Regardless of how you feel about their politics, you have to respect how One Nation always conduct themselves with dignity, grace, professionalism and statesmanship.
Whether they’re denying climate change or being huge homophobes or sharing their favourite Port Arthur conspiracies, they always do so with a careful consideration that forces you to listen to their ideas thoughtfully and take them extremely seriously.
Like yesterday, when it came out that their candidate for the WA seat of Pilbara, David Archibald, had written an article in ‘Quadrant‘ in 2015 in which he supported Abbott‘s much-derided comment that government-funded remote aboriginal communities were just funding people’s “lifestyle choices“.
While this is a pretty unsurprising position for a One Nation candidate, the somewhat startling nature of this was the manner in which he chose to do it – namely, by naming and shaming other “lifestyle choices” that should be defunded, like, say, single mums:
“The first that springs to mind is single motherhood. These are women too lazy to attract and hold a mate, undoing the work of possibly 3 million years of evolutionary pressure. This will result in a rapid rise in the portion of the population that is lazy and ugly.“We know what causes pregnancy these days, so everyone who gets pregnant outside of marriage is a volunteer. This is an easy one for defunding.”
But why stop there? How about people on the disability pension or people receiving childcare payments? Apparently, they too need to be defunded:
“The 800,000 Australians on the disability pension. OK, not all of them. But a good proportion are able to drive cars, bash police and each other, go fishing and so on.“Now comes federally funded childcare. This is a lifestyle choice. Looking after children is very labour-intensive.“If society wishes to encourage childbearing, it should reward that with tax rebates to the childbearing pair and leave it at that.”
There’s an argument to be made that perhaps he’s being satirical, except it’s quite clear from the rest of the article that he very much agrees with Abbott’s comments, so it’s unclear what he would be satirising, if not his own beliefs.
It seemed like this was going to be the start of them having to ditch yet another candidate but, apparently, they’re sticking up for him, in their own unique way.
They declined to comment last night but did a shunt a tweet out of Pauline Hanson‘s account this morning that seemed at least thematically tied to the incident:
To all the fat lazy politicians & fat lazy journalists in the fat lazy media playing fat lazy, PC, identity politics- The answer is no.
— Pauline Hanson (@PaulineHansonOz) January 31, 2017
I’m still not entirely sure what the question was – as a guess I would say “Will you fire David Archibald?” – but a spokesperson for One Nation did at least confirm to P.TV that the tweet was in response to the media’s attention on him.
There’s a lot to unpack here, firstly: this seems really mean. Secondly: you don’t really get to criticise “identity politics” when you have done 20 years of politicking based on trying to “preserve” white Australia’s identity, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Thirdly: this is just super weird.
WA’s One Nation leader Colin Tincknell defended him sliiightly more eloquently, saying that the comments were “tongue-in-cheek” and describing Archibald as “a bit naughty”.
With a bit more clarity, Tincknell told ‘The Australian‘ that Archibald won’t be going anywhere. Professionals, the lot of them.
Source: The Australian.
Photo: ABC.
