Australia’s new Race Discrimination Commissioner has declared that anti-White racism is not a major issue, saying it moves the country away from what he believes is a more important problem – positions of power being held by White people due to “structural racism”.
Giridharan Sivaraman, who was appointed to the $385,000 role by Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus in February, was asked about the issue in the context of the Australian female soccer team’s brown lesbian captain Sam Kerr’s racial harassment charges for allegedly calling a London police officer a “stupid White cop” during a drunken night out.
And while the Indian-born lawyer and professional multiculturalism advocate did not comment on Kerr’s case, he told The Sydney Morning Herald that “the notion of anti-White racism is based on a fundamental misunderstanding about racism”.
“I do not think that anti-White racism, or reverse-racism, is the significant issue of racism that is actually happening,” he told the publication.
“And it completely moves us away from the actual problems of structural and other forms of racism in this country.”
Mr Sivaraman, who was allowed to migrate to Australia as a child, went on to claim that all of the positions of power in Australia are held by White people, and stated that his “big long-term project” was to investigate “structural racism”.
He claimed there were “systems in place” that enable the progress of White Australians at the expense of non-Whites, which he hopes to identify and try to dismantle.
Mr Sivaraman also claimed that there had recently been a “terrifying surge in particular types of racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian racism”, and said that one of his priorities was to promote “healing” after the failed Voice to Parliament referendum.
Mr Sivaraman is an outspoken advocate for left-wing causes on social media, and has recently shared posts on X in support of diversity in kids’ books, pay parity in women’s sport, and diversity targets at the ABC.
He describes himself as “anti-racist, advocating for migrants, refugees, unions” in his X bio.
He appears to support a treaty in Queensland, and declared he was voting Yes to the Voice, which was rejected by most Australians.
In 2021 he wrote a column for Brisbane’s Courier Mail newspaper calling for new laws against online trolling, and arguing that the Racial Discrimination Act should be updated to apply to online private messages and not just public acts.
In 2023, in an opinion piece for the same publication demanding forced inclusion in the media, he complained that Australians of “Anglo-Celtic background are overrepresented in senior television roles” and asked: “If merit really was the defining criteria why is diversity so low in the media?”
Mr Sivaraman is Chair of the Board of Multicultural Australia (a non-profit that helps refugees and immigrants settle in Queensland), a member of the Multicultural Queensland Advisory Council, and a Principal at Maurice Blackburn Lawyers.
His appointment began on March 4, and comes with a taxpayer-funded annual salary of $384,970 plus allowances.
