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Tag Archives: John Howard
Now’s a really good time to re-think voting Abbott
Thoughts from a non-Labor person
Australia. Don’t fucking ruin it for everyone. Sometime in the next couple of days you are all going to do that weird dance with the little cardboard houses and the scrawling of runes on scrolls, and like a magical phoenix sewn from boredom and Windsor knots, a new government will be formed. According to what I’ve read in the newspapers owned by one guy, and seen in the polling of people his age who still have hand-cranked telephones, enough of you are going to vote for Liberal or National candidates that Tony Abbott will be installed as Prime Minister.
What I really, really wonder is whether you’ve thought this through.
If you are planning to vote Coalition, I’d love you to actually read the following and think about it, rather than scrolling straight to the comments for a pre-emptive gloat. Because your choice would be a very poor one, for…
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Myth-busting Islamophobic lies and hoaxes
Our esteemed colleagues at the OHPI ( Online Hate Prevention Institute) have exposed yet another attempt by the usual sorry band of haters to circulate a scurrilous piece of propaganda.
In this instance the lies were reposted by someone in the Philippines but we have seen them extensively circulated on Australian hate sites.
Snopes.com, the hoax-breaking US site details the sad history. You will note that every Prime Minister from John Howard onward has been falsely attributed with this hoax.
A later version falsely attributes yet another version of the rant to former PM Julia Gillard.
Note that all the hybrid hoaxes contain additional US material from the US far ratbag right
Hoax-slayer is an Australian site which also uncovers such scams. Here is its exposé on the same fake e mail
Other hoaxes loved by the haters
The bogots have a particular love for this one. They keep posting it everywhere even though it has been comprehensively debunked.
One wonders at the mentality of those haters who get off on imagined child abuse.
Then there’s the fake allowances supposedly paid to refugees and asylum seekers.
Those and the others can be found on our blog pages as the ignorant hate-filled bigots just keep on keeping on…
Whitewashed culture has dark implications
COMMENT
May 30, 2013
Lindy Edwards
Our Anglo-centric identity is a threat to social cohesion.
The mother and stepfather of murdered British soldier Lee Rigby. Photo: Reuters
As Britain reels from another terrorist attack by a British-born citizen, countries around the world need to be looking at how we build cohesion and social solidarity among our increasingly diverse populations. This debate is particularly important in Australia, as one of the world’s great immigration nations, and a country with a predisposition towards a truly dangerous cultural policy.
During the Howard years, a peculiar policy mix developed in which we reasserted an Anglo- centred account of Australian identity, and at the same time had a major expansion of non-white immigration.
At one level the policy rationale is clear enough. As the economy boomed there were strong business and economic demands for high immigration. Howard sought to alleviate Anglo-identified Australians’ anxiety at the change, by reaffirming their primacy in Australia’s society and culture.
Implicit in the Howard narrative is that the real Australians are British-derived, and everyone else is just the supporting cast who should keep their heads down. The multicultural Australian narrative of the 1980s and ’90s gave way to a story of white mateship, barbecues, and an increasing emphasis on the Anzac myth as defining Australian identity.
The signs of the cultural change he created are everywhere. You have probably noticed how in the 1980s the crowd at the cricket was doused in green and gold. In those days, Australian flags were rare and seemed anachronistic, yet now Australian flags with their Union Jacks are all pervasive.
The impact is most marked on our television screens. The Australia of our imaginations is projected onto the small screen. It is an overwhelmingly white world that looks nothing like our city streets.
It is a strategy that worked to a point. There are Australian Electoral Studies poll data that indicates people’s concern about immigration dropped in the Howard years, even as the number of migrants increased. However, it is a policy that is remarkably short-sighted.
The danger is inviting migrants to this country and then creating a cultural policy which locks them into being outsiders. This is not a huge problem for the first generation who usually feel like outsiders anyway, and are grateful for the opportunities their adopted home offers. The bigger problem is for the second generation, who are born here but continue to be treated as on the margins.
