God Peter Dutton just never stops, does he? And unfortunately for anyone who hoped our newest PM might do anything at all about bigotry in the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull apparently never fucking starts.
Following Dutto’s congratulatory little chat with Andrew Bolt last week, where both agreed parts of Malcolm Fraser’s 1970’s humanitarian intake of over 250,000 people constituted a “mistake” because a handful of second-or-third generation Australians have traveled to Islamic State war zones, Dutton confirmed yesterday that he was specifically talking about Lebanese-Australian Muslims.
Because denigrating an entire ethnic group for the crimes of a select few is the definition of racism and an incredibly hateful, irresponsible discourse for an Immigration Minister to engage with, let alone support, reporters asked Turnbull today what he thought of Dutton’s comments.
Guess how that went:
“There is no question that there are lessons to be learned from previous immigration policies and the minister was reflecting on, you know, on policies many years ago. He’s entitled to do that…I’m not making any comment on his remarks other than to say that it’s fair for all of us to reflect on past policies and how effective they were or not and seek to improve.”
He also lyingly called Dutton “a thoughtful, compassionate immigration minister,” and naturally threw in a pained, extremely pointless attack at Labor for good measure:
“The Labor party is constantly envious of Dutton’s record as an immigration minister, because every day, by his effectiveness, he demonstrates what failures they were when they were responsible for our nation’s borders.”
Describing Dutton’s blatant racism as simply learning from history, and going further in actually praising the guy who just insulted Lebanese Australians, is wildly inexcusable, lazy behaviour for a party “leader”.
It also weirdly conflicts with the half-way decent persona Turnbull curated for years before he was PM, and confirms his previous views on racism were either all an act or mean basically nothing to him now that he’s got the top job.
Naturally, Twitter was quick to cut through the PM’s bullshit and call a racist spade a racist spade:
Haaang on: in 2011 Mr Turnbull told us that denigrating immigrants was not OK. So perhaps #SackDutton indeed, hey?https://t.co/b0jSrS5ljy pic.twitter.com/vONxLBP26j
— Ivana Kovac Kuti (@IKKsays) November 22, 2016
Turnbull wriggling like a worm on a hook to avoid saying anything about Dutton’s racist attack on Lebanese Australians.
— Bernard Keane (@BernardKeane) November 22, 2016
Wonder if @PeterDutton_MP thinks my #Italian family should have been kept out of #Australia because of the #Mafia. #auspol
— Richard Di Natale (@RichardDiNatale) November 21, 2016
Considering Turnbull’s piss-weak response to George Christensen and Cory Bernardi’s disgustingly homophobic language during the Safe Schools debate, we shouldn’t have been surprised. It’s yet more proof that Turnbull’s happy to kowtow to all of the stupid shit the far-right of his party pulls.
This is the real PM: a coward, apologist for bigotry, and a massive fkn fizza. Give the video of Turnbull’s comments a squiz, if you can stomach it:
.@TurnbullMalcolm defends Peter Dutton’s record as Immig. minister, Lebanese-Muslims angry over migration comment https://t.co/1GKMDpOBh0
— ABC News 24 (@ABCNews24) November 22, 2016
Source: Guardian Australia.
Photo: Getty,
