Australia is not a racist country. We are comforted by this mantra every time we turn on the radio or television or happen upon a column by say, Piers Ackerman.

Whenever Julia Gillard speaks on such subjects, we are reassured that Australians are an "open and generous people" who "repudiate racism wherever we see it" - and we have a good "sense of humour" as well.

Australia is not a racist nation, we are told, and we should believe it because, well, everyone says it.

The image of Australia as an egalitarian paradise where everyone is welcome to spend eternity cavorting on a sun-drenched beach is the image Australia presents to the world, and there's a new $4 million advertising campaign to promote this ideal: "There's nothing like Australia".

Listening to politicians Kevin "the business of what works" Rudd, Tony "Muslim integration is a serious issue" Abbott, Julia "deeply offensive" Gillard or Barnaby "send the Oceanic Viking back to Colombo" Joyce, we could be excused for laboring under the misapprehension, like our politicians, that Australia is an Anglo Celtic country.

Because there are people who still regard Australia as an Anglo Celtic country, despite around 200 years of Chinese Australians, Afghan Australians, African Australians, and 60,000 years of Indigenous Australians.

Australia is not a racist nation, we are told. It is some other, hard-to-define reason that explains why Australian institutions - the government, the police, immigration, the media - appear to not only devour the 'racial and cultural divides' invective, but also promulgate it.

Last month we learned that at least 100 members of the Victoria Police are being investigated over the workplace circulation of a series of emails graphically depicting "an ethnic man being tortured".

We cannot know the "ethnic" identity of this man, or what takes place, but the chief commissioner of Victoria Police, Simon Overland, guarantees the emails are "extremely serious","offensive", and in his view "would cause significant concern and alarm in the community if the material was made public".

Overland made clear that although the material was pornographic and racist, it wasn't technically a crime because the emails didn't involve child pornography.

This is a shameful turn of events that comes 10 days after a report from the Springvale Monash Legal Service revealed "there was a culture of discrimination within the Victoria Police" resulting in racial profiling, targeting, harassment and abuse of youths of recognisably African ethnicities.

Claims against police included beating and kicking a young African who was handcuffed on the ground, threatening sexual violence, threatening to kill, excessive batoning, punching a person during an interview until he lost consciousness, using capsicum spray as punishment, desecrating a copy of the Koran during a raid by throwing it on the ground and calling it "shit", and punching a person in the eye with a torch, causing permanent eye damage.

The report concludes that the "the pattern and scale of reports of abuses indicated dangerous, institutional and systemic failures" and that previous complaints had not resulted "in the discipline or punishment of any police".

Revelations about the racist core of the Victoria Police come only two months after the murder of Nitin Garg and the denial that there was anything akin to racism, and racism as a motivating factor in crime, on Australian soil.

How did we move so quickly from utter refusal to acknowledge the existence of racism to the discovery that the Victoria Police is riddled with the kind of racism that has moved into action - the removal of identifying uniforms and badges when assaulting children?

A reasonable question when faced with this incursion of racism onto Australian soil may be: who is accountable? The dismissal of one or two officers responsible for introducing the racist torture-porn email into the Victoria Police workforce will not resolve anything because of the systemic nature of racism within the police force, and within Australian institutions.

If and when these officers are rooted out, it won't change the factors that allowed the racist culture of the police to develop in the first place. We need an explanation as to the processes that allowed so many racist police to be active for so long, and why no-one noticed earlier.

Without transparency on these issues, how do we know who has been held accountable and what has changed to prevent this racism from taking root again? We can't trust that it will be Victorian Police chief Simon Overland, who when he takes bullets onto a plane, an otherwise jailable offence, is excused while the airport screener is suspended.

But there's more. The Age newspaper has reported that three Tamil men facing imprisonment for supplying funds to the LTTE pleaded guilty to lesser charges and were released. The officers involved were castigated by the Supreme Court judge for arresting Arumugan Rajeevan at gunpoint, without legal grounds, "unarresting" him, after realising their mistake, and subjecting him to hours of "outrageous" questioning without legal counsel.

As Brian Walters articulated on The Drum:

"The burden of the prosecution case was that the accused sent money to the LTTE…The prosecution said it did not matter if that money was for the purpose of charity - the Act makes no exception for such circumstances. Not surprisingly, when the charges were laid, major international aid organisations immediately feared that they too would be subject to criminal charges. After all, they had done exactly the same thing as the accused men. Privately, the authorities reassured these organisations that they would not be charged."

In other words, the prosecution is selectively applying these laws to people they feel they can intimidate without resulting in public scrutiny, which is also called racial profiling.

So, despite the evidence from our police forces, politicians and selectively applied laws, we can rest assured that Australia is not a racist nation, as we have been told.

Jacinda Woodhead is a Melbourne writer and the online editor for Overland literary journal, where she blogs about politics and literature.