If you’re not already angry about the Liberal Party‘s proposed lifetime ban on settlement in Australia for refugees who come by boat, you should be – it’s fucking heinous.
It’s been a particularly shitty year for Australian politics, any hope we had of Malcolm Turnbull coming in and whipping the Libs into a sensibly moderate, somewhat socially progressive, less xenophobic party have been dashed as he’s caved time and time again to pressure from the vocal dipshits in the party’s more conservative wing.
Pauline Hanson somehow managed to worm her way back into Aussie politics, jimmying herself into the Senate along with three other weirdos, at least two of which are certifiably insane. Polling has shown that an extremely disheartening amount of the population supports at least one of One Nation‘s fucked policies – and now the government is getting praise from these racist yahoos for their own similarly-themed policy decisions.
But there’s hope, right? We have a major party that’s vaguely left of the centre enough to stand up to such unambiguously inhumane punishment to those doing what they can to flee persecution – surely we can rely on the Labor Party to tell the Libs to get fucked?
Well, sort of. We can rely on them telling the Libs to get fucked, but it doesn’t look like we can rely on them to actually do anything about it, and the way the media is reporting it is pretty telling about how piss-weak the Labor party are.
Take the Sydney Morning Herald as an example, their article entitled “Labor leader Bill Shorten slams Malcolm Turnbull over refugee ban announcement” literally starts by saying that they will likely support it:
“Opposition Leader Bill Shorten says Labor will consider the government’s new crackdown to stop refugees held in offshore detention facilities from ever coming to Australia, but has branded some aspects “ridiculous” and accused Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull of caving to right-wing extremists in the Coalition.”
It seems incredibly like a self-own to accuse Turnbull of “caving to right-wing extremists” when in all likelihood they too will be caving to the exact same pressure, but this is unfortunately quite typical of Labor, who need to employ a fair bit of cognitive dissonance to maintain support from voters who are quite often much further to the left than they are.
For instance, in the wake of infamous shitlord Mike Baird backing down from NSW‘s ban on greyhound racing, NSW Labor piled in on Baird for changing his mind, even though they had been opposed to the greyhound ban all along – they wanted to capitalise on Mike Baird having a bad opinion, even though it was a bad opinion that they themselves had been strongly promoting the whole time.
Shorten’s response was cute, sure:
“He’s earning the praise of Pauline Hanson – I hope he’s proud of that. The old Malcolm Turnbull would never have proposed this to keep the extremists in his party happy.“We’ll look closely at the legislation when the government can be bothered releasing it.”
But it doesn’t mean fuck all if they continue to unquestioningly support the Coalition‘s asylum seeker policies. I’ll be applauding his little one-liners when Labor actually takes a stand against Dutton and Turnbull’s draconian anti-refugee bullshit.
Photo: Getty Images / Scott Barbour.
