Sensible centre needs to reclaim immigration debate
WHEN the sensible centre goes missing in the immigration debate, the unhinged, and truly unrepresentative, likes of Fraser Anning step into the breach, writes Laura Jayes.
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FRASER Anning is appealing to a significant cohort of people, who have wrongly been ignored by centre mainstream politicians.
Set aside the shout-out to Nazi propagandists for a moment. Senator Anning only has a platform because others have vacated the field when it comes to serious discussion on immigration and integration.
It shouldn’t be up to Fraser Anning to lead this debate. He’s the last person in the parliament that should be. He was elected on 19 first preference votes and surfed in on One Nation’s wave. His guiding principles can surely be called into question after he defected from One Nation on his first day in Parliament, eventually joining Bob Katter’s Australia Party.
I’m not even sure he represents the people of north western Queensland. Why? Because he lives in a high-rise building in Brisbane. As one of his colleagues told me: “He left Gladstone to move to his luxury apartment and his parliamentary office is on the 36th floor of a riverside building with an office window that overlooks the Story Bridge”.
A man of the people? I think not.
He was deliberately provocative in his maiden speech. That’s the way you get headlines and get noticed. Make no mistake, that was the primary motivation, and he achieved it.
But all of that is irrelevant, because on Tuesday night he struck a chord with people who are worried about Muslim immigration and, more broadly, our annual total migration intake.
People nodding along with the broader sentiments are sick of being branded racists for wanting to have a discussion on it. Australians aren’t racist, they just want to hear their political leaders talk about solutions. Solutions to better integrating ethnic communities. Solutions to better and more effective infrastructure. And assurances that those in charge actually know what they’re doing.
Make no mistake, providing solutions is very different to just articulating the problem and letting the fear percolate.
The oft-repeated platitude of “we are the most successful multicultural nation in earth” doesn’t cut it anymore. There are too many individual examples of this not being the case.
It was a great bipartisan moment on Wednesday — when Bill Shorten and Malcolm Turnbull denounced Fraser Anning for evoking Nazi Germany and harking back to the White Australia policy. To see the Parliament’s first elected Muslim MP Ed Husic be embraced by his mate — a Jewish minister in the other side, Josh Frydenberg — reminds us of the great things that can be achieved.
That is all well and good. But it can’t just be the political class, the media class and the chattering class tut-tutting.
The sensible centre needs to step up, and soon. Step up and show the Australian people you are listening so Fraser Anning can go back to shouting at the TV, rather than appearing on it.
And when it comes to Bob Katter, he can often be cast aside as the crazy, joke parliamentarian that sits on the crossbench with a big hat and asks long meandering questions.
But he’s a shrewd operator who’s seized a publicity opportunity before the next election.
Today he said he not only agreed with Fraser Anning’s speech “1000 per cent”, he had actually endorsed it before it was delivered.
He didn’t always think that way. In the 1990s he called Pauline Hanson’s immigration policies “stupid” and “irresponsible”.
In a media conference at the time he added: “All I can say is that up north, we are not very conscious of any differences. And if you are saying we shouldn’t be conscious of any differences, well I’d say, you know, good on you … But if you are saying to me that we should accentuate the differences, then I think that that is very stupid policy and that anyone that says it is very irresponsible.”
We all evolve. The immigration issue is different now to what it was then.
The cynic in me sees that there’s an election looming. And this is more about trying to outflank Hanson on the right, and to steal a large chunk of her voters.
Laura Jayes is the host of NewsDay on Sky News.
Originally published as Sensible centre needs to reclaim immigration debate