Category

Society

April 18, 2018
0

After all, we have had routine forays into populist extremism from the mid 1990s with the likes of Hansonism without it ever threatening our democracy. Our politics may be dreadful, a black comedy pregnant with collapse, its actors exhausted, without imagination or courage or principle, solely obsessed with pillaging the tawdry jewels of office and fleeing into distant sinecures as ambassadors or high commissioners, or with paid up Chinese board posts, while outside the city burns.

Richard Flanagan
March 28, 2018
1

The great tragedy of the shamelessly regressive politics of Pauline Hanson is not so much that it is rooted in ignorance, prejudice and fear, though it is; not so much that it projects the ugly face of racism, though it does; not so much that it is dangerously divisive and deeply hurtful to many of her fellow Australians, though it is; not even that will cripple our efforts to enmesh ourselves in a region wherein lie the jobs and prosperity of future generations of young Australians, though it will – the great tragedy is that it perpetrates a myth, a fantasy, a lie. The myth of monoculture. The lie that we can retreat to it.

Paul Keating
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