Why is the dog whistle successful in Australia?

This is how it goes.  Many people are outraged when non-white migrants struggle to feel welcome here, and especially when a few disturbed young people choose a violent, radicalized response.

The boot is put into asylum seekers, refugees, Muslims and any other soft targets of a good dog whistle. Our leader morphs as he passes from one bunch of electors to another, desperately seeking legitimacy, and failing that, a semblance of a legacy beyond ‘stopping boats', offshore gulags, Muslim baiting, climate change denial, Aboriginal marginalization and Sudanese vilification. Good luck, g'day, where the bloody hell are you?  Those that have tracked the dog whistle politics of the LNP know they routinely stir the racist underbelly of the body politic when they are under pressure.

In recent times who better to start the ball rolling than that bastion of fairness, Peter Dutton? They know their market when it comes to the race whistle. It has worked miracles for them in the past. 

We have been subject to a radical reactionary agenda that has taken Australia away from the political middle ground. Many of the media hacks don't understand that a large percentage of Australians have finally seen through the LNP extreme agenda, despite the lazy work of the hacks on the subject, and they don't like what they see. Morrison tries to hide his real self, but just a casual survey of changes wrought on the LNP watch reveal an ongoing determination to 'Americanize' our society and economy. 

I believe profoundly that much else besides the relative utility of human beings as units of production matters if you want to strengthen community and the social underpinnings of the body politic. I'm afraid the 'insider' hacks spend too much time around the political makers and shakers; they have largely lost sight of what matters.  Human rights considerations have dropped off the radar of politicians and their pamphleteers embedded in the 'LNP zone'. 

Despite a shifting backdrop of many white Australians having gone through a dark night of the soul and admitting they may have been part of the problem, and of small 'l' Liberals across the land fleeing the LNP war camp as it lines up one weak, marginal group after another for being un-Australian and in need of 're-training' in our ways, the racial attacks of Dutton and Morrison on Muslims everywhere and Sudanese migrants in Melbourne, one of the most vulnerable groups to ever seek shelter here, continue to scrape a well-scraped barrel.

Beneath the obvious default responses to people with different cultures arriving uninvited, lurk guilt complexes in the Australian psyche over treatment of Aboriginal people that surface in strange ways. Many of our fellow citizens and their forebears have built their fortunes on the backs of generations of 'black fella' misery and misfortune. They seem to have developed a racial psychosis to protect their sensitive souls from having to front up to what they and these forebears have done to the first Australians.
 
It is an ironic aspect of this phenomenon that quite a few of the most rabid proponents of 'white Australia' have a mixed race dynamic in the family cupboard.
 

This is my message to those drawn to the dog whistle:

It is about time this country faced up to the dispossession and cultural genocide perpetrated by forebears on indigenous people.

Part of this construct should see Australia become a welcoming safe haven for all people fleeing oppression on racial, ethnicity and religious grounds.   

That dark night of the soul and the manifest fear of the 'dark’ other will only be more broadly mitigated by a reconciliation that sets this country on a course to undo the damage of the past. 

Asylum seekers & Nauru- "Aid: With Strings Attached"

Asylum seekers & Nauru- "Aid: With Strings Attached"

Regular readers of this blog will know that Tampa and the Pacific Solution were the catalyst for my discursive rantings on Australia's human rights record over the last decades.

Over the years I have posted on the miscasting of aid to Nauru and elsewhere under corrosive asylum seeker policies and the alarming 'somnambulism' of the Australian people as these events unfolded. I have been critical of Australia's fourth estate for largely failing to expose and condemn Howard's approach to human rights. The profound negative implications of the Howard experiment and its lengthy aftermath for the health of Australia's body politic will be the subject of much reflection in coming years.

Writing in New Matilda in 2007, Nic MacLellan underscored the tawdry misuse of official aid under the Pacific Solution and the downstream implications of the strategy, which was made up on the run by bureaucrats trying to engineer good outcomes from bad motives. He quoted my published condemnation of aid to Nauru as "‘an unmitigated bribe’ to ensure the Pacific Solution continued". The public sector reform 'conditionality' that evolved was a half-baked and largely punitive response to Nauru's failed economy, wages crisis, decrepit infrastructure, growing civil unrest and the potential impact this instability could have on the management of the island. 



 
Australia bullied, bribed and coerced its way to the current situation. The challenge remains to help Nauru avoid total failure as a state by salvaging its limited resource base sufficiently to sustain its small population into the future. We must commit ourselves to a genuine long term development partnership. The next Australian government must discard the cynical, mercenary gambit to compensate Nauru for hosting our offshore detention facilities and put the bilateral relationship on a proper footing.

It is necessary for the next government to investigate this dark chapter. I hope my oft repeated call for an inquiry (preferably a Royal Commission) to shine a light into the dark recesses of the Pacific Solution and the bad governance it spawned will be realized.