For kids of Caucasian appearance the problem is an internal one. Anglo-Australians don’t notice them. They merge into the landscape and don’t appear to be different. However, the young person themselves feels the exclusion of knowing the national story does not apply to them.
The bigger problem is for kids whose skin marks them as outside the Anglo tradition. These kids will grow up being treated like foreigners in the only country they have ever known. This compounds their internal sense of alienation. It creates a sense that they will never be truly accepted, and that the doors open to others are not open to them.
Social fragmentation and threats to stability do not occur because a society has different cultural groups. Every free society has that. We already have a range of subcultures, from corporate high-flyers, to footy-heads, to greenies, to conservative Christians and gay dance clubs. What is dangerous is when group identities become aligned with grievance.
The true threats to social cohesion arise when whole subgroups feel that they are not able to achieve their life goals and ambitions through hard work and playing by the rules – when they feel that, irrespective of merit, they will be sidelined.
The question of how we create a cohesive society in which everyone feels able to fulfil their dreams is a national security issue. The disenfranchised of the past simply became isolated Marxists or anarchists. These days, an increasing number are becoming jihadis with an ideology of violence and an internet of resources on how to take out their vengeance.
This is an issue on which our political leadership has been missing in action. The Labor government has continued singing from Howard’s song sheet, reinforcing rather than challenging the approach. Recent comments by Christopher Pyne suggest an Abbott government is lining up for more of the same.
With 50 per cent of Australians having at least one parent born overseas, this shouldn’t be a party political issue. It needs to be above short-term political stunts.
We need political leadership with the maturity to realise that for the Anglo-identified population there is a tension between their short and long-term interests. In the short term they benefit from preserving their privilege, but in the long term their interests lie in social stability, peace and cohesion.
We need the kind of leadership that can grasp the magnitude of the challenge and bring us together by focusing on the long term.
Lindy Edwards is a senior lecturer in politics at the University of NSW and the author of The Passion of Politics (Allen & Unwin, 2013).
How to try and intimidate anti-racists on Facebook…failure guaranteed
An activist blogger we know recently wrote:
Miniposts
More threats
As some of you may know I have been censoring the posts of a serial pest who makes anti-Muslim and racist comments and has in the past threatened me. He has posted again saying that the next time he is in my area – he names my street – he’ll ‘drop in to say g’day’. Clearly this is an attempt to further intimidate me. If anything happens to me or my family here are his details to provide to police. jack 58.96.105.106 He has a druid name email at txc.
We know these tactics only too well.
To help him out, we’ve given him an approximate location for his stalker. It’s a nice little town just south of Adelaide. A pity that the swamp dwellers have reached there.
IP Address: 58.96.105.106
ISP: Exetel
Region: Strathalbyn (AU)
And we have actually passed these details on to the blogger so he can contact SA Police. They may help make life uncomfortable for his stalker.
So on with the (freak) show
Preamble for the failures
We’ll keep it simple for racists and bigots. We know they are not too bright. In fact they are so dumb they think that the First Amendment of the US Constitution is the law of the land in Australia.
Hate to tell them this – it is not. So when they see hate groups in the US like the Westboro Baptist Church spouting bigotry and try and do so here they are potentially liable for legal action.
You see the First Amendment was written around 1776 by a bunch of well-off white farmers and lawyers in the American colonies who were (rightfully) pissed off that they were not allowed to have a free press which could criticise the government, unlike the colonial power itself, England.
That’s all. It is not the 11th Commandment brought down from cardboard Hollywood Sinai by Charlton Heston Moses. In fact it has probably been challenged in the courts more than any other provisions of the US Bill of Rights, simply because as long as you put up such a seemingly admirable law, you are going to have nutjobs, cranks and loathsome haters who will abuse it.
“This is the First Amendment – I think. Either that or I picked up Jesus’s shopping list by mistake.”
10 ways to be bigger failures than you already are
- Make a defamatory Facebook group or groups targeting someone you think is running an anti-racist group. It doesn’t matter if you are wrong, in your universe the far right is never wrong. After all in their cargo cult Pauline Hanson and John Howard are going to return bringing Centrelink payments and a gas-guzzling SUV for all.
