The convicted racist and extreme Right-wing propagandist, Andrew Bolt, in his column today has claimed that the ABC is ignoring the Abbott government’s ‘success’ in ‘stopping the boats and the drownings’. He claims that: “The new Abbott Government’s policies to stop the boats, stop the drownings and gradually empty the detention centres are clearly working.”
Well, if one happens to be a xenophobic racist who is anxious to keep non-white foreigners out of Australia then the policies of the closet thing Australia has ever got to a fascist government are, indeed, working. But, what needs really to be asked is; are the government’s policies morally the right policies?
Bolt and the extreme Right of Australia like to argue that it’s all about stopping the drownings at sea as though they actually care that foreigners they hate are dying in their attempts to find their way to Australia. If it were just about preventing the drownings at sea then it would have been a simple task of providing either a far more efficient system of detecting refugee boats and then ensuring their safe arrival in Australia or, alternatively, providing them with seaworthy boats – as they are now doing. But, rather than forcing them back to Indonesia, which in itself puts the passengers in extreme danger, they could have been escorted to Australia in safety.
Bolt is attempting to implicate the ABC in the tragedies of the past and at the same time asking why the ABC is not supporting the government’s inhuman treatment of desperate asylum seeking refugees. Bolt has in his recent columns inferred that the ABC’s reports of asylum seekers being mistreated and abused by both the Australian Navy and by Australian authorities in the governments concentration camps on Manus Island and elsewhere are somehow ‘un-Australian’.
Bolt insists the ‘government’s policies are working’ and for xenophobic racists of Australia they are.
The problem is they are the wrong policies. They do not reflect Australia’s refugee obligations and they show Australia as a nation of unsympathetic racists, bigots, liars and hypocrites.
It is the Abbott government and the likes of Bolt that are being un-Australian by promoting their xenophobic hatreds of boatpeople under the pretence of caring about them.
We should be thanking the ABC for exposing the truth about what the government is doing in our name.
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