Terrible predatory forces are eating away at the country. The corporatists, militarists and political mandarins that serve them are the enemy. It is not our job to make them more appealing, but to destroy them. There are amongst us genuine freedom fighters of all ethnicities and backgrounds whose integrity does not permit them to serve the system of inverted totalitarianism that has destroyed our democracy, impoverished the nation and perpetuated endless wars. Diversity when it serves the oppressed is an asset, but a con when it serves the oppressors.
We need to be careful to not assume that these high-profile cases are exceptions. They are the tip of the iceberg. I hear racist, homophobic and other slurs around difference at my local golf club and in other places where people mix, on a regular basis. And so do you. We damn the different, no matter what the form. We don’t value diversity, only diversity that makes others more the same as us, in other words, assimilation. We want migrants to be Australians, as long as they cook their authentic national dishes. Sadly, we are not as civilised as we would like to think ourselves to be. I think we are getting better at calling out prejudice when we see it but we still need much more leadership from politicians and institutions such as those that support the events I’ve described above. The quip of the week goes to Deborah Devine who talked about her son Dan Levy, the star of Schitt’s Creek, who is gay. She had a message to Dan’s bullies at a school camp when he was a boy: “Live from New York, it’s Saturday Night!” Dan was hosting the prestigious program, a measure of his enormous success.
The headmaster told Ian, “This new kid’s dad has just committed suicide. Look after him.” He was incredibly friendly and nice. He came from a really established family – there were so many things expected of him that no one would have dreamt of for me. My family was such a disaster, I could have said to my mother, “After school, I’m going to South Africa to become a mercenary,” and she would have said, “No worries.” We clicked through drama. We’d stay up late, improvising poems or lying onstage in the school theatre telling stories. It was like a love affair; that intensity, that closeness. When I look back at all those years after school, as a drug addict and a complete mess of a human being, I often wonder why Ian stuck with me. But I guess when things got weird, he remembered that kid. After school, we lost touch: he did uni and got into finance; I was expelled from the National Institute of Dramatic Art and got into drugs. Then we ran into each other on Collins Street in Melbourne. I was in op-shop clothes, probably going into withdrawal, completely broke. He was wearing this gorgeous suit, looking like a million bucks. We were both jealous of each other. I’m thinking, “God! He probably spends more on lunch than I do in a week!” And he’s thinking, “He’s living this wonderful bohemian artist’s life.”
IN RECENT MONTHS, many questions have been raised over the degree of influence Australia’s media corporations are having on the day-to-day lives of Australians.
The latest Federal Election makes it clear that Rupert Murdoch remains powerful.
He and his News Corp entities have had an enormous grip on much of the news media, particularly in print and online formats, which we consume daily.
When joined by Australia’s television juggernauts Seven, Ten, Nine and Win, and radio broadcasting giant Macquarie group, it becomes increasingly alarming as to the lack of diversity displayed across Australia’s media landscape.
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