“We don’t like it”
And remember no matter how big the anti-racist group is only one person runs it even if the group profile shows a dozen or more admins. They “must” be all fake profiles.
- When you are not copy-pasting boring hate-filled shite make screenshots of posts at the anti-racist group followed by nasty comments about the poster’s gender, age, appearance and sexuality. And remember they are all Muslims. It doesn’t matter that they mostly are not. So while all the real Muslims are working out in the community keeping the economy ticking over you can keep hardened up from your bedroom at Mum’s or the cheap caravan in some one horse town by insulting and vilifying the false Muslims.
You are all Muslim woman (sic)
- Steal some photos, preferably from young women. Have a particular gloat over the ones where someone’s partner is featured, particularly if the partner is either of a different ethnic group or is same-sex. Comment negatively on the victim or their partner’s age, height, weight or fuckability, notwithstanding the last time you had a root would be when you managed to save up enough to give a bad time to the local sex workers. They ended up charging you extra woody time, a boredom allowance and they complained to Fair Work Australia.
Bonus bogot points for pics of parents or grandparents. Especially if they have recently died or are terminally ill.
- Because every anti-racist must be Muslim, grab some random pics of people who are Muslim or who “look Muslim”. Doesn’t matter if they are or not – facts don’t matter in Bogotopia. It’s all about feelings. And bogot psychotic episodes feelings are always paramount right?
- Remember the Aboriginals are very dangerous, mainly because they were here first and they often don’t look like you. So spend a lot of online adrenalin pointing out all the things they have that you don’t … like…ah…adequate housing, proper medical services, adequate educational facilities, decent jobs? Also remind them that the Apology has nothing to do with you because you weren’t born when blah blah blah….
- Make up some lame humourless memes using pictures of Aboriginal elders disrespectfully or pictures of people sitting in town camps (remember Aboriginal people are always old, all live in rural or remote areas, all live in town camps and they are always sitting around) pointing out their supposed drinking, substance abuse, violence etc – never mind that Aboriginal people actually have lower levels of drinking on the whole than do other groups.
And we are still waiting for the first child abuse prosecution under the Intervention.
- In your crazed crusade against innocent Australian Muslims don’t forget to post hundreds of false rumours, conspiracy theories, xenophobic rants, pseudo-histories and Photoshopped pictures of bloody and dismembered corpses, preferably sourced from disreputable foreign websites which are tarted up by their resident web-person to look like “respectable” news sites. Add to that deliberate misinterpretations of actual file pictures and the dreaded Photoshams (the notorious Palestinian “child brides” who are not child brides and the woman supposedly beheaded while buried in sand being favourites). Don’t be perturbed when someone points out the sinister resemblance between your activities and the scurrilous hate propaganda disseminated for centuries against the Jews.
- Ignore all references to factual information on scam-busters by Hoaxslayer, snopes.com, Loonwatch and in Sandi Logan’s letter to the media regarding asylum seeker entitlements. In Bogotopia facts do not exist.
- Because even your tiny minds dimly comprehend that notwithstanding (3) there are no facts which will justify your hatred and xenophobia, troll anti-racists sites with your rubbish and post in CAPITAL LETTERS with lots of swear words. This is supposed to scare people and makes up for a complete inability to provide debating points.
- When all else fails threaten anti-racists with lawyers and “suites” (or was that lawyers in suits), forgetting that firstly
IT IS NOT ILLEGAL TO BE AN ANTI-RACIST/ ANTI-BIGOT
and secondly
it is entirely likely that at least some of the anti-racists you target might actually know lots of stuff including the law.
And by that we don’t mean “being known to police” – which is definitely the case with the racist bogots.
Though we could actually do with some new lounge or dining room suites. ASIO Mossad the CIA don’t pay us too well since the GFC.
This will happen
DO WE NEED AUSTRALIA DAY?
By Monica Attard
January 21, 2013
It’s not long now until Australia Day.
