Webdiary - Founded and Inspired by Margo Kingston

The former member for Tablelands, Rosa Lee Long, was the only candidate to stand as a member of One Nation at the last election.

She has lost the new seat of Dalrymple, in the state's north, to the LNP.

At its peak, One Nation won 11 seats in the 1998 Queensland election.

The last member of One Nation has failed to win her seat. Let's hope it's the end of One Nation and Pauline Hanson. 

"Alga, you are like our deluded politicians. The law is new and binding dear. As of 2004, not 60 years ago. Don't believe me? Believe our own judges then because I am sick to death of saying it is not illegal. As for ideological misfits, who are they?"

Marilyn Shepherd, only bureaucrats, academics and the elitist rich are like our politicians, as that's all our politicians consist of. There are very few if any real people in politics or government and we are experiencing the results of that combination. I don't qualify, how about you.

Ideological misfits are those people who bring the worst sides of their ideology to wherever they go, so as to disrupt their new society and force their negative ideology onto the countries which accept them. I suppose you could put those who make up our poltical system in the category of ideological mifits as well, as their agenda has the same outcomes as those they import, calamity.

"And clearly as there is no offence to come here there is no such offence as people smuggling. Which part of this don’t you get? "

It's all very clear to me, it's you who don't get it. You've provided a good example of the problems real people face, what you quoted is an example of how stupid our legal system is. They are designed so the elite can manipulate them in any way they like to get the outcome they want.

It's completely illogical to have laws only those who created them understand, whilst those they effect, the people are in the dark and in the main bamboozled by the insanity of legalese and politically correct denialists babble. The stupidity of our laws makes no sense to anyone but those who use them to control society and reject true justice. It's our country and people who need justice, not elitists ego's. But I doubt those type of people could ever understand how a real Australian would think, you have to know and understand one first.

Hamish, thanks mate. I didn't specifically mention Henry Lawson, but it must be me you have in mind since noone else has gone near the aspect I'm trying to hunt down, that you've opened up.

I reckon both pieces you cite, particularly the Drovers Wife, should be read in conjunction with Louisa Lawson's Alice Gertler; an altogether darker poem incorporating a female view, with none of son Henry's observer's humour.

I guess Hansonism and Hanson represent to me a very defensive mindset. What is its ancestry?

The less sanitised evidence that betrays our history and has none of the triumphalist glory of an AB Paterson, for example, demonstrates where such a traumatised (at worst) outlook might have had its origins. Racism, gender and class oppressions point to a more Hobbesian forge for the Australian psyche's hit-out traits and it's a shame that Howard and the like attempted to santise a more accurate Australian history by whitewashing the oppressive bits with the embarkation upon the rotten culture wars and attendant Brady Bunch sanitisations of Australia, back in the nineties.

As the sages have said, it is better to "know thyself".

I don't think it's entirely fair to imply that Henry Lawson sidelined women. He was one of the few who paid a lot of attention to colonial women, and was a pioneer in doing so. I especially recommend The Drover's Wife and The Sex Problem Again.

Anthony Nolan'spost intrigues me. Fancy I'' ll check up on Therese Brennan.

Alga's and Marilyn's posts put opposing sides of what has become an either/or dichotomy, but both are civil and combined, present a rare opportunity for moving forward, if the tone stays civil.

Sufficient to say, I am relieved to see the two points of view framed in the way  they are in this thread.

Alga puts a pragmatic imperative first,concerned with practicalities,  for quite rational underlying reasons. And his approach is moral.

But Marilyn foregrounds an also firstly and formostly deeply practical approach, as well as also expressing a  motivated moral imperative but one expressed at a different aspect of arguably the same issue  I believe Marilyn s point carries with it an implicit suggestion that if the West had better belatedly clean up its own humanitarian messes, internal and external in a comprehensive way, much more pressure from within Western countries would be be applied, by the citizenry, to Western governments before they imposed avaricious IMF/world bank/IMF type economic programs on poorer countries or commenced ill-conceived military campaigns in exotic countries, often on behalf of amoral commercial interests. These damage millions of ignored locals, who ae just dismissed as "collateral damage" and set up big ant  trails of refugees fleeing for survival.

Alga, quite rightly seems to me suggesting "well, it could be worse". 

Alga, I do understand and deeply sympathise with where you are coming from. I also resent us being dragged into a distant world's mess, created largely by others tainted with character traits that Australians find distasteful. Particulalrly when we appear to have consciously attempted to develop a society deliberately in response to the flaws of the old world. You say they are not (largely ) our messes and you find some agreement in that from me. That's why I resent the Big Powers so much.

But we are complicit in the overall long term system of  neo imperialism and neo colonialism. Likely our comfortable lives come to some extent at the expense of innocent foreign people dead and alive, as good as we are.

Specifically concerning your second paragraph, in fact,   fair enough.

We are entitiled to protect ourselves on a just cause in rational ways. But the comment is to me, still too simplistic and reductionist; too "blanket" and generalised as to approach  to migrants and asylum seekers.

