[First published as Gideon Polya, “Entrenched White Australian racism exposed”, MWC News, 4 October 2016].
Entrenched White Australian racism exposed.
Gideon Polya.
There is entrenched racism in White Australia but the last half century has seen a progressive increase in political correctness that has made in-your-face public racism unacceptable – until recently that is. Although zero (0) Australians have ever been killed in Australia by Muslim terrorist organizations and only 2 Australians have ever been killed in Australia by self-described Muslim jihadis, thanks to US and Zionist propaganda Australia now has entrenched anti-Arab anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. There remains , however, a politically correct Mainstream public narrative about “good Muslims” who are a recruiting ground for radicalizing into “bad Muslims” and thence into Muslim terrorists. An extreme right-wing, racist and bigoted party, the One Nation Party led by Pauline Hanson, gained a critical 4 seats in the Australian Senate in the 2016 Federal elections on a platform that included the Donald Trump-like policy of banning Muslim immigrants. The major parties - the right-wing ruling Coalition led by PM Malcolm Turnbull, the Right-dominated Opposition Labor Party led by Bill Shorten, and the progressive, Green-Left party the Greens led by medical doctor Dr Di Natale- all reject this racist One Nation proposal to ban Muslim immigration. However now an Essential poll has shockingly revealed that 49% of Australian voters, 60% of Coalition supporters, 40% of Labor supporters and even 34% of Greens supporters, support the One Nation policy of banning Muslim immigration into Australia i.e. half the Australian adult population are in–your-face, anti-Arab anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic bigots and racists.
In the July 2016 Federal Election, Australian voters returned the right-wing Liberal Party-National Party Coalition Government under Prime Minister Turnbull with the barest of margins of 76 out of 150 seats in the House of Representatives (the Lower House that determines who forms a government). However in the Senate (the states-based, Upper House of review) the Coalition only gained 30 out of 76 Senator positions, with the remainder going to Centre-Left Labor (26), the Green-Left Greens (9), the Centre-Right Nick Xenophon Team (3) , other Rightist independents (4) and the extreme-right wing One Nation Party (4).
The Coalition Government can just win by 1 vote in the House of Representatives (it has already lost 3 contests in Parliament because some Coalition MPs were too eager to fly home from Canberra) and has also gained the support of 2 conservative independents as a back-up. However legislation must pass both Houses of Parliament and the Labor (26) and Greens (9) senators – 35 in all - will oppose the Coalition on many matters. The votes of the Centre-Right Nick Xenophon Team (3) , other Rightist independents (4) and the extreme-right wing One Nation Party (4) – 11 in all – become crucial because the Coalition (30) needs the support of 9 of these 11 Senators to pass legislation with a 38 to 37 bare majority over the Labor plus Greens (35 in all) (the Coalition provides one of its Senators as the President of the Senate who has a casting vote in a dead-lock).
Accordingly, the extreme right-wing, bigoted, racist, scientifically illiterate, anti-science, and climate change denialist One Nation Party’s 4 Senators are crucial for the passage of Coalition Government legislation. These ignorant and stupid people, led by former fish-and-chips shop owner Pauline Hanson, have now been thrust into the centre stage of Australian politics. The bigoted, racist and dangerously ignorant views of these One Nation Senators are now trumpeted every day by Australian Mainstream media that are already dominated by the pro-Zionist, US-loyalist, warmongering, racist, neoliberal and effective climate change denialist Murdoch media empire which has garnered 70% of Australian city daily newspaper readership.
