Really? When my sister was living in Oz, she said that the attitude of a lot of australians towards ‘abos’ was shocking, and much more socially acceptable than being racist in Britain is.
Mind you, in Britain, ranting against working-class ‘chavs’ is considered almost universally acceptable, which makes sense since snobbery and classism is the social sin that defines us more than racism ever has...
My experience living in both the UK and Australia, is that racism is no more of a problem in Australia than it is in the UK, but it’s not a particularly major problem in either country. If you go to the area of Australia where there are lots of Aboriginals, you might well see more racism but those places are not indicative of Australia as a whole.
I take anti-Aboriginal feeling very seriously - my mother was an activist during the freedom ride days of the 1960s and I was one myself (or as much as a military officer could get away with) during the land rights era of the 1970s and 1980s and I honestly don’t think it’s a major problem here anymore. We used to be almost as bad as South Africa until about 1970, but things have changed dramatically especially over the last twenty five years. There are still issues to be resolved and even if the racism totally vanished, a lot of damage still needs to be repaired but overall we’re doing pretty well now.
Classism is actually an issue in this recent case as well - the people who were responsible for the abuse directed at the French women have been categorised in the media as ‘bogans’ which is a very similar group to British chavs in terms of background and outlook.