The racist immigration Minister

Sometime in 2014, journalist Rob Burgess interviewed former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser and discussed refugee policy. During the discussion, apparently Fraser made a prediction. Burgess recently wrote an opinion piece for The New Daily discussing Minister Dutton’s recent claims about South African farmers and recalled Fraser’s prophecy
The cruelties of the offshore detention system, he said, made it look, “from outside Australia … as if the white Australia policy battles are still raging”.

There was no way, he said, that a boatload of “white South African farmers would be treated that way if they sailed into Fremantle harbour” – a sentiment he also expressed to the ABC in 2012 [during the term of the Rudd/Gillard ALP Government].

They were prophetic words, because this week 2GB’s Ray Hadley asked Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton if he was planning to help “white South African farmers who are facing violence and land seizures at home”.

Mr Dutton replied: “I’ve asked the Department to look at ways in which we can provide some assistance … potentially in the humanitarian program, because if people are being persecuted – regardless of whether it’s because of religion or the colour of their skin or whatever – we need to provide assistance where we can.”
In the past couple of weeks, Dutton has demonstrated the Australian Government’s refugee and immigration practices are racism pure and simple. At the same time as we as a nation hold people who have proven themselves to be refugees in detention centres across the South Pacific in less than humane conditions, the Australian Government’s Minister for Home Affairs (and pretty well everything else) Peter Dutton is openly discussing allowing white farmers from South Africa, who claim they are subject to violence and land seizures at home, to be granted priority help and assistance from a ‘civilised country’ like Australia. As reported on Fairfax news websites
"If you look at the footage and read the stories, you hear the accounts, it's a horrific circumstance they face," Mr Dutton told News Corp on Wednesday.

"We have the potential to help some of these people that are being persecuted."

He has directed the Home Affairs Department to explore whether the farmers can be accepted into Australia through refugee, humanitarian or other visas, including the in-country persecution visa category.
Dutton is quoted as saying
it was clear the farmers in question wanted to work hard and contribute to countries like Australia.

"We want people who want to come here, abide by our laws, integrate into our society, work hard, not lead a life on welfare," he said.

"And I think these people deserve special attention and we're certainly applying that special attention now."
Greg Barnes of the Australian Lawyers Alliance, writing in a South African paper (reported by the ABC in Australia) suggests that
Mr Dutton's choice of the word was intended to shore up support among the right-wing voter base in Australia, and is an extension of his "African gangs" rhetoric.
Barnes also claims that Dutton
is appealing to the racist element in the Australian body politic that doesn't mind immigration so long as those landing on Australia's shores are white and middle class,"
In his The New Daily article, Rob Burgess quotes 2GB radio announcer Ray Hadley as saying there were
“reports that one white farmer is murdered every week”.
And suggests
That’s a terrible statistic, if true, but there are far worse reports coming from the “crisis on our doorstop”, as the Greens call it.

Medecins Sans Frontieres reports more than 10,000 Rohingya have been killed in the past six months – close to 400 people a week.

They too have been forced from their land, and their homes and villages destroyed.
It seems that in Dutton’s mind at least, one alleged South African murder a week is worse than 400 confirmed Rohingya murders in the same timeframe. There is no other word to describe this than appalling.

Dutton’s justification that South Africans would come here, abide by our laws, integrate into our society, work hard, not lead a life on welfare and others (the implication being refugees from South Asia, the middle east or central Africa) wouldn’t is clearly not confirmed by even a cursory examination of the facts.

Four years ago almost to the day, The Political Sword looked at the contribution refugees and their descendants have made to Australia from the end of World War 2 until now. And you don’t have to be well-known like Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard, Kylie Minogue or Dr Munjed Al Muderis to have made or be making a contribution to this country that we have all adopted at some point in our family trees. The doctors, dentists, shop assistants, cleaners, bus drivers and car sales people you see as well as the office workers, carers, researchers and so on that you don’t can quite easily be people who either were refugees or their descendants. Most if not all of them pay their taxes, purchase goods, educate their kids, aspire to better things regardless of their skin colour, belief systems or country of origin. Just as the South African white farmers would if they did come here or the Rohingya people that Dutton won’t let in to the country would do if given the chance.

While we’re at it, the refugees or their descendants that are driving your bus, looking at your teeth, caring for our sick or reconstructing your skeleton aren’t taking jobs from ‘ordinary Australians’ either. In the first place, Australia has been the adopted home of significant numbers of people from all over the world for all of the last century so the definition of ‘ordinary’ has to be pretty loose. The ‘Asian’ who is selling you a car or checking your teeth may be part of a family that has been here for a lot longer than yours has, as Asians have been immigrating to Australia since the Gold Rushes of the 1850’s. The ‘middle eastern’ cleaner at the shopping centre or deciphering your CT scan might be celebrating the granting of a permanent residency visa next week or they could be mourning the loss of their grandparents who were descended from the famed central Australian Afghans of the 19th Century.