The appalling One Nation policies are up-front for all to see – simply do a Google Search (or better still, a Search on Bing) for ”One Nation Policies” ). This, in part, is the ignorant, dangerous, anti-science One Nation climate change policy: “What is the climate change agenda? Climate change has and will continue to be used as a political agenda by politicians and self interest groups or individuals for their own gain. We cannot allow scare mongering by people such as [Professor] Tim Flannery, who make outlandish statements and are not held accountable. Climate change should not be about making money for a lot of people and giving scientists money. Lets know the facts and scientific evidence to make a well informed decision as to how best to look after our environment. Paying a carbon tax or an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is not going to wave a magic wand and stop nature changing the climate change. It will only make it harder for Australian families and businesses to make ends meet. We can address real environmental issues with legislation. Hitting struggling families and businesses with another tax has been designed to make some people a lot of money. Don't allow yourself to be misled…”
Yet the horrible reality from an expert, scientific perspective is that a catastrophic plus 2 degrees Centigrade temperature rise - that must be avoided according to all world governments at the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference - is now unavoidable, and expert climatologist have recently said that the Paris Climate Change Conference’s more stringent plus 1.5 degrees Centigrade temperature rise “target” would be exceeded in 4-10 years’ time (Google “Too late to avoid global warming catastrophe” and “Are we doomed?” )
This year when Pauline Hanson got up to give her first post-election speech in the Senate, the 9 Greens Senators walked out as a protest against One Nation racism, bigotry, anti-Arab anti-Semtism and Islamophobia. However the Coalition Government adopted a pragmatic approach, carefully dissociating itself from One Nation bigotry but oh-so-politely expressing sympathy for the 5% of Australian voters who voted for One Nation assertedly out of a sense of frustration and disempowerment, like Trump supporters in the US.
Hillary Clinton may be a pro-Zionist, neoliberal, war-monger, war maker and serial war criminal but she got it right when she stated “You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up”. She , of course, got it wrong from a moral perspective when she subsequently disingenuously recanted, stating “Last night I was 'grossly generalistic,' and that's never a good idea. I regret saying 'half' -- that was wrong". Just as “the customer is always right” so the majority of voters , no matter how “deplorable”, are always right from the perspective of neoliberal politicians.
Thus Coalition Minister for Education, Simon Birmingham, on One Nation Islamophobia: “We also have to acknowledge there are around 500,000 Australians who voted for Pauline's party. They have worries… we can't be blind to the fears that are there either and to the fact that terrorism, Islamic terrorism, has become an increasing problem in pockets of the world, has threatened us in certain ways and therefore we have to be ever vigilant”.
Pauline Hanson’s Donald Trump-like call for a ban on Muslim immigration was supported by right-wing Australian media personalities Andrew Bolt and Sonia Kruger, with Mainstream media Muslim celebrity Waleed Aly squibbing the moral issue of unequivocal rejection of racism by stating “Sonia Kruger isn’t evil. She’s scared”.
Pauline Hanson targeted Aborigines (Indigenous Australians) and Asians in her maiden speech to the House of Representatives of the Australian Parliament as the Federal MP for Oxley (1996): “ My view on issues is based on commonsense, and my experience as a mother of four children, as a sole parent, and as a businesswoman running a fish and chip shop. I won the seat of Oxley largely on an issue that has resulted in me being called a racist. That issue related to my comment that Aboriginals received more benefits than non-Aboriginals. We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness and those who control the various taxpayer funded ‘industries’ that flourish in our society servicing Aboriginals, multiculturalists and a host of other minority groups… Immigration and multiculturalism are issues that this government is trying to address, but for far too long ordinary Australians have been kept out of any debate by the major parties. I and most Australians want our immigration policy radically reviewed and that of multiculturalism abolished. I believe we are in danger of being swamped by Asians”.
She lost her seat at the 1998 federal election and her racist supporters were successfully sought and captured by the Coalition under war-maker John Howard who, while remaining “politically correct” and not indulging in outright, crude racism of the One Nation kind, nevertheless “dog whistled” this racist constituency who understood that with the Coalition they would get Australian Government support for US violence against Muslims and Australian Government persecution of Muslim refugees. In 2003 Pauline Hanson was falsely imprisoned for electoral fraud on a technicality but swept back into public life in 2016 as red-neck racist voters deserted the Coalition they presumably saw as not right-wing or racist enough.