On that day, some will show their love of Australia by flying the Australian flag atop their cars. Or by draping the flag over their shoulders to parade on beaches, beer in hand. Others will quietly celebrate whatever it is that we think we are when we so publicly and proudly declare ourselves Australian.
Love of this country and nationalism are deliberately fused together on this day – to set an example of how it is we ought to live in this multicultural nation – as Australians! We will be told by politicians of all persuasion that we peacefully co-exist because we all “share” something.
What does “being an Australian” mean to you? Image via waltzingmorethanmatilda.com.
What is extraordinary is that over the years, Australia Day has cemented the notion that there is some quintessential characteristic or set of characteristics that we share that make us all Australian. And even more extraordinary, that we share it simply because we happen to have been born here or happened to have arrived here.
What this is has changed over the years. When I was growing up in 1970s Sydney, even if you were born here, you were Australian only if (a) your parents were born here and (b) you didn’t look Mediterranean. I ticked neither box.
Though waves of Vietnamese immigration, followed by Lebanese immigration, followed by waves of asylum seekers have dimmed this peculiarly 1970s definition of Australia, the notion remains that there is something identifiable which – if subscribed to or accepted – makes you somehow, magically, Australian, and the same as everyone else.
And it’s not mere citizenship of the type, which can be bestowed upon anyone who meets certain government set criteria.
Many have tried to define it, this “Australian-ness”.
Some say it is egalitarianism – that we all have the right to work and live as well as the next bloke (or sheila). Some say it is mateship – that we are there, barracking for or defending each other when the chips are down. Some say it is loving cricket, or loving tennis, or playing rugby, or bagging those who bag us, or loving fish and chips on the beach, or just not being – generally speaking – a douchebag.
Some say you can feel this thing that makes us Australian whether you are Muslim, Hindu, Christian, Jew, black, white, or somewhere in between. Watch this video for evidence of how we now flatten out what it “means to be Australian”.
But in the absence of an absolute definition with which all of us can identify, celebrating sameness when so many of us are so different can surely serve only to make many people feel more different and less like the rest of the country in its Australianness, and therefore less accepted.
The whole “we are all Australian” thing can feel like little more than the jingoism of nationalism on steroids on Australia Day. And that can so quickly and so easily turn very ugly.
Remember those horrific years of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and John Howard’s “we will decide who comes to this country and under what circumstances” time as PM?
Remember Cronulla in 2005 when mobs of rioting angry, young, Anglo youth rounded up on young, angry, non Anglo youth – throwing bottles at them as they carried signs reading “F*ck off Lebs” and “ We grew here, you flew here”? Relations between Anglo and non-Anglo Sydneysiders still haven’t returned to pre-Cronulla normal.
A violent scene from the 2005 Cronulla riots. Photo via abc.net.au.
Loving the place where you live is a great thing. But lest we forget that it can be and indeed, has been abused to produce behaviour that is most dishonourable. Cronulla is but one example.
There are, for example, the decades we insisted on the notion of terra nullius followed by our refusal to apologise to indigenous Australia for the sins of the past. To do otherwise – on either count – would have been to dishonour the idea of this being “our” country, possessed by us (and no-one before us) in a nationalistic fervour that could be whipped up at whim. It would have been to discount the idea that this is our country where we can institute whatever policy we deem necessary, no matter how inhumane, to maintain our idea of law and order.
And there’s our refusal to see the suffering of asylum seekers and open our national doors for pretty much the same reasons as above: this is OUR country, not theirs. We decide who gets to live here.
As the philosopher Raimond Gaita has said in the past, love of country often degenerates. And it can often degenerate into something we may not like or even have control over. It can often encourage people to think its okay to say “we” in a way that excludes others.
It can also often degenerate into nationalistic jingoism peddled by politicians for their own political purposes.
We can however, enjoy the day off knowing that the public holiday is, indeed, the one thing we all have in common.
What does Australia Day mean to you?
*Monica Attard OAM, is a five-time Walkley award-winning Australian journalist – including the Gold Walkley Award for Excellence in Journalism 1991. She was the host of the ABC’s PM, the World Today and Media Watch. She spent 28 years at the ABC, leaving to start up The Global Mail where she was, until recently, the Managing Editor. In 1997, Monica published a book entitled Russia: Which Way Paradise? documenting her time there as a foreign correspondent. You can follow her on Twitter: @attardmon.
