David Penberthy: No-one in politics deserves abuse from idiots

THESE attacks on politicians aren’t a Left-Right thing, but a sad demonstration of the ‘arseholeification’ of public discourse in this country, writes David Penberthy.

Sam Dastyari copped racist taunts in a Melbourne Pub in a video posted to Facebook by the far right group Patriot Blue. (Pic: Facebook)

IF you want to see how politics is changing for the worse in Australia, look less at the monstering of Labor Senator Sam Dastyari by a pair of racist bigots at a Melbourne pub than the pathetic excuse-making that has characterised the reaction to the incident.

It is bad enough that a politician cannot enter a public place to take part in an open conversation without being menaced, threatened and abused.

What’s worse is that, when it happens, so many people will turn around and say it was probably the politician’s fault that it occurred.

That is exactly what has happened since Dastyari was bailed up by these halfwits in a Melbourne pub on Wednesday, with every unthinking right-wing ideologue in the land piling on to say that he is either a wuss who can’t stand a bit of harmless attention, or a troublemaker who brought it upon himself.

The fact that these two men hailed from an organisation known as Patriot Blue has been held up as evidence that Australia is playing witness to the rise of the Far Right, as has happened in the United States and in western Europe.

Well, it might be evidence of that. What it definitely is evidence of is a broader deterioration of civility and reason at either extreme of the political divide.

Sam Dastyari copped racist taunts in a Melbourne Pub in a video posted to Facebook by the far right group Patriot Blue. (Pic: Facebook)

It makes no difference to me if it is former prime minister Tony Abbott being belted in Hobart, or conservative columnist Andrew Bolt being attacked at a book launch, or Dastyari being called a monkey and told to go back to Iran by two blokes who clearly wanted nothing more than for the Senator to give them a shove so they could assault him.

Be it the extreme Right or the extreme Left, these people share a common disregard for freedom of speech and freedom of assembly.

Their conduct is an offence to what should be bedrock values in a democratic society like ours. If these boofheads are bad, so too are their enablers in the comments section online and on social media who seek to excuse or rationalise their shocking behaviour.

When Bolt was belted it was almost party time at Fairfax, who chipped the bloke for having the temerity to fight back in self defence, while across social media all the lefties were squealing with delight at the fact that Bolt had been targeted for a random assault.

So too with Abbott, where the attack was hailed as the kind of thing you could expect when you had played the politics of division with such aggression and for so long.

A quick glance at the commentary surrounding Dastyari, particularly from the more rabid loonies in The Australian’s online comments section, provides the right wing counterpoint to all the exculpatory rubbish the Left was peddling in relation to the attacks on Bolt and Abbott.

Neil Erikson and a group of men, physically threatened Labor Senator Sam Dastyari and launched a racist verbal attack on him at a pub in Melbourne. (Pic: Facebook)

“Rude, but not aggressive,” a reader called Michael wrote. “Annoying and they should have left him alone. But it is not as bad as Abbott & Hanson get.”

Darren wrote: “While not condoned, Dastyari is a ‘self promoter’ and this kind of heckling goes with the territory.”

On and on it went.

This column is not a defence of Dastyari.

I would admit to enjoying the bloke’s indefatigable nature, and admiring his boyish enthusiasm, but he is hardly an asset on the political stage given his shady dealings with Chinese donors and his questionable pedigree in the murky world of NSW Labor’s Sussex St machine.

But no-one in politics deserves treatment like this and it’s appalling that, to quote Darren from above, people in Australia now openly argue that this kind of thing “goes with the territory”.

The territory is shifting so far that good people will baulk at the idea of going into politics.

Unless you are an anarcho-syndicalist you have to concede that we have to be governed by somebody. That’s why we have elections every few years, to work out who gets the chance to rule us.

Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott was assaulted in the form of a headbutt while in Hobart in September. (Pic: AAP)

That’s the time at which you get to express your view in a direct sense, not when you decide to barrel into a pub with your skinhead mates to racially vilify someone, or when you happen to see a conservative ex-PM crossing the street and opt to plant one on him.

This episode does say a bit about the rise the Alt-Right, to borrow an expression from American political vernacular, and mostly it says that they are profoundly stupid.

As Graham Richardson said the other night, if I was that dumb I would try to keep it to myself, whereas these blokes filmed their own stupidity and then posted it for the world to see.

Even while wearing branded clothing from their place of work, from whence, in happy news, they now risk dismissal.

Ultimately though, none of this is a clear Left-Right thing, but just the latest sad demonstration of what you could call the arseholeification of public discourse in this country.

As has happened in the US, and as is starting to happen in Europe, open dialogue has been replaced with slanging matches, and confrontations and even assaults are now seen as a valid form of expression in the exchange of ideas.

The end place for all this hatefulness is, of course, Charlottesville, where a peaceful protester was run down in a moving car, sparking a conversation about what she had done to provoke things to such a degree.