EDITORIAL: Sneering at average Aussies has a political cost
The message must be getting through. Australians don’t like to be patronised or sneered at for their views.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s rhetoric about the ISIS brides has spoken volumes.
Since the news broke that 34 ISIS-linked Australian women and children were trying to leave a Syrian detention camp and make their way here, there has been understandable community alarm.
The Government has done its best to create the impression it is not helping — but of course providing travel documents is help in itself — and Mr Albanese has rolled out a range of tough-sounding phrases.
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By continuing you agree to our Terms and Privacy Policy.Among them was “If you make your bed, you lie in it”. Clearly Labor is reading the wind.
Albanese’s trait of talking down remains seemingly embedded
Let’s recap. More than two years of often vicious anti-Semitism culminating in the Bondi massacre — carried out with ISIS flags inside the windscreens of the vehicle driven to the scene by the alleged murderers — and now an ISIS-inspired group wants in.
To use that most Australian of descriptions, Australians have had a gutful. They want their country back.
These are the sentiments that have clearly driven many to start listening — possibly for the first time — to the messages being delivered by One Nation.
And it seems Labor, not just the Liberal and National parties, is rattled.
How else do we explain the speech to the McKell Institute in Sydney given by government frontbencher Julian Hill this week?
The Assistant Citizenship, Customs and Multicultural Affairs Minister delivered a warning which can be loosely described as ignore or play down the views of average Australians at your peril.
Among the reported messages were that those who attend March for Australia rallies or who may turn to One Nation “deserve to be listened to rather than dismissed”, and that “the economic concerns of frankly ‘pissed off’ people or worries about integration are real”.
“Unacceptable cultural practices” such as gender segregation and forced marriage must be called out, and debates over the scale and focus of migration were entirely legitimate, he said.
He attacked Pauline Hanson’s statement that there were “no good Muslims” in Australia, but argued there was a need to call out “the dangers of radical Islamist politics and ideologies” and said people did not want to be “sneered at” for wearing “Aussie garb” to celebrate Australia Day.
This was an extraordinary speech for a senior Labor politician to make. The message must be getting through. Australians don’t like to be patronised, looked down upon — sneered at — for their views.
If Mr Albanese didn’t read the speech he should do so, for his answers in a word association game at an event in Melbourne — which required a one word response — showed the trait of talking down remains seemingly embedded. Among his answers were that Senator Hanson was “divisive” and One Nation voters “frustrated”.
Lessons should have been learnt after the progressives’ stampede to what they viewed as a certain “yes” vote in the Voice referendum came unstuck when the so-called quiet Australians, the “no” voters, expressed their views at the ballot box.
And they are still out there.
