New Multicultural Affairs Minister Refuses To Apologise For Talking Shit About “African Gangs”

Scott Morrison’s been busy appointing his new ministry this week, and amongst them are some absolute doozies. Take Jason Wood, our new Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Community Safety, who not only has a history of fearmongering about “African gangs” — he’s proud of it.

Wood, who is the local MP for La Trobe in Victoria, has spent the past few years waging a pretty vocal campaign against “African gangs”, a phrase we’ll continue to put in quotes seeing as police have repeatedly urged people to stop using it, saying it just doesn’t represent the actual problems with crime in Victoria.

We’ve written about Australia’s obsession with so-called “African gangs” before — in late 2017, Australian media started panicking and running increasingly extreme headlines about a supposed wave of crime perpetrated by African youth in Victoria. There have been several waves of similar “African gang” panic in recent years, but the short version is this: while crimes involving African-Australian youth made up only a tiny chunk of the overall crime rate in Victoria at the time, these crimes received an outsized amount of media attention.

That media attention was encouraged by equally overblown comments from politicians including Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton, the latter of whom tried to claim that Victorians don’t eat out anymore because they’re so scared of “African gangs”.

Compared to Abbott, Turnbull and Dutton, Jason Wood was a bit of a nobody at the time, but he’s also been putting a fair bit of effort into his own race-based scare campaign. See for example this collection of Facebook posts from recent months, which picture a faceless hooded figure alongside big red words like “WARNING” and “AFRICAN GANGS”.

For those interested, here is a small sample of new Assistant Minister for Immigration Jason Wood’s “African gangs” Facebook campaign over recent months: pic.twitter.com/bg9B5aJYKw

— Sally Rugg (@sallyrugg) May 28, 2019

“What Labor is ignoring is that Sudanese-born people are 57 times more likely to be charged with aggravated robbery in Victoria than their Australian-born counterparts,” he wrote in one Facebook post, accompanying a picture of a menacing hooded figure. Textbook scare campaign, really.

Wood didn’t just confine his bullshit to social media — in 2017 he was the chair of the Parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Migration, and in this role, he helped produce a report on migrant settlement outcomes that used the word “gang” six times in the first three pages. In the report’s foreword, he wrote that in his own electorate he had seen “the rise of the Apex Gang, a group of young people with a Sudanese background terrorising suburban Melbourne with riots, thefts, car jackings and violent home invasions”. He wrote this despite the fact that eight months earlier, the Victorian Police told the inquiry Wood led that the Apex gang was a “non-entity” that no longer really existed, and had never been predominantly African in the first place.

When the report was released, Wood also gave a series of media interviews saying things like “a lot of migrants have no understanding of the law. I was told by South Sudanese people that…breaking into someone’s house and stealing a car is not a big deal”. It was comments like those that helped kick off the media frenzy about “African gangs” in the first place.

These Comments Really Hurt The African-Australian Community, But Wood Says He Has “No Regrets”

African-Australians, in particular the South Sudanese-Australian community, have been very clear about how much the whole “African gangs” scare has hurt them — young South Sudanese-Australians say they’ve faced increased racial abuse from the public, as well as racial profiling from the police. In a report released last week, young people described feeling like they could no longer go out with friends and family, because the public automatically assumed they were a gang.

“When we head out together, they think that we’re gonna do something bad, but … they are our brothers and sisters … we’re not even doing anything,” one young person said.

Debates about Sudanese gangs are fuelling racial fear and anxiety. The panic risks doing serious damage to our racial harmony. My interview with ABC’s The World Today this afternoon https://t.co/Hhxi3EbysR

— Tim Soutphommasane (@timsout) July 27, 2018

The South Sudanese community also spoke out earlier this week when Jason Wood was appointed to become Minister for Multicultural Affairs, pointing out that he’s probably not the right guy for the role. “I’m just baffled why somebody like Jason Wood would be appointed at such a time,” Maker Mayek, a South Sudanese Australian community leader, told The Guardian. 

Wood, however, has spent this week refusing to apologise for his comments — instead, he told The Age he has “no regrets”, and told SBS that “if you don’t call this out, then it just continues on”.

“If anyone thinks we’re overreacting, go and look at the YouTube of the Melbourne Moomba riots,” he said. Of course, YouTube videos of the riots do not include the context of police pointing out that the people involved in the violence came from a range of racial backgrounds, definitely not from a specifically African gang.

All in all, that’s not really the kind of CV — let alone attention to detail — you’d hope to see from a Minister for Multicultural Affairs. We contacted Wood for comment, but he did not respond.