What mattered, in that it was useful for electoral purposes, is that stigmatising a minority community may gain votes. Race-baiting and dog-whistling are where Australian politics comes from. It has been so for a long time. Whether it was the original invaders treating Indigenous People like value-less fauna, and later on like ‘savages’; the enactment of the Influx of Chinese Restriction Act enacted in New South Wales in 1881, followed in time by other jurisdictions, because of ‘moral panic’ over Chinese miners; the discrimination against Irish because of the ignorant assumption that they were all Catholics and thus potential fifth-columnists; the internment of Germans as ‘enemy aliens’ during the first world war, and of German, Italian and Japanese ‘enemy aliens’ during the second world war; the mind-twisting obsession with ‘Asian crime gangs’ in the 1980s; or the anti-Lebanese and anti-Muslim sentiment which fuelled the Cronulla riots in late 2005, and the present Islamophobia fuelled by another ignorant, Pauline Hanson and her followers and imitators, Australia has wasted most of its historical efforts demonising one group or another.

But there is no improvement on the horizon, and not for want of trying.

via Comedy without art (part 6) – » The Australian Independent Media Network