Today has not been a great one for Australia. Between Bill Leak releasing his most cockfaced cartoon yet and Essential Research releasing a poll that suggested that 49% of Australians back Pauline Hanson‘s proposed ban on Muslim immigration, today actually sucked an entire ass.
The poll had a sample size of 1000, which probably isn’t conclusive enough to make you don a heavy coat and march into the ocean, but it is enough to make you want to stay in bed for a few days getting sad and angry about how ignorant a lot of people are.
Luckily, not everyone in Australia a complete dingus – Greens senator Scott Ludlam was also galled by the poll, writing on Facebook:
“Reports this morning about the level of public support for Hanson’s Muslim immigration ban make for sobering reading. Almost half of the country supports some sort of ban on Muslim immigration.“Most jolting for me was that the poll reported that around 1/3 of Greens voters support such a proposal. It’s only small comfort that the largest cohort that opposes the proposal are Greens voters too, but make no mistake, this division is one that will define politics for all of us for the foreseeable future.”
He acknowledged that a lot of these prejudices come from fear:
“Whether it’s the precision targeted dog-whistling of Abbott in recent years, the enfeebled opposition that failed to take on the racially loaded asylum seeker debate, the never-ending escalation of the “war on terror”, the devastation left in the wake of the failed promises of globalised corporate trade or the growing gap between the rich and poor in Australia, for too many people their fears about the future have been given a name and a face by politicians willing to exploit them.”
And that Australia is going to have to work to find alternatives to politicians like Pauline Hanson who prey on people’s fear and turn it into bigotry:
“It’s a formidable challenge, to offer alternatives, to take that fear and find a better way. But the scale of the task is nothing next to the persecution of the people coming to Australia from places like Syria, Iran or Afghanistan. These desperate people are seeking a better life, only to find that almost half of the population wants to send them away, send them anywhere but here.…“We don’t have long to address this. Indeed for those already suffering, for the hundreds of thousands of Muslim Australians already at greater risk of hate crimes and societal exclusion, we have no time at all. We need to get to work, and it is going to take every one of us, and every one else you can find.”
You can read the whole thing here:
It is a pretty disheartening time to be an Australian.
Source: Facebook.