With the headline national unemployment rate approaching the economists theoretical benchmark of ‘full employment’ (which is around 5% unemployed), the argument that someone who ‘looks different’ to your perception of an ‘ordinary Australian’ has always only recently immigrated to this country and will take your job really doesn’t make much logical sense.

While generalisations can be incorrect, a significant number of the alleged dispossessed South African white farmers identify as being Afrikaans, who have a history of practising discrimination within South Africa that goes back over a century.
In the late 19th century, the British governor of the Cape Colony Sir George Grey and imperialist Cecil John Rhodes carried out what they considered to be a "civilising mission" to convert Africans to Christianity, give them a Western education and encourage them to adopt the Western way of life.

A few decades later, the policy of "civilised labour" was used in South Africa to justify policies of preserving certain jobs for whites only.

By the mid-1940s, Professor EP Groenewald of the Dutch Reformed Church argued apartheid was needed for the survival of Afrikaners so that they could take responsibility for acting as guardians towards the less "civilised" people.

"When the apartheid state took over in 1948 the term acquired a racial tone, being used to separate whites [the civilised] from blacks [the uncivilised races]," Mr Ngcukaitobi said.

South African prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd — known as the architect of apartheid — went on to rely on the concept when he responded to UK prime minister Harold Macmillan's "Wind of Change" speech to the South African parliament in 1960.

"They [white men] are the people ... who brought civilisation here, who made possible the present development of black nationalism by bringing the natives education, by showing them the Western way of life, by bringing to Africa industry and development, by inspiring them with the ideals which Western civilisation has developed for itself," Dr Verwoerd said.
Are Dutton’s claims of persecution of Afrikaners even valid? According to The Guardian
Gareth Newham at the Institute for Security Studies, one of South Africa’s leading authorities on crime statistics, said there was no evidence to support the notion that white farmers were targeted more than anyone else in the country.

“In fact, young black males living in poor urban areas like Khayelitsha and Lange face a far greater risk of being murdered. The murder rate there is between 200 and 300 murders per 100,000 people,” he said. Even the highest estimates of farm murders stand at 133 per 100,000 people, and that includes both black and white murder victims.

Estimates of the rate of white farm murders are fiercely contested. “It’s a difficult question to answer because we don’t really know exactly how many white South Africa farmers there are,” said Newham.

“All these methodologies are hugely flawed because if you start ring-fencing certain people because of their race you are missing out on the bigger context of how violence and murder takes place in South Africa. I wouldn’t say that white farmers are more likely to be murdered than other groups, we don’t have enough evidence of that,” he added
While it is true that South Africa’s Parliament did recently start a process which may allow for the expropriation of land, and if it is ever enforced it is likely that white farmers will be affected to a greater level than others,
no farms have yet been seized, nor is there any immediate plan by the government to do so.

According to the November 2017 Land Audit Report, 72% of agricultural land is owned by white farmers. White people make up 8% of South Africa’s population.

The inequality in land ownership is a legacy of apartheid in South Africa, and all major political parties agree on the need for extensive land reform. The current land reform policy is based on the principle of “willing buyer, willing seller”, and has largely failed to result in meaningful transformation.
Last August when Turnbull’s leadership of the Coalition Government appeared to be on shaky ground, we looked at Dutton and observed that he plays politics [with] hatred and spite rather than equity, equality, morals, ethics, compassion or betterment for all Australians. Dutton, like a number of other politicians, claims to lead a life based on Christian beliefs. In September 2014, The Political Sword published an article entitled Jesus was a refugee where we asked
Who demonstrates the morals and ethics of their chosen religious text better? Is it the conservative political leaders who stand by and watch people starve or suffer ill health or the Sisters of Mercy and other religion-based organisations that actively channel profits from provision of services to help those less fortunate? Is it those conservatives who suggest that ‘stopping the boats’ is a worthy aim or those that suggest that Jesus was a refugee and accordingly we should assist and care for those that have felt the need to make the refugee journey? Is it the conservative people who invade a country and impose a rule of law or those with religious beliefs that go about their daily lives and attempt to help someone in need?
By bending over backwards to offer ‘help’ to potentially dispossessed white Afrikaans farmers while ignoring the plight of others, probably based on skin colour or differing beliefs, demonstrates yet again the warped view of morals, ethics and claimed values shared by conservative politicians such as Dutton.

What do you think?

Rate This Post

Current rating: 5 / 5 | Rated 7 times

Jon Chesterson

26/03/2018

Another great article from TPS - Yes he is racist and he runs the largest most hypocritical, incompetent, corrupt and tyrannical Government Department we have ever witnessed in Australia.  Great men Gough Whitlam have been sacked for less, far less, illegitimately so for running the country on just terms; and today the twist falls to the gradual erosion and destruction of our constitutional democracy and civilised society, not merely the execution of it.  Yet still he reigns supreme as he scowls and crows at the Opposition, human rights, the Judiciary and ordinary fair minded Australians.  How long shall we tolerate this tyranny?

