I’ve been watching politics since I was a kid in the Fraser years and like everyone else I’ve seen plenty of stuff-ups, misjudgments, indecencies and outrages in that time. But few left me feeling sick in the way that the Coalition supporting Pauline Hanson’s “it’s OK to be white” motion in the Senate yesterday did.
There is no explaining away, contextualising, justifying or dismissing this outrage by the Coalition. Caught by surprise? What — you can’t read a notice paper? Confused about how to vote? You need guidance from your party leadership on whether to vote for a motion about “anti-white racism” from Australian politics’ best known racist? And in any event, Attorney-General Christian Porter only confirmed the government’s support for Hanson’s motion afterward on Twitter, backed by Mathias Cormann. Fair dinkum, Mathias. You’re supposed to be better than this shit.
This morning, after a firestorm of criticism, the rowing back began. “Regrettable,” the Prime Minister called it, hanging Porter and Cormann out to dry. Cormann then was sent out to declare that the government’s support was “an administrative process failure”. Porter released a statement blaming his staff for not “escalating” the motion to him, and trying to explain away his tweet. A bold statement against racism last night was suddenly an administrative error… after a hostile reaction. These people are running the country but can’t read an 18-word motion? They really do take us for fools.
Maybe some Liberals and Nationals actually believe there is “anti-white racism” in Australia. That white Australians suffer under the burden of living significantly longer lives than Indigenous Australians. That we endure the xenophobic torment of having better health and fewer chronic diseases. That we suffer the apartheid of better access to health and education services. That we are forced to live with greater wealth, more and better-paying jobs, and greater economic opportunity than non-whites. After all, is there not a Closing The Gap program to address exactly these kinds of racial injustices for whites?
Let’s Godwin this garbage. Yes, let’s go there. This is how Nazism grabbed power in Germany, by being indulged and legitimised and enabled by conservative politicians for their own political purposes. What was the Coalition’s political purpose? Presumably to keep in Hanson’s good books so as to ensure their chances of securing legislative outcomes in the Senate. As if their experience with Hanson on company tax cuts hadn’t shown them that Hanson lacks both the brains and basic decency to either stick to a policy position or a commitment once she’s given it.
The job of fighting fascism isn’t merely one for progressives and centrists. Conservatives also have a crucial role — conservatives with decency, values, a belief in protecting institutions and an understanding of history. Many in the Coalition have fought hard against the cancer of One Nation. Ron Boswell battled them ferociously in Queensland. Peter Costello went out hard early against Hanson, in the face of criticism from John Howard, and established the tradition — that would last until Malcolm Turnbull’s time — of putting One Nation last on how-to-vote cards under all circumstances. Even Tony Abbott in the 1990s dedicated himself to using all means to destroy One Nation. That tradition of opposing One Nation root-and-branch is now being mocked and degraded by a cynical, desperate and opportunistic government.
The point of Godwinning this is because fascism — white nationalism, neo-Nazism, alt-right, call it what you will — is surging in Australia and across the west. And it relies heavily on being legitimised by the media and by mainstream politicians. Violent fascists like Blair Cottrell now appear on mainstream media outlets here. Their racism and bigotry is echoed in the senate by Hanson and her ilk, whether in her camp or spread across other parties in Hanson’s Diaspora of Disaffection. Now they’ve got one of the major parties to endorse the toxic lie of white victimhood. If it happened in 1998 it would have been a footnote. Now, it’s a something quite different and far more sinister.
And every single Coalition senator who voted for it is responsible for legitimising and enabling it. We look back on the 1930s and wonder why people did nothing about fascism then. The answer was staring us in the face in the senate last night, “administrative process failure” or not.
“Fair dinkum, Mathias. You’e supposed to be better than this shit.” Why on Earth would anyone think Cormann was better than this?
This is exactly what Cormann is. This is the same person who co-authored a budget which saw the proposition of massive cuts to welfare along with massive wins to the corporate sector and then sat down and smoked a cigar in celebration. We’ve had pensioners getting letters of demand from centrelink, young people in ‘select’ suburbs being told to pee in a jar before they can receive the dole. Now the unemployed are to be bused out to farms and ordered to pick fruit, which I suppose might stop the rape of female backpackers by the landed gentry.
Exactly how bad do the coalition have to get before the meeja start to accept that they simply aren’t fit to govern?
The political hyena, who along with Cackles Cash, stitched up a deal in WA for Hanson’s preferences in the last state election ……. But some people seem pretty eager to forget that too.
Well said.
It’s all coming pouring out now. People like Turnbull, Bishop and Cormann have had the journalist class snowed for years, which is why they get so favourable described in articles even when the government goes awry…. they are always described as intelligent and charming and mature and when stuff goes wrong it is because they were let down by easily scapegoated colleagues. Even someone like Keane who professes to be angrier at neo-liberalism than I’ll ever be falls for this personal appeal stuff. So Bishop is cool calm and collected no matter how many times she’s gone fully Abbott at people (remember the threats to New Zealand over Barnaby Joyce’s citizenship? The “terrorist’s picnic” rant against Plibersek?).
But now Turnbull is out of the building and it’s apparent that with the loss of his protection and the sway he had over half the media, the lid on the Coalition’s incompetence and chaos is off. We’re back to the last days of the Abbott government. Well, we never left, but now the journos can fully see it again.
Anyway, the wheels
Yes, staggering that the commentariat has excused and praised Cormann. Strange that Keane seems not to be taken in by Julie Bishop, but was by Cormann.
Cormann was craftier than most not to wear his Liberal ‘ugly’ stuff on the sleeve, but it showed through in the ‘let them smoke fat cat cigars like me and Joe’ budget attacks. And in being an inveterate liar – on a par with Morrison, Hunt, Frydenberg and the worst of the rest.
It’s not just Australian Politics that has had a moment; et tu Bernard? “Fair dinkum, Mathias. You’e supposed to be better than this shit.” Maybe he’s not. Strike 1: his appalling judgement during the Turnbull coup. Strike 2: the Hanson motion supporting tweet. Strike 3 …………..
Wrong. Strike 1 was his role in the 2014 budget. He has already hit Strike 4 & beyond.
Yeah and didn’t his student background feature an association with some Belgian Catholic Falangist group? Another week another fiasco.
Administrative error? I only look silly you clowns.
So what happened to that alleged “agility” that you were banging on about yesterday, Bernard? As a white male myself, I’ve yet to see any examples of this alleged “anti-white racism” being referred to. Though I do hear the word screamed a lot by a bunch of overly self-entitled & easily triggered white males in certain media and political circles.
This is an absolute low point in Australian politics. I’ve been alive for over 50 years but I didn’t think I’d ever see a sitting government sink this low. Even after the “children overboard” saga and subsequent decades of trying to appeal to racism, I didn’t think we’d ever sink this low. And for what? What is exactly the point of this motion? It’s a typical Hanson stunt in that it addresses no real problem and offers no solutions. All it does is to incite and aggravate.
Every single one of them deserves to lose their senate seat.
I didn’t think I’d ever be glad that Derryn Hinch was in the senate, but that’s how low we’ve sunk.
Hear hear
seconded
So now we have the self justifying self pitying by Smugbastards-R-US, plus the arrival in Oz of various war-profiteering firms.. and the escalating hypocrisy & willing blindnesses of the mainstream media.
TAMPA… WMD. ..Phosphorescence-On-Vietnamese-Waters …. anyone seen a moving-footage version of that sequence of events in the South China Seas?
I accidently supported a proto-nazi motion that has been on the notice paper for months and called out loudly by Hinch and others? Come again?