For example, should all refugees, including victims of wars Australia participates in, be excluded on the basis that someone who might be a bit  subversive or maybe as little as merely a bit "different" also slips under the net.  God knows we've all been picked on for being "different " sometime in our lives and know the bleak esperience of ostracismand exile from experience.

I would  like to think  it is"Aussie" to feel for the underdog. Part of the character , or at least the positive side of it, that has made us successful, that we have prided ourselves as being big enough to help out another having a bad trot and be equananimous as to point of view. If we neglect or shun the unfortunate, don't we just deteriorate to becoming just so many Ebenezer Scrooges, Wack ford Sqeers or Ralph Nicklebys (sorry, Dickens!).

Perhaps you are also thinking of the latest of our immigration waves, from Africa and the Middle East.

 If they follow the same pattern as previous waves ( Poms, Europeans, Vietnamese) they will probably, on the whole, fit in well enough. Most already do. Some, like the Academic and commentator Waleed Ali are more "Aussie than Aussie".

I think current policy shows exactly where the split between rational conservatism, let alone radicalism and Hansonism is occurring. It  fits almost exactly half way between the poles. Labor has also eased the punitive conditions on unemployment benefit for local Aussie workers ("refugees"?), unable to compete with cheap offshore imported labor. Alga fears us becoming refugees in our country.

 I feared it when I believed that the Howard government was going to bring in vast amounts of offshore labor in to cripple local working class resistance to an unjust collapsing of wages. welfare and living conditions for something more feudal, if agreeable to vested interests ( while executives continued earning vast sums of money for sacking people ).

A surpassing irony was, that while refugees were eventually kept out, accelerating  indeterminate numbers of cheap off shore workers continued to be brought in on trick visas, a  trend that will continue while the economic orthodoxy remains "growth at any cost", including the environmental sustainability on which the future viability of the country rests.

Marilyn would probably find Labor's approach, tho less crass than Howards; thus less encouraging and exploitative of the dark underbelly of the Australian psyche, still too cautious and timid. Whilst it at least doesn't valorise the worst irrationalities of Hansonism, prefaced on a nineteenth century irrational hatred of racial "others" as inferior, undeserving and degenerate (a variation on the old despising of local underprivileged  as "undeserving poor" ), it still panders to the remains of the mindset; operates within its parameters. There is still no overt challenge aimed at the bad aspects of the populist conservatist mindset. Easier to work within the current paradigm than challenge assumptions, spooking the horses.

Perhaps we are past the worst of Howardism/Hansonism and capable with a better outlook of of reassuring locals and asylum seekers alike that they need not be left behind.

But it will take a while to reduce fears both rational and irrational and this process itself will be governed by what happens in future in world affairs. We should not expect miracles from Australians and others alike, but we can see that in a decade Australia has moved forward, if some what haltingly, from a less rational, if understandable from a historic and cultural perspective position, to the current one.

Paul Walter: “A little like Alga, I was suspicious of refugees myself, but no way was the government going to tell the truth, to dispel fears, either.”

Paul Walter, I am not suspicious of refugee's in general, just the cultural, religious problems and agenda some bring with them. There have been many refugees come here and done a wonderful job of fitting in and enhancing our lives with their knowledge, abilities and compatible cultural aspects. Today most do the exact opposite, bringing the cause of their problems with them to spread around.

I agree the current reds in the closet approach is just another example of the limited intellect of ideological politicians and their short term thinking supporters.

Activists in all forms have their places and do exert pressure to make the elite come clean. But if those activists have ideological agenda's, rather than revealing truth, then they become a part of the political problem, as they too resort to lies or ideological deception to press their case.

China does have an agenda in our case, some control of our resources, which is not really different to corporate control. Nor have they lost their barbarity in maintaining control, they have changed approach and learnt how to have their cake and eat it to.

As for Fitzgibbon and his non disclosure, its the same as them all, you may find down the track Fitzgibbon ends up working for or having shares in Chinese companies, just as we have seen with polticians in the past and may see with Rudd in the future. When you have to hide assets in blind trusts, you have something to hide. Until we ban all donations, all free trips, gifts and financial or material support to political parties, politicians and bureaucrats and deny them becoming involved with any company having or had business with governments for 10 years, nothing will change.

“Our nation needs a feeble opposition like a hole in the head, and the delinquent stunts of the opposition since losing government only demonstrate how problematic the return to opposition has been for them and a country that needs them doing their job responsibly.”

With a single, two faction party in control of the country, what else can you expect. They just change positions and take on the persona of deflecting the real problems away from the people, so their other faction can operate with the least public scrutiny as they can. Attacks on individuals is just another ploy to make them look like they are doing their job. Their job should be putting forward alternative and workable solutions, rather than the long held plan of disruption and denial.

There's no different between the closeness of Howard/Rudd and USA/government/corporate sector and it's Chinese comparison. The lib/labs are ethically corrupt and probably completely corrupt in all aspects of government.