The Poem: Monster of Home and 'Inhuman' Affairs Song of the Deadz

The sheep and a billy goat short of a cobby
white-as an Afrikaans farm,
they went to bed for hell and a hobby,
dead squats in a ‘straylian barn.
The sheep with a tag and peculiar dag,
flag and visa bizarre;
for shag and a wag with that gun lobby
‘oh what a mutton-head
Dutton you are
you are
you are!
What a mutton-head Dutton you are!’

Part of Australian Whimsical by Barddylbach, 24 March 2018 based on the nonsense poem, The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear, 1871 https://allpoetry.com/poem/13800841-Monster-of-Home-and-Inhuman-Affairs--Song-of-the-Deadz--by-Barddylbach

The Article: Monster of Home and Inhuman Affairs

‘They’re dead to me’ said Dutton of his critics, the ABC, the Guardian and many other Australians including human rights advocates and humanitarian refugees men, women and children who have been locked away out of sight, away from Australia on Nauru and Manus Island for the past five years; abused and denied their most basic human rights by Dutton and his monstrous ministry.  if that is so what does this mean for Australian democracy, constituency, elections, free speech and the role of a government minister, and a department so large and secret, it might even put Harry Potter to shame?  
It’s not illegal to sail away to the shore of another country if you are fleeing from tyranny, but he chooses to play the cold gun slinging foul mouthed turkey!  If Turnbull won't sack him and he cannot be deposed, what hope is their for Australia?  But first enjoy a little aside on the house with Edward Lear by Barddylbach - The AIM Network, 24 March 2018 https://theaimn.com/monster-of-home-and-inhuman-affairs/ 


 

2353NM

27/03/2018

Jon Chesterson - thanks for your comment. I hate to say that Dutton is as low as we can go in comparison with previous governments from all sides who did practice humanity and respect, because there seems to be no end to the rabbit hole the governments of the past couple of decades have taken us.

Hopefully, there is a point sooner rather than later where Dutton's behaviour is reason for dismissal. Turnbull should suffer the same fate for not calling the bad behaviour for what it is.

janice

28/03/2018

Since the reign of Howard, Australia has turned into a nation of selfish turkeys.  Many of us saw it coming but most allowed themselves to succumb to the brainwashing e.g. that Labor are run by evil 'union bosses' and that Labor are financial nitwits 'addicted' to recklessly spending money and saddling the nation with huge debt and deficits.

The cheating  Australian Cricket Team scandal has caused outrage yet only a few of our media experts have concluded that it is really not so surprising when we condone worse behaviour from the nation's chief leadership team who abuse their positions of high office, blatantly lie and deceive the populace, rort their entitlements, 'sledge' their colleagues in opposition and  ignore the consequences of raping the land in to feather the nests of themselves and their well-healed mates.

As for Dutton and Turnball, neither is worse than the other.  In a perfect fair world, these two mongrels and most of their 'team', would be put on trial for treason and tampering with the financial well-being of the country, gross neglect of their duty to the welfare of its citizens as well as the torture and imprisonment of those who came to our shores seeking refuge.  This will never happen of course because the voting public are still in a hypnotic trance and cannot see they have been led into the cesspool Dutton et al emerged from.



fred

30/03/2018

"With the headline national unemployment rate approaching the economists theoretical benchmark of ‘full employment’ which is around 5 unemployed,.."

Which economists?

The concept of full employment is highly political and much abused and used for political purposes.

Wiki reckons:

"Full employment means that everyone who wants a job have all the hours of work they need on "fair wages".1

Currently we have about 750,000 full time jobless, reduce it to, say around 4 as we had only 10 years ago, and we would still have 600,000 who want jobs and cannot get one so at 4 we would still be miles away from 'full employment'.

Wiki goes on :

"Because people switch jobs, full employment means a s rate of unemployment around 1 to 2 per cent of the total workforce"

That further miles from 5.

And we have haven't considered the currently  more than a million underemployed workers in Australia.

The concept of full employment is highly political and much abused and used for political purposes.


Bacchus

30/03/2018

fred - the concept is called NAIRU - Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment. It's an obscene construct of neoconservative economics that says to avoid inflation, we MUST maintain a rate of unemployment of about 5.

Ken Wolff wrote about these concepts here back in 2016:

http://www.thepoliticalsword.com/posts.aspx?postdc4cc939-1235-40e0-9ad6-d62ea4184d55



fred

30/03/2018

Yeah I know about NAIRU - a highly dubious concept equally as nebulous and ideologically, or even dogmatically, unsound as 'full employment" of 5 did the percent symbol appear?. The link to Wolfff's article brings me back to this article.

Bacchus

30/03/2018

OK fred - let's try another tack...

https://tinyurl.com/yb6s34le should take you to Ken's article.

As for the percent symbol -

5%

5%


Ad Astra

1/04/2018

After listening to Turnbull's enraged comment about our cricketers' ball tampering, I thought this retort from Mike Carlton on Twitter was apt:

“I want to apologise to all of you for the disaster that is the NBN. I’ve betrayed your trust, and I’m sorry. I take full responsibility for the shambles the NBN has become. Its my fault, and something that will be with me for the rest of my life.”

I have two politicians and add 17 clowns and 14 chimpanzees; how many clowns are there?