Nowra City Church Preaches Against Asylum Seekers
Some facts for the influential preacher Peter Pilt to consider:
* 43.7 million forcibly displaced people worldwide at the end of 2010;
* Seeking asylum in another country is not illegal;
* Howard’s Pacific Solution didn’t ‘stop the boats’ as the figures do not represent the amount of boats that were either turned back around and sent to Indonesia or sank;
* Peter Pilt has not considered the legality of seeking asylum, or the actual statistics based on what is referred to as the worldwide ‘push factor’.
If you’re given a highly influential position as some kind of minister or preacher in a church, the very least you can do is to get your fucking facts right and avoid pushing scare campaigns on social media.
The Bogot History of Straya
Once upon a time there was a mythical wide brown land called Straya. It suddenly appeared in 1788 even though according to scientists it was probably the world’s oldest continent and one of the first to be continuously inhabited by modern humans (feral unwashed leftie propaganda) and was then sprinkled with white people, something like a giant flat Pacific lamington.
There were people already living in Straya even though the English said that no one lived here so they didn’t really live here. So the English called the land “Terror Nullius” or something. Probably because these people ran away in terror and hid from the strange white ghosts. A wise move.
In many ways they probably wish they were still hiding.
Life for the people who were here in the first place changed just like this.
We can see the Aborigines got better toilets from it. That’s what true Strayans would say anyhow.
The white people liked to think they had a unique kinship with the often challenging and cruel bush, the ancient mountains, the eerie silences and the baking hot deserts. Not to mention the flies, the mozzies and the cow and sheep dung. That is why they moved as quickly as possible to the coast where most of them live now. But they still had the bush poets like Banjo Paterson, who spent most of his adult life in the harsh wilderness of Gladesville, to tell them about their bush heritage.
Life was tough in the Paterson bush hovel
All true Strayans embraced Ned Kelly and Eureka woops …
(Warning for true Strayans – feral unwashed leftie multicultural propaganda)
Straya’s best time was in the war (any war) especially the Great War where they won at Gallipoli. This was followed by WWII which they also won. Strayans don’t like to talk much about the Depression because no one won anything then and there were no Diggers.
Then there was the 1950s when absolutely everyone was white (except for the Indigenous people, the Chinese, the Afghan descendants, the Kanak descendants, the Pacific Islanders, the Cocos Malays etc etc) and had white fences around their houses. Women were called ladies and stayed home. They weren’t allowed in pubs much anyway.
A cup of tea, a Bex and a good lie down while waiting for the man of the house to come home
Strayan men on the other hand worked very hard
This was the time everyone at school saluted the British flag at morning Assembly and sang to the British Queen. And did lots of marching. That gave them lots of skills and knowledge about things.
Marching was good for the brain
And people who were not even born then remember that time, know exactly what it was like and are always talking about it and wanting to return there.
Straya rode on the sheep’s back. It must have been uncomfortable.
Straya only had two Prime Ministers.
Bogots have an innate understanding of Australian political history
They are both here. Strayans loved them
Bogots like watching telly so here’s an educational video.
Another educational video here
Why Do They Call Us Racist?? Waaaaah!
Um, we call you racists because…:
(Note: If you were wondering why so often we categorise racism with Islamaphobia, you only need to read a few of these to understand why).
Hitler: Australia’s Preferred Prime Minister
Despite mass media often denying that there are KKK and neo-Nazi remnants in Australia, we constantly find very public evidence of it.
And it seems that the kind of people shown above generally don’t like Kevin Rudd because of his immigration policies. John Howard accepted more immigrants per year into Australia than ‘Krudd’, but this fun fact is widely ignored.
Funny how these people find that accepting immigrants into our society is more detrimental than violently abusing, threatening and killing people based on their country of origin.
Below are just a handful of some of the members of the (above) group):
you said it... 
