Politics

THE FISH AND CHIP SHOP LADY RETURNS

In an interview with Pauline Hanson, journalist Andrew Bolt revealed his children had been threatened by Islamists and two of his colleagues had also had to change addresses because of threats.

Where most people simply heard anguished concern from a father worried about his children, others, with more feverish brows, heard a dog whistle.

According to some overheated Facebook writer, Bolt’s concern for his children typified his performance as a ‘disgusting lowlife slag’ and an ‘elitist fascist’ who is now ‘bleating after 20 years of attacking low and middle class earners.’

This sums up the Left today, zero compassion, complete intolerance plus excess abuse for anyone with whom they disagree.

Bill Shorten has fostered this climate of hate with his low, abusive performance towards the moderate conservative senator, Cory Bernardi (Liberal SA). As the latter was walking past a press conference the Labor leader was giving in Parliament House, Bernardi was accused loudly of being a ‘homophobe’ simply because of his consistent support for traditional marriage. Perhaps Shorten is a homophile.

Meanwhile Hanson’s temerity to rise, phoenix like, from the ashes after a distant two year stint in the Australian House of Representatives (1996-98) has caused the usual facile derision from certain members of the lame-stream media.

They just don’t get it. Hanson is back in favour precisely because she is perceived as the little Aussie battler who is prepared to raise community concerns, on Islam, that a gutless media recoils from.

When the media attack Hanson large sections regard it as an attack on them. They know minority rights have replaced equal rights.

On July 7 some media nonentity, from the SMH, saw fit to write an article breathlessly informing the nation that Pauline had been (allegedly) caught drinking milk that was Halal. Oh really? Well, stop the press, wheel out the tumbril and let us be done with her!

The reality is that fatuous comments like that simply give more grist to the Hanson mill. As the Senator-elect has stated before Halal items should be clearly, not surreptitiously, marked on food items so that people should have the right to boycott such products in the super market. Indeeed, and that is a debate just waiting to be brought on by the feisty politician.

Elsewhere in cloud cuckoo land, students are being denied access to a computer lab in Queensland University of Technology because of their race. This was reserved for Aboriginal students and those turned away were further complained about them under the Racial Discrimination Act with the university complainant making a claim for almost $250,000 on the grounds of causing her ‘offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury’. One wonders how the students feel?

 Also to suggest that students wishing to access a study place somehow made that area ‘culturally unsafe’ belongs in the theatre of the absurd.

The Australian Human Rights Commission is a complete misnomer because it stands for pandering to minority rights over equal rights and would appear to have earned the same disrespect, among the general populace, as Roland Freisler’s Court did in another place and another time.

Under the odious section 18c of the Racial Discrimination Act people who may give offence to a group can be dealt with, upon complaint, before some latter day star chamber. Indeed Andrew Bolt was a victim of this pernicious clause in 2011, when marked to play the role of a latter day Thomas a’ Beckett.

Tony Abbott ‘squibbed’ his opportunity to ‘rid of us of this troublesome clause’  (apologies to Henry II for paraphrasing), and  the present, temporary, prime ministerial incumbent, Malcolm Turnbull, also has no intention of taking any ‘courageous decisions,’ on this front.

The arrogance of the Race Commissioner, Tim Soutphommasane, to invite Pauline Hanson to ‘meet with him to discuss her views,’ should be treated with the contempt it deserves. The nation has just had an election and a sizeable number of voters have given her endorsement.

Therefore, she does not need to go, cap-in-hand, to an overpaid bureaucrat, being paid in excess of $300,000 per annum, to gain his imprimatur.

Instead, he may well find himself being asked to attend her office to ‘please explain’ his offensive stretch in linking Brexit, Donald Trump and herself as manifestions of racism and xenophobia. She may also ask him about his deafening silence when left wing extremists denigrate people with conservative viewpoints; and further why, as journalist Jennifer Oriel notes, ‘there is the codification of racial inequality in discrimination law and affirmative action.’ As Oriel further said, ‘the codified bigotry of the Racial Discrimination Act and censorship of dissent under 18c offends the principal of equality and fairness that made the modern West.’ (The Australian 11 July, 2016 p.12)

Indeed, universal human rights have now been substituted for minority rights –except of course in South Africa where clearly, to coin a phrase, white lives do not matter, as the constant cultural and physical attacks on Afrikaners amply illustrate.

This is why people like Hanson and Bolt deserve attention and respect. They stand up. Pauline is not always the most elegant wordsmith; Andrew, fine writer that he is, is also a little clumsy in front of the camera but both have good instincts and the courage to take the constant blows rained on them by their more manic and maniac detractors.

For those who have constantly heaped odium and verbally battered the former fish shop proprietor understand that she also knows a thing or two about batter and may well be ready to use that experience again. Watch her grow in the job.

Footnote: Former Labor Prime Minister,Gough Whitlam (1916-2014) would have turned 100 today (11 July). Whitlam, like NSW Labor Premier Jack Lang (1932) was sacked and both died at 98.