The White Australia Policy redux

It’s all so predictable. So laughably predictable. Angus Taylor, satrap of the US imperium, supporter of the mad king’s war, Aussie patriot who is never more enthusiastic about the national interest than when he is prostituting it to his Israeli and American masters. Angus Taylor, cheer leader for the regime that spreads chaos across the globe like piss spreading across the footpath from a collapsed drunk’s pants. How to respond to the fuel and economic crisis caused by the lunatic war you support? No meaningful ideas that would actually help? Opposed to the one thing that would actually make a difference – the hastened roll-out of renewable energy? Then play your trump card, of course: immigration.

And to announce it, Taylor, predictably, rolled out the Liberals’ turd that just won’t flush, Howard, who made a political career out of victimizing vulnerable people and using race to sow discord. According to Taylor, migrants to Australia should support “Australian values”, such as democracy and respect for the rule of law. This rules out, immediately, those who Taylor seems most determined to emulate – Trump and his gang of oligarchic authoritarians.

Also to be copied from the failing Trumpian state are more deportations (would you like ICE with that?) and scrutiny of social media (clearly privacy and freedom of speech and thought are not core Australian values in Taylor’s view). It never ceases to amuse me how Australia’s right-wingers, claiming to be such great patriots, can never come up with an idea they haven’t stolen from overseas – in the old days the mother country, England, today, Trump’s US.

Is there any vicious idea that a right-winger can’t hide behind a mealy-mouthed incantation of the “national security” mantra? No doubt Howard always thought that the end of the White Australia Policy was a terrible moment for the nation. And now here’s little Angus surreptitiously bringing it back. Clever Angus. He’s even worked out that you can’t say “coloured” or “Asiatic” anymore. Just say that those Palestinians fleeing Israeli genocide are a “security risk”. Huzzah! No more dirty foreigners oops, I mean “subversive migrants”.

According to Taylor, Australia should not take migrants from countries ruled by “fundamentalists, extremists and dictators”? This would rule out Israelis and Americans, of course, although one suspects that in Taylor’s world it’s only leaders of non-white nations that are capable of such poor behaviour.

The supreme, bitter irony is that if Taylor’s prohibition on people fleeing such nations had been in force after 1933, it would have prevented Australia accepting Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.(1)

The other entirely predictable thing about Taylor’s announcement is that it reveals the persistent inability of the Coalition to learn anything. All the evidence from around the world – even from English-speaking countries, so Taylor has no excuse – suggests that when right-wing or centre-left parties try to steal the policies of far-right parties on issues like immigration it does them no good. Why vote for a cheap imitation when you can vote for the real thing? Why vote for Badenoch when you can vote for Farage? Why vote for Angus when you can vote for Pauline?

Fellow Australians – when contemplating the Coalition’s immigration policies, don’t forget to flush.

(1) Of course, Australia was not particularly welcoming of German Jews back then anyway. Taylor would have made it even worse.

I’ve used this image before, but it’s worth repeating. In Kassel, Germany.