Yet again I hear our (elected) Prime Minister describing a fellow obnoxious interviewee on Lateline as “un-Australian”. Then realising how hollow his echo sounded, he cleared his throat and repeated it twice more until it sounded “right” to him. He does that a lot, have you noticed?
Tony has a very desperate sense of Right -v- Wrong, and a shallow predilection for simplistic slogans that support his bovine posturings. I'm well and truly over him and his brood of rednecks, just as I am of bozos like the guy whom Emma Alberici very neatly nailed to his own petard.
Inside his slippery shadow-boxing, the guy did have a point – about the current crisis with ISIL being The Coalition of the Silly's own fault. But being obnoxiously superior in his prosecution of it ain't going to win him any support outside of boot camps for the compulsively disillusioned.
Have we really reached the bottom of the G.W. Bush Memorial Sinkhole where, if you ain't singing from the same hymn-book as them you're Un-Australian? Am I “un-australian” because I disagree with the way this Middle-Eastern thing is being handled by this current bunch of very uninspired and uninspiring truth-twisters? I don't think so.
Prime Minister – views uttered by Australians, whether you agree with them or not, ARE Australian. It's very “Australian” to see things from odd angles and disagree with anyone posturing as an authority on what's right and what's wrong. If you think critics are wrongful or misinformed, then you really do have to grapple with them a little more intelligently than by figuratively banishing them to Cambodia to join the other 4 people you're spending $40 million of our money to send there. You owe better than this to the money Cecil Rhodes spent to tolerate you at Oxford, and you owe it to Australians, whether they belong to your cosy little “Team Australia Patriots” or not. Aussies who question the wisdom of certain decisions deserve better from you than to be swatted at like pesky houseflies.
What you are inside seeps out. When you dismiss various views as “un-australian”, you display moral and intellectual laziness and impotence – just as much so as this sentence (see, even I can do it too!) But it's much more serious than that. When you dismiss opposing views as un-australian, without regard to real-life experiences that might have given rise to those views, you give yourself licence to go to war on those people; for example, by allowing 800 police to be deployed to arrest one man on suspicion of being a disturbed “might-be”.
I pray for leaders who can look a little deeper into themselves and the situation, look for a solution rather than some obscure political advantage, and accept that dissent from populist conservative extremism is VERY Australian in character. Dissenters might have a point that needs insight and work – real work.
What's being done in our name should always be open to close scrutiny from those you owe your position to.
My government – right or wrong? I don't think so.
Who was it who said that if we don't learn lessons from our past, we are doomed to repeat them.
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