There are, of course, easier ways to get in the ear of Prime Minister Anthony Albanese than marching in large groups and waving Australian flags, as hundreds of thousands of people plan to do across Australia this Sunday.
Just ask Australian cricketers Pat Cummins and Usman Khawaja, who both scored private meetings with the PM this week — the former to discuss climate change, the latter to whine about “Israel using starvation as a weapon” against his co-religionists in Gaza.
What both these issues have in common, apart from being yet another excuse to bleed even more money from long-suffering Australian taxpayers, is that neither of them is even real.
Climate change is based on the fear that the carbon-dioxide emitted by Australia, which is a tiny proportion of the total emitted by humans worldwide, which in turn is tiny compared to naturally occurring carbon-dioxide, which itself is a minuscule part of the gases in the Earth’s atmosphere, is causing imaginary floods and droughts in Australia.
Cummins opened the batting in this pair of meetings by asking Albo to flick a lazy $100 million to cricket clubs around the country to alleviate the catastrophic consequences of the unchanging climate. Naturally, the PM was all ears:
Khawaja’s meeting a couple of days later was supposedly private. “I would never dream about going in there and tell the Prime Minister how to do his job but there are some things I’m passionate about,” he later told the ABC, then coyly divulged that he had discussed the issue of sanctions against Israel for not allowing food into Gaza.
But like Cummins blaming non-existent climate change on humanity’s virtually non-existent carbon-dioxide emissions, Khawaja let loose about a non-existent famine being caused by Israel’s non-existent food blockade.
Had the PM played cricket as a young lad — instead of bludging off the rest of us by hanging around a housing estate with his single mum etc etc — he would have been the type of bowler who appealed every delivery that had the remotest chance of being given out because he knows that even the most contrary facts amount to nothing once the umpire has made a call.
The same applies in politics. If your key policies, such as climate change and the culpability of Israel in Gaza, are based on fantasies, you need all the help you can get to convince everyone else that reality is wrong and your delusions are correct. And in a sports-mad country like Australia, a couple of Test cricketers fits the bill very nicely.
As if that’s not enough, the PM is also being kept busy and visibly stressed by the onerous task of denying the real and relevant concerns felt by people like you, me and the hundreds of thousands of other Australians who will be waving Australian flags in cities around the country on Sunday.
You’ve got to feel sympathy for Albo here. It’s not easy to denounce masses of people waving the flag of the nation of which you are nominally the Prime Minister. Denying as many people as possible the flags to which they are entitled is a start, but it’s hardly enough. Luckily, he’s got no shortage of help to convey the message that patriots are in fact unpatriotic.
Immigration Minister Tony Burke took the majority of the burden by audaciously vilifying those who like the country the way it is — or was — as enemies of the culture.
“We stand with modern Australia against these rallies — nothing could be less Australian,” he said.
Obviously, that’s not entirely accurate. Nothing could be less Australian than Burke himself greeting a constituent outside a polling booth in Bankstown in May.
For those who don’t know it, “assalamu alaykum” is Arabic for “peace be upon you”. Apart from talking to a constituent in a foreign language, since when has a politician in Australia, one of the most peaceful nations in modern history, needed to greet a constituent by wishing peace upon her? If we are suddenly afraid of war breaking out, could it have something to do with Burke’s “modern Australia” being less harmonious than the Australia it’s replacing?
Burke has personal experience of the dangers caused by mass immigration. In March, during the federal election campaign, he visited a mosque in his own electorate, which triggered a group of unassimilated constituents to decide they would like a word with their local member, and it wasn’t “assalamu alaykum”. The Federal Police got wind of their imminent arrival and quickly whisked Burke to safety.
Burke’s electorate is 23 per cent Islamic, the highest percentage in the nation. Here’s a photo of him and his supporters a few weeks later, on the night he retained his seat in parliament.
Burke lecturing us about what it means to be Australian is like Dan Andrews lecturing gymnasts about the safest way to walk down stairs.
There is, of course, no shortage of members of the nominal Opposition parties who are jumping aboard Albo and Burke’s anti-Australian crusade. Victorian Opposition leader Brad Battin, for example, said the marches are “unacceptable” and “(do) not align with the values of an inclusive, tolerant and multicultural state.”
Well, that’s all the more reason to go then, given the miserable failure multiculturalism has turned out to be.
And that’s the point, innit? For a few years now, we in Australia have consoled ourselves that, as bad as things have got, at least our multiculture wasn’t as dystopian as Britain’s. But, as I published a few days ago, in many ways we are even worse. These figures can’t be repeated often enough:
31.5 per cent of Australians were born overseas. In Britain the equivalent number is 14 to 17 per cent.
Roughly 2.5 per cent of Australia’s population arrived in the last year. In Britain, the equivalent figure is a relatively modest 1.4 per cent.
3.4 per cent of Australians have trouble speaking English or can’t speak it at all. In Britain, it’s only 1.8 per cent.
And most alarming of all: Migrants living in Australia sent about $38 billion of the wages they earned riding Deliveroo bikes or being rude to Uber passengers back to their home country last year. In Britain, they sent only $18 billion.
All we need now is for a teenage girl in the western suburbs of Sydney to be arrested for threatening a creepy migrant man with a knife because she fears becoming yet another statistic in a government-assisted rape epidemic, and the process will be complete.
That’s just one of the millions of reasons I will be marching on Sunday.
I may be wrong, but there might be some people who intend to join the march to vent their pent-up frustration about being ignored by media and politicians hell-bent on steering our country into oblivion. It’s a tempting opportunity, to be sure, but let’s not. Let’s instead make it a fun celebration of the real Australia — the one Albo, Burke, Battin and the rest of the pissant politicians and narcissistic journalists wish never existed — the one that is free, happy and deeply grateful for our flawed but glorious history and culture.
I’ll see you there.