“Under Australian law it has been legal to arrive in Australia anyway possible and seek protection under the refugee convention since 1954.”

Legalising refugees to arrive in any way they could, was made more than 60 years ago, when times were very different. Now it's a very different form of refugees problem, one which is and will cause incresing trouble in this country. Today, most of these people are refugees from their own beliefs, culture and their barbaric implementation, yet they demand to bring them here to contaminate our societies into being like theirs.

Illegal or not, the refugee debate won't go away as long as people continue to see the results allowing ideological misfits into our country, to spread their draconian , suppressive and violent lifestyles amongst us.

.....open up the whole refugee debate over many years and it finally is exposed as the lie Howard told us.

Under Australian law it has been legal to arrive in Australia anyway possible and seek protection under the refugee convention since 1954.

Nothing more needs to be said about that.

Actually, above was only a draft.

In the last few days we have seen a panic about China eventuate, where  politicians are debating on whether or or not , amongst other things, the opposition is playing on Hansonist type historical anxieties concerning the old red/ yellow(stripes, polka dots?) peril.  Anxieties about the "Heathen Chinee" to the north, of course, date back to the gold rushes of the mid nineteenth century, through fears of indentured labor imported to slave under appalling conditions (Kanaka plantation workers), to recent migrant waves; post ww2.

The last phenomena coincided with the terrible McCarthyist cold war night terrors of the 'fifties, based on manipulation of lack of education and ignorance, that the Hansonist phenomena was hopefully the last dying spasm of. We could here add consideration of a related phenomena, as to the construction of a manipulable fear- and- anxiety trait in ordinary people:  the ending of the ignorance-based guilt and loathing hang ups up about sex, that was an underlying factor in cultural anxieties during preceding eras,  contributing to the general anxiety that allowed politicians and media scope for emotional manipulation. One again, the contributions of people like Prof. Marilyn Lake, as to preconditions for cultural myth-making that prefigure authoritarianism and movements like Hansonism.

But the new China Syndrome is interesting.

Firstly, because it appears to have failed where Hansonism and Aboriginal baiting succeeded or impacted- the public is too well-educated. China is not the crude, turbulent post civil war beast of paranoid Mao, equally paranoid America  and various Philistines involved. It is now a relatively  stable, if politically imperfect,  economic powerhouse member of the international community.

 Australians and others realise that the craziness that used to be there has been,  if not killed completely, at least eclipsed.

In the twenty first century current realities concern good relations of and with, a new and significant nation state of fellow humans at a make or break time in human history.

The comparison would be with Japan; once depised and hated as a barbarian empire, especially by a ww2 generation that experienced unpleasant proximity to them during ww2.  Japan was rehabilitated and rehabilitated  itself, was absorbed into the global economy as an important component and is now counted amongst the best of the civilised nations.  

Australians are not interested in illiteracy-based fantasies, unless they are part of old Hansonism/Howardism/ McCarthyism, or the obsolete evangelical push that also denies Darwinism and still has its knickers in a knot over sex.

These people had their last gasp in the ignorance and ideology, even superstition-driven monumental crudity and wastage of the Reagan- Thatcher-Bush era, that has the world now in such ecological, international affairs and economic strife currently. Neo con failed as tragically as Maoism and earlier Fascism, Nazism and Stalinism and even Ricardian authoritarian capitalism before that. It has deeply debilitated America's capacity to be a force for good over future times. 

But  now that the neo con Emperors New Clothes have been revealed on all their  tawdry squalor,  the world's people are having a moment of clarity, in which the urgency  for a fresh start as paramount is grasped. The vested interests are going to resist, but currently the world's people have a chance to want and to tell global leaders to change tack to a more rational approach, forthwith.

............................................................................................

As to the latest local storm in a teacup, it probably of more interest figuring out why Fitzgibbon didn't declare his trips to China.

We recall the kerfuffles that went on during the Howard era concerning the issue of junkets and Fitzgibbon, realising how unpopular with the public the issue is, must have ducked the issue. A bit like the Murdoch journalists who refused disclosure for AIJAC funding of their trip to Palestine about the time of the Gaza incursion( Media Watch covered this ) The practice has become something increasingly widespread and undesirable, regardless of who does it, if disclosure is not forthcoming.

But the conflation of a minister's slothfulness to a plot straight out the worst redneck fantasies, reminiscent of the nonsenses of the fifties and sixties, where a wireless receiver stayed hidden under every sympathisers bed, is a stupid shot by the opposition into its own foot . In trotting out the old nonsenses, they effectively rescued Fitzgibbon from scrutiny, also further discrediting their own capacity to be regarded as and a legitimate and credible opposition testing substantial matters.

Our nation needs a feeble opposition like a hole in the head, and the delinquent stunts of the opposition since losing government only demonstrate how problematic the return to opposition has been for them and a country that needs them doing their job responsibly.