If now is not the time to ‘man-up’ against a wildly unprepared and frankly juvenile opposition, then when will be? As Clare O’Neil stated so clearly in 2022,
“The question for us is: is the safest thing for these 13 children to grow up in a squalid camp where they’re subjected to radical ideologies every single day and then return to Australia at some point when they’re an adult, or is it safer for us to bring them here so they can live a life around Australian values?”
The children have never held a weapon. They are children, and most of their mothers were children, or if not children, obviously under the influence of older husbands and fathers, when they went to Syria. It was a massive mistake, but in most cases they lacked agency in the decision.
This ‘debate’ shows the absolute moral bankruptcy of our current political leadership. It is the worst example of racist group-think we have seen since the White Australia policy.
Our women and children have been subjected to layers of inhuman punishment in Syria, for years, and now both ‘sides’ are vying to show their righteous judgement. It reeks of hypocrisy and of stone cold hearts. And all it is is a dog whistle. Pauline Hansen must be salivating.
First we get to show that the Syrians, (Muslims) are cruel and inhuman. Proven by the women’s living conditions. Secondly, it actually doesn’t matter how uncomfortable and degrading the conditions are, because those affected are, in a word, Muslims. So why pity them, or help save them? They deserve nothing more.
It gets worse. He uses his mother’s past opinion, that “if you make your bed, you must lie in it”, for his own political purposes. He is actually re-purposing his mother’s homely saying to bolster his own despicable position, which actually amounts to negligence in public office. Of course we don’t have such a law in Australia, or most of our political class would be in jail.
And then we have the opposition actually wanting to criminalise the act of assisting. If you needed some indication that our political discourse is in the gutter, the Labor Government, led by the human weather vane, thinks he is onto a winner by tacitly approving their suffering, and meanwhile feeling nothing but contempt for his fellow citizens.
To not assist looks very like dereliction of duty to me, in that they have passports, which mandates that they receive consular assistance, BECAUSE THEY ARE ENTITLED to be assisted.
This is, if not clear evidence that he is not fit to be a national leader, at the least proof that his judgement is very flawed. Just quietly it also tacitly legitimises the anti-Islamic feelings of some of the population, still smarting from the Bondi massacre.
I am ashamed to be an Australian when we all gang up on women and children, many of whom were either too young or too dominated by their spouses and fathers to have made any sort of informed choice.
So we watch the opposition trying to ‘out-hate’ Hansen and her fellow travellers, and Labor lags behind the two right wing parties. Albanese may as well saddle up with them, because being Prime Minister still carries weight, especially when you utilise the dog-whistle.
Watching the opportunists use victims as nationalist bait is nauseating. We all know the range of consequences the women and children might face if they don’t get to leave. They range from death, to forcible marriages, to the children being groomed for a lifetime of terrorism, to any number of catastrophes for children whose only crime was to choose their parents very unwisely.
And wouldn’t it be refreshing if we had some idea of how the families repatriated earlier, in 2019 and 2022, have functioned since their return.
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