three own small businesses. "It's been good for us here," she said.

Far too good for some Australians, who wish she would just go home. Phung and other Asian immigrants are keenly aware that they are in the cross hairs of this country's divisive debate about race relations, immigration and the identity of a mainly European nation at the far end of Asia.

"I'm scared sometimes," Phung said, noting an increase in verbal and physical abuse of Asians in the last year. "But there's nothing I can do about it except remind my children not to go out at night – it's dangerous."

Since World War II, Australia has grown from a land of 7 million people of almost purely British and Irish descent into a multihued melting pot of 18 million people, almost a quarter of them born overseas. The transition generally has been smooth, unmarked by the sporadic violence toward immigrants in parts of Europe and the United States. But with unemployment now hovering around 9 percent, some native-born Australians are convinced that immigrants are taking away their jobs and destroying their traditional way of life.

The government's "White Australia" immigration policy, which officially ended in 1973, required immigrants to be of European descent. Since then, Australia rapidly has become a society of immigrants from 150 nations in Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, the former Soviet states and many Asian nations.

Last year, almost 100,000 newcomers settled here, more than half of them from Asian countries and Pacific islands. Sydney has an ever-growing Chinatown, and outside the United States, Australia has the world's largest community of overseas Vietnamese, about 200,000 people.

Australia's changing makeup has been welcomed by many who see a new richness in the nation's culture, food and lifestyle. But some people feel uneasy watching comfortable old traditions such as cold ale and hot meat pies being replaced by Singha beer from Thailand and Vietnamese pho soup.

It's 10,000 miles from Sydney to London, Australia's former colonial capital, and the distance has never seemed greater. Cultural and personal relations have thinned between Britain and its former colony, as it has vigorously fostered links with its Asian neighbors. About 75 percent of Australia's exports now go to Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, China and other Asian nations.

Sensing its changing place in the world, Australia has chosen a decidedly more Asian tack in its economic and foreign policy. In terms of trade and security, Australia now pays closer attention to its 200 million neighbors in Indonesia than to its 3 million English-speaking cousins in New Zealand.

The changes have affected nearly everyone here, from the rising number of scholarships and slots at public universities won by Asian students, to Chinese spoken on the streets of Sydney, to the ornate Balinese hardwood furniture that fills store windows.

But for some Australians, an increasingly vocal force, the changes seem a direct threat to their security and their children's future.

So when blunt-talking Pauline Hanson, a fish-and-chips shop owner, was elected to the federal Parliament in 1996, she was like lightning striking a parched forest. The ultraconservative Hanson's maiden speech in Parliament was an angry screed against immigration.

"I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians," she said. "They have their own culture and religion, they form ghettos, and they do not assimilate."

When Hanson started her One Nation political party, which claimed that Australia might soon be run by "multiracial lesbians," thousands of people turned out for rallies where she autographed posters that show her wrapped in the Australian flag, standing beneath a banner that proclaims "Pauline the Patriot, and her fellow patriots."

More angry than articulate, Hanson predictably drew support from extreme right-wingers, from biker gangs to groups linked to the Ku Klux Klan. But what startled most observers here was the hidden middle-class rage that Hanson seemed to have tapped. It was a kind of anger comparable in some ways to the paranoia that has fueled the American militia movement. Hanson says Australia is being run by a "bunch of academic snobs" who "wouldn't know what a hard damn day's work is like." She worries that the United Nations is trying to take over the world.

"She gives a lot of unhappy people someone to kick," said Phillip Adams, a prominent columnist and radio talk show host in Sydney.

"They're signing up with Pauline because their kids don't do what they tell them, because they've got weight problems, because their husband or wife doesn't love them anymore," Adams said. "They're there because other people seem smarter or prettier or richer than they are. Because other people win the lottery. ... We're looking at problems that require therapy rather than legislation."

Analysts here say Hanson's popularity has peaked, and polls indicate it is now around 4 percent. Hanson still travels with bodyguards and rarely gives media interviews. There have been threats of violence toward her, and there also has been an increase in abuse of Asians, largely attributed to the anti-foreigner feeling whipped up by Hanson's supporters.

Hanson is still prominent in the public debate here, as she has been for more than a year. Ask any Australian about any topic, and the conversation seems to turn inevitably to Hanson, race relations and immigration questions.

Many Australians are clearly embarrassed. They fear she has set back the race debate by 40 years, to the days when another Australian legislator discussing Asian immigration uttered the notorious observation, "Two Wongs don't make a white."

Many here say Prime Minister John Howard is manipulating the immigration debate for political gain. It took Howard eight months to disavow Hanson's original speech in Parliament. Even then it was carefully qualified criticism, intended apparently not to offend Hanson's supporters. "It would be a serious mistake," Howard said, "to attack those who are attracted to her as bigoted, narrow-minded and racist. A few no doubt are. Most, however, are not."

Many political analysts fear Howard may further divide the nation along racial lines by not fully denouncing Hanson's positions on the Aborigines, who inhabited Australia before white settlers arrived. She said "red-blooded Australians" were "fed up to the back teeth" with social welfare programs designed to correct two centuries of discrimination against the Aborigines.

Australia's highest courts have issued rulings in recent years giving Aborigines new land rights. Howard's government has proposed legislation to diminish the effect of those decisions. Parliament has been bitterly debating the issue all week, and it appears headed for an angry confrontation in the coming days. Some here worry that the issue could be divisive enough to cause Howard to dissolve Parliament and call early elections.

"We fear we'll have a federal election based on race, which will tear this country apart," said Adams, the columnist.

Polls here show that support for immigration is at an all-time low, mainly because people here believe that it costs jobs. Howard has responded to that sentiment, cutting next year's immigration quota by 8 percent, or a total of 20 percent since he took office in 1996, claiming that "there is a link between high unemployment and high immigration."

Most economic analysts disagree. They say many immigrants today tend to be creative entrepreneurs who start businesses and create jobs in places like Cabramatta. Crime rates and problems with drugs and gangs are more acute in this suburb than in most of Australia, but the Vietnamese community also produces some of Australia's top students, and first-generation immigrants who get their start here move out to more affluent areas.

The center of Cabramatta has the feel of Adams-Morgan, lively and filled with small shops and restaurants. A pagoda-style gate leading to a shopping street known as Freedom Plaza greets visitors in English and at least six Asian languages.

Clare Khanh Dinhvu, who came to Australia two decades ago as a refugee from Vietnam and is now an optometrist with her own shop in Cabramatta, says she thinks Australia is "more racist now than it was 20 years ago."

"Right now we're the scapegoat, it's our turn," she said. "Twenty years down the road, it will be somebody else's turn."