Australians old and new converge on immigration-refugee issues.

By Gary Scarrabelotti

On June 5 Prime Minister Julia Gillard buckled under pressure from the Federal Opposition and agreed to set up an enquiry into the Latif case. 

The PM commissioned the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security to investigate why an asylum seeker, Maksoud Abdul Latif, who had been convicted in 1999 by an Egyptian military court for murder and for being a member of a terrorist organisation, went undetected as a potential security risk and allowed to while away eight months in the low-security Inverbrackie detention centre in the Adelaide hills. 

It’s a very good question and one that requires urgent examination, even if it should prove that Latif is innocent of the crimes imputed to him. 

It is not, however, the most important question of this kind facing the Australian government and our political class. 

A much more important one is how come some 200 Australians are fighting in Syria against the Assad régime and of that number some 100 are fighting with al-Nusra, a branch operation of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” ? (See our April 19 post Alarums without awakenings).

It is unlikely, however, that an open enquiry into this question will be undertaken.  This is because no Opposition would ever put a Government under pressure to investigate a matter over which both sides of politics would stand condemned. 

We have the problem of the 100 al-Nusra “Aussies”, many of whom will return “home” fired up with greater Islamist zeal and hardened by the experiences of jihad, for two reasons: first, because we conduct culturally colour-blind immigration and refugee policies and, secondly, because we do not understand Islam and we do not wish to understand it.

Leaving the great question of Islam to one side, I want to stick for now to immigration and refugee policies. 

Though by no means the deepest, one reason why we have the immigration and refugee policies that we have is because, since the time of the Whitlam government, our political masters have taken the largely unspoken view that white Australians are not morally fit to make a judgement about policies which touch so closely upon the culture of their society. 

This contempt for white Australians – or at least for a great many of us – by other white Australians went inadvertently on display on June 4. 

Laurie’s foot

That day an understandably frustrated Laurie Ferguson (the federal Member for Werriwa) complained publicly about how Labor was suffering from the unchecked flow of illegal immigrants into Australia and from Julia Gillard’s failure to convince voters about the merits of Labor’s border control policies. 

On the ABC’s Lateline, Ferguson was reported as saying about the people who were stirred up by the asylum-seeker issue: 

“This is not just racist rednecks. These are Muslims, there are Buddhists, these are people from Malaysia, these are people from Bangladesh who convey this to me. They see a Government here that they don’t think is controlling the situation. They’ve got no perception of what is happening internationally.” 

Let’s have that again:

“This is not just racist rednecks. These are Muslims, there are Buddhists, these are people from Malaysia, these are people from Bangladesh who convey this to me.”

Remember that a “redneck” is a term applied only to whites.  A “redneck” is a white man, usually a Christian, who becomes flushed or choleric when he expresses alarm or anger. On one level, “redneck” is no more than an effective descriptor of a distinctive racial and character type.  But on another, it is a killer term employed in “political discourse” to denigrate any white man who wishes to preserve his received culture and (or) who takes a critical position on the immigration-refugee policies that prevail in Anglosphere nations. When one uses the term in this way, the phrase “racist rednecks” is a tautology. 

Now it’s just possible that the Honourable Member for Werriwa has expressed himself badly and in terms for which he will soon be making his mea culpas amid sobs of remorse. But the meaning which actually popped out of Laurie Ferguson’s mouth – as distinct from some other he might have intended — was this: 

‘Whites who express concern about asylum-seeker policies are rednecks and can be dismissed.  But if you’re a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Bangladeshi, or a Malaysian, then your’ve got “cred” and you can be heard.’ 

It’s just possible that the Honourable Member for Werriwa has expressed himself badly and in terms for which he will soon be making his “mea culpas” amid sobs of remorse.

In other words, if you are neither white nor Christian, and you say Australia has a border control problem, then, by jingo, you must be right. 

Now, I for one am deeply relieved that the new arrivals in our country are generally people of common sense who can see things just as clearly — and possibly even more clearly – than us ‘older Australians’ with our purblind attachments to our own kind.  I am equally relieved that immigrant wiseheads have acquired a certain authority with the politicians. They certainly won’t bend an ear to us “rednecks”, but thankfully they’ll listen to Middle Eastern and Asian migrants.  Good! 

Magnetic society

The irony of this situation, in which the judgments of ‘older Australians’ are held in contempt, is that it is their kind of society – one created by whites stamped in the Western mould — that draws non-white, non-christian immigrants like a magnet to Australia. 

Meantime, let’s not imagine, that the wisdom of recent immigrants on border protection is deeply respected just because it is heard.  Not at all.  Recall the coda to Ferguson’s lament: 

“They see a Government here that they don’t think is controlling the situation. They’ve got no perception of what is happening internationally.”

 Get that?  “No perception”! 

In other words, not even Muslims, Buddhists, Bangladeshis and Malaysians are smart enough to understand the complexity of global people movements.  That kind of genius is the preserve, it would seem, of white Labor MPs. 

Now I find that rather rich, don’t you? 

The fact is that these new entrants into Australian society have experienced international migration from the inside — and a good many of them as country-hopping refugees and asylum seekers.  Contra Ferguson, then, I rather think they know very well what’s happening internationally. 

Something unexpected, I suggest, is taking place back home in Australia. Despite the way it has been culturally re-engineered by a succession of national governments, without consulting the people ‘in place’, there appears to have been a convergence between Australia old and new. Both are suffering from immigration-asylum-seeker overload and both, it appears, would support a much more disciplined and perhaps much less liberal immigration-refugee régime. 

Social re-engineers, you’re on notice.