Andrew Bolt: Toxic multiculturalism has weakened Victoria, leaving it vulnerable to coronavirus
The Victorian government has failed the state, but so have many individuals. Multiculturalism has weakened Victoria, leaving it more likely to get smashed by a pandemic and the evidence is now undeniable, writes Andrew Bolt.
Andrew Bolt
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The lockdown of Melbourne does not show the Victorian government is strong. It proves it has failed.
But it’s not just the government that has failed, killing 797 people.
So have many individual Victorians, in a frightening sign that their state is crumbling under mass immigration and toxic multiculturalism.
Australia, beware.
The government’s failures are, of course, the safest and easiest to admit.
They include hiring untrained private guards to enforce security at quarantine hotels — guards who promptly got infected themselves. The government then did not properly test, trace and isolate the infectious, or protect the aged care homes where 80 per cent of the victims died.
The lockdown of Melbourne, now in its third month, is proof of these failures — but also of the failures many don’t dare to discuss.
No sane or competent government would lock down a city of more than 5 million people for so long, given the horrendous cost in jobs, mental health, suicides and blasted lives.
That’s now becoming obvious to millions of Melburnians. More than 500 doctors have now signed a petition warning that the lockdown will kill more people than it saved.
Even the World Health Organisation this week warned it does “not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus”, and said the best and least damaging way to fight the virus was to test, trace, quarantine the sick and protect the vulnerable.
I think Victoria’s government now knows this, but also knows it’s too incompetent to do these basic things well, even with just seven new cases (and five deaths) on Wednesday.
But on Tuesday, Chief Health officer Brett Sutton insisted this failure was not the government’s alone.
Accuse him of buck-passing if you like, but Sutton argued that Victoria’s contact tracers faced “profoundly different” challenges to those in other states.
He didn’t actually say those challenges came from Victoria’s new immigrant communities. He’s a Victorian bureaucrat, after all, and last month had to apologise in Farsi and Urdu for singling out Afghan families.
But what Sutton described made clear what he meant.
What made the job harder in Victoria, he said, included dealing with affected households “twice to three times that size ... of an average Victorian household”, as well as “issues of visa status, issues of language and cultural barriers”.
What Sutton was hinting at — and what the Press Council has been asked to punish me for saying — is that multiculturalism has weakened Victoria, leaving it more likely to get smashed by a pandemic.
The evidence is now undeniable. This virus hit hardest in suburbs with big foreign-born communities, and in schools, housing commission towers or businesses with many immigrants.
The Andrews government has complained that even translating virus warnings into 53 languages was not enough to reach some communities, which seemed disconnected from Australian media.
No wonder, given that a co-ordinator of its virus response said even many security staff at the two hotels from which the virus escaped had cultural or “language barriers” making it harder to get them to follow health instructions.
But no surprise that this should be a problem in Victoria, where multiculturalism is a faith.
So mad is the Andrews government for multiculturalism that it even gave the biggest security contract for its quarantine hotels – $30 million — to a non-preferred tenderer, Unified Security, on the apparent grounds that it was at least “Indigenous owned”.
Unified was in charge of the hotel from which the worst of this virus outbreak escaped. Victoria’s new motto: go woke and die.
So the Victorian catastrophe is not just a failure of a government. It is also a failure of an immigration intake, plus multicultural policies, that produced a fractured people that cannot be trusted to voluntarily do their basic civic duty in a pandemic — keep a social distance, wash hands and don’t work or socialise when sick.
That’s what the Victorian shutdown represents: an incompetent government that fears an incompetent public.
Will we learn the lesson?
The signs are poor. The Morrison government, desperate for easy money, says it wants to ramp up immigration back to 201,000 a year.
But when it said immigrants on partner visas would at least be denied citizenship if they did not have basic English, or at least take English lessons, it was denounced by academics and journalists as “racist” and a promoter of a “White Australia”.
How stupid we are. So pure in our multiculturalism. And, in Victoria, so sick from it, too.