In 2016 the One Nation policy on Muslims is utterly offensive, anti-Arab anti-Semitism and Islamophobia as revealed by their One Nation Policy website : “Islam regulates the Muslim’s social and domestic life, their legal system and politics – their total life. Its religious aspect is fraud; it is rather a totalitarian political system, including legal, economic, social and military components, masquerading as a religion. Islam is a constitutionally protected religion, as stated in Section 116 of the Australian Constitution. This means that Mosques, Islamic Schools and other Islamic institutions are void from paying tax. Being defined as ‘a religion’ it is considered ‘discriminatory’ for Islam to be questioned and this is shutting down any debate that we, as Australians, would like to have. Islam is proving to be seditious against every nation and government on earth. Islam demands that all Muslims work to overthrow all nations, governments and non-sharia laws… We will enact the following: Call for an inquiry or Royal Commission to determine if Islam is a religion or political ideology. Stop further Muslim Immigration and the intake of Muslim refugees. Ban the Burqa and Niquab in public places. Driver’s licence cannot be obtained without showing the full face and having photo ID on driver’s licence. Surveillance cameras to be installed in all Mosques and schools. Mosques to be open to the public during all opening hours. No more mosques to be built until the inquiry is held. Oppose the introduction of Sharia Law. Investigate welfare payments paid to Muslims who may be in multiple marriages, having multiple children. Ban Halal certification. Halal certified food not to be provided in prisons or the armed services. Companies may comply for export but no monies must be paid. Call for a referendum to change Section 116 of the Australian Constitution. Muslims will not be allowed to be sworn in to Parliament under the Qur’an. Female genital mutilation to carry lengthy jail term ” [the last proposal being reasonable, however].
Racism involves damaging treatment of particular ethnic groups – but the bottom line is that you cannot do anything about your birth origins. Anti-Semitism involves discrimination against Semites for being Semites per se and comes in 2 equally repugnant forms, anti-Arab anti-Semitism against 300 million ethnically Semitic Arabs or 1,500 million culturally or ethnically Semitic Muslims and anti-Jewish anti-Semitism against 15 million mostly culturally Semitic Jews. Pauline Hansen’s xenophobic, anti-Arab anti-Semitic and Islamophobic assertions fail the Jewish test for racism i.e. replacement in her declarations of “Asians” and “Muslims” with “Jews”, “mosques” with “synagogues”, “burqa” and ”niqab” with “yamulka” and “Islam” with “Judaism” generates intolerably repugnant anti-Jewish anti-Semitic assertions: e.g. “we are in danger of being swamped by Jews”, “Call for an inquiry or Royal Commission to determine if Judaism is a religion or political ideology”, “Stop further Jewish Immigration and the intake of Jewish refugees”, “Ban the Yamulka in public places”, “Surveillance cameras to be installed in all Synagogues and Jewish schools”, “Synagogues to be open to the public during all opening hours”, “No more Synagogues to be built until the inquiry is held”, “Oppose the introduction of Jewish Law”, “Investigate welfare payments paid to Jews who may be in multiple marriages, having multiple children”, “Ban Kosher certification. Kosher certified food not to be provided in prisons or the armed services. Companies may comply for [Kosher] export but no monies must be paid”, “Jews will not be allowed to be sworn in to Parliament under the Torah”.
Many decent Australians have responded properly to this One Nation bigotry and racism. Thus Labor Opposition Leader Bill Shorten on “banning Muslim immigration” (2016): “Other than our first Australians we all came from somewhere else. What I don't want to do is see this country scapegoating minorities for the challenges of the bigger issues… We would be playing into the hands of the crazies, of the fundamentalists, of those who hate the Australian way of life by somehow saying that that religion, Islam, is incompatible with western democracy.”
Senator Sam Dastyari (extremely effective, Iranian Muslim-origin, Right-wing Labor Senator who was crucified by Sinophobic (China fearing) public opinion because of his publicly-declared modest $1,670 funding by a Chinese college, while Chinese companies have given millions of dollars to both the Labor and Coalition parties): “It would be frightening to see the debate in this country dragged further to the right. The type of views espoused by Pauline Hanson can have a really destructive effect on political debate and discourse, so it’s important for the country’s political leaders to not pander to her politics but to call it out for what it is, abhorrent racism”.
