A confusion of nationality, race and geography

According to the JEP:  

A SENIOR civil servant has been accused of playing the ‘race card’ during a Twitter spat with Jersey’s Australian community representative.

 The phrase in question was “such antipathy for an antipodean!’”

 An Antipodean, according to the dictionary, is a person from Australia or New Zealand.

 As far as I am aware, the fact of being an Australian or a New Zealander, is a reflection of national identity rather than racial identity.

 While the term “Asian” might be thought to be more certain, in terms of ethnicity this itself is a category with loose boundaries. As Wikipedia notes:

In parts of anglophone Africa, especially East Africa and in parts of the Caribbean, the term "Asian" is more commonly associated with people of South Asian origin, particularly Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.  In South Africa the term Asian is used in the pan-continental sense. Due to the high number of Indians in South Africa, in official documentation the designation "Indian" is used to refer to both South- and East-Asians.

An academic study of who was considered Asian in America showed the same kind of  loose boundaries:

For White, Black, Latino, and most Asian Americans, the default for Asian is East Asian. While South Asians – such as Indians and Pakistanis – classify themselves as Asian, other Americans are significantly less likely to do so, reflecting patterns of “South Asian exclusion” and “racial assignment incongruity”. College-educated, younger Americans, however, are more inclusive in who counts as Asian, indicating that despite the cultural lag, the social norms of racial assignment are mutable.

But Australians, colloquially referred to as "Aussies", are people associated with the country of Australia, usually holding Australian citizenship. Their racial origins may vary enormously. And that’s not even considering Australia's indigenous peoples, comprising Aboriginal Australians, Aboriginal Tasmanians and Torres Strait Islanders!

Now it is true that just as Australians refer to the people of England disparagingly as “Pommes”, and as one individual pointed out online:

It's not derogatory but there is in general a polite reluctance to use plural adjectives as nouns like Asiatics, the Japanese... and a preference for Asian people, Japanese people, etc. Perhaps Antipodeans falls in the same category?

But it also occurs quite naturally and not as any form of insult:

An Australian writer says: “"I published my first book in 1955, when I was living in London, at that time the great cultural metropolis for Antipodeans"

‘Antipodean wines’

‘Go into any bar in the county and before long the chances are you'll come across a member of the bar staff with that distinctive Antipodean twang.’

‘Apologies to any Antipodean readers; just throw another Turkey leg on the Barbie for me and I will be right over.’

But whatever the case, one thing is clear – it is not racist, unless we start defining membership of a race as equivalent to membership of a nation, which is clearly not the case.

 Those who have called out the politician for “playing the race card” are quite simply wrong. There is a an alarming tendency to play the racist card when it does not apply.