This was written in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack where 50 innocent people (at the time of writing) were gunned down by a lone gunman. It was going to be a rant against a number of Australian politicians who use racism and terrorism to further their own objectives. However, Waleed Aly on Network 10’s
The Project can express it much better than I can:
It’s true, the Senator in question received 19 direct votes. As Amy Remeikis writes in
The Guardian’s website
But vote for him, they did. More than 250,000 people did just that in fact, with his name forming part of the One Nation Senate ticket in Queensland, winning the Pauline Hanson-led party the highest vote after the major parties.
A twist of fate elevated him to the Senate when Malcolm Roberts, Hanson’s number two, fell to the section 44 constitutional crisis.
But it would not have taken much more for Anning to have been elected as the third One Nation senator. He didn’t just happen upon the party’s ticket. He’d been there before. If he hadn’t had fallen out with Hanson over Roberts, he’d be there again.
As Remeikis points out, last August this Senator delivered a speech using a term straight from the annals of Nazi Germany. Two months later Coalition Senators voted for a motion declaring it is ‘OK to be white’ moved by the leader of One Nation. A month after that the NSW National Party kicked out a number of members because the media worked out that the members were neo-Nazis and told the National Party about it. In short, it wasn’t a problem until it was public knowledge.
We’ve also had the Home Affairs Minister suggest that white South African farmers deserved our assistance to jump the queue if they wanted to migrate to Australia (the very crime asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat are claimed to commit) and a number of white nationalists have been welcomed to Australia and Parliament House in Canberra to spread their particular form of propaganda.
Some of what this Senator does has to be purely to get some name recognition come the next election and maybe a few votes from rednecked Queenslanders who know what he is saying (or even worse, those that really don’t care but have heard the name — so he must be ok). The real problem is that we have a group of people in this country that can be summed up by this diagram found on Facebook the day after the terrorist attack in Christchurch.
And Morrison’s expression of sorrow on television on the Friday night the terrorism occurred, while probably genuine, should be balanced with the statement made by Waleed Aly’s in his video editorial (above) that 8 years ago when in opposition, Morrison was promoting creation of racial unrest as an election strategy. You would also have to ask why the 1,000 people predominately from the middle-east (where the Islamic religion is most popular) are still being held in concentration camps off-shore while over 27,000 people flew into Australia in the last year, applied for protection visas and are living in the community.
Terrorism is terrorism — regardless of your particular ‘cause’.
The same day as the terrorism in Christchurch, students across Australia and elsewhere around the world went on strike to protest the lack of meaningful action on climate change. The same conservative blowhards that promote ‘Christian values’ but look for excuses when terrorism is perpetrated by a Christian (and some that should know better) were claiming that the students should have protested on their own time.
Why? When you look at it rationally, the students’ parents and grandparents have ensured that the students will have to make a lot of sacrifices to be able to live on this planet and religious and racist nutjobs have ensured that there is artificial division of homo sapiens based on skin colour, belief systems or other arbitrary barriers. We’ve really stuffed it up for our descendants. They have the right to protest and tell us to lift our game.
As one of the placards at one of the student climate change rallies around Australia shown on the media suggested — ‘there is no Planet B’. It’s a shame our children have to tell us the blindingly obvious.
What do you think?
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