It’s hard not to be sad about the rise of race as a touchstone of political positions in the Australian polity. The media today is rife with it.
The Australian leads off with One Nation’s surge in the QLD election:
He is the little-known stalwart of One Nation, who recruited Pauline Hanson back to the party and now stands as the possible kingmaker at the looming Queensland state election.
As speculation grew yesterday that Queensland Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk will call a poll within weeks, Jim Savage was quietly readying to step out of the party backroom for his own tilt at a seat in parliament. But while Liberal National Party defector Steve Dickson leads One Nation into the campaign, it is Mr Savage who is emerging as the more likely parliamentary leader after polling day, which is expected as early as mid-October.
The polls and pundits are predicting Mr Dickson’s likely defeat as the LNP throws everything at him in his traditional blue-ribbon Sunshine Coast seat of Buderim.
Instead, it is Mr Savage, a former farmer and oil worker in Papua New Guinea, who is firming as the most politically experienced of the One Nation candidates with a real chance of being elected.
…The 62-year-old, who is married to Philippines-born wife Jackie, with whom he has adopted twin girls, said although there was no way he would support a Labor minority government, he still has reservations about Opposition Leader Tim Nicholls.
…Mr Savage said he supported Senator Hanson’s push for a ban on the burka and calls for an inquiry into Islam, saying it is those policies that appeal to people. “People are disillusioned with politicians for not speaking their mind,’’ he said.
Meanwhile, at The Guardian, the assault on One Nation is intense:
I ask her why she’s replaced the Asians in her crosshairs with Muslims, and whether she thinks Australia has indeed been “swamped by Asians”, 20 years on.
Hanson is unequivocal. “You still have problems, whether they are Asians living here or foreign investors. And you turn up to auctions and the majority are Asian bidders, and Australians are flat out trying to buy a home. So you ask Australians what they feel about it. Or the Shenhua coalmine. Or the ports up in Darwin that are Chinese-owned.”
“So why do you think Muslims are a bigger threat?” I prod.
“Because with Muslims you have a lot of people who are extremists and they hate us westerners with a vengeance. It’s been filmed on the streets in Sydney, the hate for us. They were out celebrating after 9/11. Do you feel safe in this country?”
“Yes,” I reply, remembering the peaceful streets of the mainly Muslim suburb of Lakemba in Sydney, where we filmed last week.
The major parties can’t get enough of it. At the Herald Sun:
An unprecedented blitz on foreign-born criminals has seen more than 2800 ordered to leave the country.
It involves state and federal police working with intelligence agencies and Department of Immigration and Border Protection officers, with no plans to stop the crackdown.
The co-ordinated effort is being driven by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s determination to rid the nation of as many criminals as possible who are not Australian citizens.
Figures obtained by the Herald Sun reveal the 2847 killers, crooks and creeps ordered out of Australia since December 2014.
Sounds like old news recycled as political grandstanding to me.
Which is where we find Labor on the other side of the coin, back to The Guardian:
Bill Shorten has taken aim at Malcolm Turnbull over a decision to cut support for asylum seekers transferred to Australia from offshore detention for medical reasons, declaring him a “weak prime minister trying to look tough”.
The Labor leader took to Facebook on Sunday to blast the proposal to cut income support worth $200 a fortnight, and force asylum seekers to find their own accommodation, characterising it as Turnbull’s “weakest move yet”.
Shorten said the government’s action had “nothing to do with strong borders or stopping people smugglers”.
“It’s a weak prime minister trying to look tough. That’s it,” he said.
“Kicking people onto the streets with no support is needlessly cruel and really, really dumb. It won’t fix anything. It’s just hurting vulnerable and sick people for the sake of it.
Labor lost its opposition to offshore detention long ago. Let’s not forget that it invented it.
You could put this down to just another day in the political office but the pervasiveness of it is much more than that. Immigration is now the number one hot button issue in the country and for good reason. It is no longer a complement to the economy, people’s standards of living and society. It is a (the?) key driver of all three as we continue to drive huge inflows of temporary and permanent migration into a demand-depleted and over-supplied economy.
This is creating very obvious winners and losers that our ruthless political class are now vacuuming up on all sides, fracturing the multi-cultural consensus along the way. On the racist Right by attacking irrelevant but emotive symbols in specific minority groups. While on the Left, refusing to discuss the very real downsides of the mass influx of peoples thus leaving the playing field open to the real racists.
As that fracturing transpires, the actual transformation accelerates, at The Australian:
The $20 billion international education industry has transformed the face of the southern state capitals and created an unofficial race to attract Asian students.
Analysis of Australian Bureau of Statistics figures confirms that Melbourne’s CBD is facing the biggest cultural transformation in decades as higher education and cheap student accommodation attract mainly Chinese students in record numbers.
The soaring demand is also flowing into Adelaide’s CBD, where almost 30 per cent — or 4249 people — claim Chinese ancestry, only slightly behind central Sydney in total numbers.
The ABS breakdown supplied to The Australian also shows that central Brisbane and central Perth are lagging behind the other capitals in attracting the Chinese education dollar.
The figures show Melbourne’s CBD has 38 per cent of its population — almost 18,000 people — reporting Chinese ancestry.
The effect of this higher education-driven residency boom has been to transform central Melbourne, effectively super-sizing the old Little Bourke Street-based Chinatown, with a heavy concentration of Chinese students in the CBD and beyond.
And the consequences go largely undebated:
The Chinese consulate-general has entered a dispute over Taiwanese independence at the University of Newcastle, exposing the increasing influence exerted by Beijing on Australian university campuses.
The dispute, one of several involving Chinese international students at Australian universities, has seen the students receive strong support from Chinese commentators.
The university was asked whether the Chinese consulate-general, the Chinese Students and Scholars Association and Chinese-Australian news outlet Sydney Today were in contact with the university over the matter. “The University of Newcastle has engaged with a range of interested stakeholders, including students, staff and the consulate- general of the People’s Republic of China,” a university spokeswoman responded.
The consulate reportedly became involved in part because of its “one-China bottom line” and because the incident “seriously hurt the feelings of Chinese students”.
The Newcastle University Chinese Students and Scholars Association is “an association supervised by the Chinese general consulate Sydney”, according to the university’s website.
The incident at the university, where a lecturer came under fire last week for listing Taiwan and Hong Kong as separate countries, is the fourth prominent case since May where academic staff or Australian universities have been targeted and their actions or teaching material attacked on Chinese social media.
We are running an immigration-led economy and society that we have no plan for, no future in mind for, no sense of preservation for, and no care for what it does to our most fundamental freedoms and institutions.