Senator Lee Rhiannon (Greens Senator): “Pauline Hanson’s election to the Senate will give her a platform to voice her racism and bigotry. While she has been democratically voted in, we won’t be accommodating her racist views. Advocating in the best interests of Australians, as Hanson promises to do, involves not spreading racist and Islamophobic vitriol and abuse which threatens and marginalises so many non-white and Muslim Australians”.
Senator Sarah Hanson-Young (Greens Senator): “As Parliamentarians, we have to reckon with the fact that on July 2 many thousands of people felt that Pauline Hanson spoke for them. To disregard her resurgence as a flash-in-the-pan populist vote would be foolish and would underestimate the seriousness of what has taken place. At the core of Hanson’s popularity is the fact that many people feel hard-done by. They are struggling to pay their bills and they don’t feel listened to. The problem is that, rather than tackling the complexities of entrenched disadvantage, Hanson has capitalised on those frustrations by blaming foreigners. Pauline Hanson’s road to Parliament was paved with fear; she saw that people are doing it tough and cynically exploited their anger for her own ends”.
Concluding remarks.
White Australians are overwhelmingly deeply racist even if they don’t recognize it themselves. Indeed most Australians would vehemently reject the proposition that they are racist but history says otherwise. Thus the ultimate in racism is invasion and devastation of other countries. Australians have invaded 85 countries and these invasions have been associated with 30 genocidal atrocities of which the first and continuing atrocity has been the Aboriginal Genocide and Aboriginal Ethnocide ( the Aboriginal population dropped from about 1 million in 1788 to about 0.1 million 100 years later through violence, dispossession, deprivation, introduced disease, and forced children removal, the latter a process that is continuing at a record high rate in 2016 ; of 350- 750 Aboriginal languages and dialects in 1788, only 150 remain and of these all but 20 are severely endangered). US-lackey and Zionist lackey Australia is currently involved militarily its Eighth Iraq War and Third Syrian War in a century, in the ongoing Afghan Genocide, and, through the joint US-Australia electronic spying facility at Pine Gap in Central Australia, in targeting war criminal US drone strikes in Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. In the Australia-backed US War on Muslims (aka the US War on Terror) there have been 32 million Muslim deaths from violence, 5 million, or from war- or hegemony-imposed deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9-11 false flag atrocity in 2001.
Perhaps, to bend over backwards, we could describe most Australians as politically correct racist (PC racist) – being verbally politically correct in public but paradoxically supporting racism, and specifically, racist wars. Australia has a compulsory, preferential voting system which involves taking voter second, third etc preferences into account, and in the 2016 Federal election Australians gave a 50.3% “2-party-preferred vote” to the war criminal and climate criminal Coalition that is presently involved in the racist and war criminal US devastation of 7 sovereign nations. In terms of primary vote for the House of Representatives in 2016, 42% voted for the war criminal and climate criminal Coalition, 35% voted for war criminal and climate criminal Labor, only 10% voted for the pro-peace and pro-environment Greens, and 13% gave their primary vote to others.
There must be zero tolerance for racism and in relation to the racism of Pauline Hanson, her One Nation Party and its supporters, apologists, excusers and empathizers, one can paraphrase German Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous poem “First they came”:
“First they came for the Aborigines , and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an Aborigine.
Then they came for the Asians, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not an Asian.
Then they came for the Muslims, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Muslim.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me”.
What can decent people do? The appalling history of the last 100 years in particular instructs that there must be zero tolerance for racism. Whether through imposed war or hegemony, 17 million people die avoidably from deprivation and deprivation-exacerbated disease each year on Spaceship Earth with the mercilessly neoliberal and mostly White First World in charge of the flight deck (see Gideon Polya, “Body Count. Global avoidable mortality since 1950”, that includes succinct histories of all countries from Neolithic times and is now available for free perusal on the Web: http://globalbodycount.blogspot.com.au/ ) . Decent people who value all human life must (a) inform everyone they can, and (b) urge and apply Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against all parties, politicians, countries and corporations disproportionately involved in this ongoing and intrinsically racist Global Avoidable Mortality Holocaust. In Australia, decent people will utterly reject the obscenities of racism, neoliberalism and war, vote 1 Green and put the Coalition last.
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