This is a clip from Dennis Norden’s Laughter File about a current affairs piece that took place in Adelaide, South Australia. The TV show in question aired from 1991 to 2006, so this is squarely within the range of dates in question:

https://youtu.be/3Lyex2tSUyA

Tell me, if it was deemed acceptable for a newspaper to run a classified advertisement which was clearly one that had been lodged via phone that stated “No Asians” (in common Australian parlance this refers to East & SE Asians exclusively) at the end, what does that say about the level of permissible bigotry against Asians?

[CW: police brutality, queerphobic murder]

While we’re talking about South Australia, this was the first state in Australia to decriminalise homosexuality in response to senior police officers intentionally murdering Professor George Duncan. This was in 1972.

To think that Australian culture would go from a group of police officers murdering a queer person and there being an extensive cover-up and the typical government obstructionist bullshit and then, skip forward less than two decades, and things are just rosy for gay people in Australia?

Bro, what??

Those cops who killed a queer man in cold blood were probably still alive in the 90s and they themselves weren’t prosecuted, lynched, or complete social pariahs so what does that say about Australia’s level of homophobia in the 90s exactly if not for the fact that it was extremely permissive towards it at the absolute minimum?