Immigration Minister Tony Burke is backing an inquiry to investigate how and why two psychopaths were able to stroll onto a Bondi footbridge on 14 December carrying rifles, shotguns and enough ammunition to casually pick off almost 50 victims, killing 15 of them, during nine long and terrifying minutes.
“We need answers, and we need them fast,” he says with faux urgency in a video he posted today. In contrast, other law-enforcement agencies didn’t need to wait for a political inquiry to hunt down and arrest a man for the less lethal offence of allegedly having a Nazi tattoo. Welcome to the new two-tier regime, which will only get worse next year.
Burke is the real-life equivalent of the Rt Hon Jim Hacker MP in Yes Minister demanding “I have a right to know” blended with Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau helping bank robbers make a speedy getaway and then acting comically indignant when his boss calls him an idiot and relieves him of his duties.
It would be hilarious if the only things at stake were Hacker avoiding negative stories in The Guardian and Clouseau keeping his job in the Paris gendarmerie. But Burke’s real-life stakes are infinitely higher: they are the lives of whoever will be killed in the next terrorist attack and, over the longer term (although not that much longer), Australia’s survival as a bastion of Western Civilisation.
Burke, of all people, should know what caused this attack. In March, during the federal election campaign, he attended Friday prayers in a park in Lakemba, in his western Sydney electorate of Watson, hoping to harvest a block of votes by wishing his many non-English-speaking constituents “Assalamu alaykum”, which is Arabic for, “I’ll give you free stuff if you vote for me”.
It soon became apparent that a group of thugs on a WhatsApp chat group had arranged to pay Burke a visit so they could let him know “he wasn’t welcome”. Luckily the Australian Federal Police were across it, and were able to whisk Burke to safety, which, if I’m not mistaken, was somewhere well beyond his own electorate.
If Burke was half as diligent as he is ridiculous, he would be insisting that one of the terms of reference for the aforementioned inquiry is: “Why don’t all the little people have their own contingent of AFP officers to protect them from these random assailants?”
But alas this inquiry isn’t interested in the safety of constituents. Like all inquiries, its primary purpose is to gloss over inconvenient facts, produce a report that puts a neat bow on the issue and lets whichever politicians are responsible off the hook.
Burke himself says as much. The main reason he disagrees with holding a full-blown royal commission is that it would compel witnesses who could explain the source of the hatred that inspired the gunmen at Bondi in the first place. Burke can’t allow that to happen because it would “provide a platform for some of the worst voices… [which makes him] deeply concerned in terms of social cohesion”.
That’s like a drug dealer saying he’s worried his clients might die of an overdose.
Burke isn’t the sharpest knife in the Cabinet, but surely even he can see the bleeding obvious: that the people he and Labor (and to a lesser extent the Coalition) have been importing in their hundreds of thousands over the past three decades in order to secure blocks of votes in formerly working-class suburban electorates are exactly the same people who are chasing him out of his own neighbourhood and shooting Jews dead in theirs.
Burke and Albanese managed to talk about the inquiry for 18 and a half minutes on Monday without mentioning the M word once. AFP commissioner Krissy Barrett, accompanied by Albanese, came out two days later to reassure the public that, “There is no evidence to suggest these alleged offenders were part of a broader terrorist cell, or were directed by others to carry out an attack.”
Technically, she’s correct. But the alleged gunmen also, however, left certain religious literature in their car that might provide some evidence about their motive that contradicts Barrett’s speedy conclusion.
If the furore over what type of inquiry the government should conduct has achieved anything for Albanese and Burke, it is to obscure the fact that, actually, no inquiry is necessary at all. A blind man can see what the problem is. And the solution, although tough, is also obvious: if Australia is to remain a bastion of Western Civilisation, it needs to reunite beneath one Christian culture. This necessitates the closing of all mosques. The only alternative is self-annihilation followed by subjugation by a country or culture with more aggressive ambitions than the namby-pamby multicultural bollocks that passes for Australian aspirations these days.
For all of my adult life, the thought that Iran would one day teach Australia a lesson in civic pride seemed about as likely as Chopper Read winning best floral display at the Chelsea Flower Show. But that is exactly what is happening today. The Iranians — or as I prefer to call them, Persians — are rising up in masses to potentially and finally overthrow their religious overlords just as our own government is taking its first tentative steps towards making Australia the next Islamic republic.
It won’t be long before Muslims are the only friends Burke and Albanese have left, the odd inner-city socialist, ABC hack and Aboriginal industry freeloader notwithstanding. Don’t be surprised if, out of desperation to gain favour in their new heartland, they offer the Ayatollah political asylum after a helicopter rescues the religious tyrant from the mobs encircling his compound.
If you think that’s an outrageous prospect, then allow me to remind you that British Prime Minister Keir Starmer this week warmly welcomed Alaa Abd el-Fattah, who once said Britons are "dogs and monkeys" and Downing Street should be burned down, back from a stint in an Egyptian jail. He was “delighted” to have this fine man back in the country, he said (Starmer has since been forced into a minor backflip).
You might want to make the most of the champagne tonight, while you can. Next year is going to be a wild ride.
