If you were looking for a prototype for today’s populist independent you would find it in EL Wisty, a comic creation of Peter Cook, who in an early 1960s TV sketch declared he was standing for parliament on behalf of the World Domination League.
“I’ve had some wonderful ideas for getting the dominating going,” he explained.
“Things like ‘Vote for EL Wisty and lovely nude ladies will come and dance in your room’.
“It’s a complete lie of course but you can’t afford to be too scrupulous if you’re going to dominate the world.”
Not even Cook could have dreamt up Clive Palmer, the broad-beamed braggart with an oversized mouth who pulls out policies like a late-night gambler in Crown casino peeling from a wad of 50s.
Nor could Cook have imagined Julian Burnside, who blends Palmer’s populism with the piety of Mahatma Gandhi.
Burnside appears to have jotted down his talking points at a Toorak dinner party before treating guests to more of his wisdom.
“The trouble with Twitter,” he might have said, relaxing in his chair, “is that it’s not an ideal place for complex ideas.
“I’m not saying Peter Dutton is guilty of the kind of unspeakable acts which we call the Holocaust but its important to remember the Nazi regime spent years generating in the German community a hatred and fear of Jews, without which the Holocaust would not have been possible.”
Wiser men than Burnside might have left those thoughts at the dinner table, particularly if they aspired to represent the Jewish community in the electorate of Kooyong, some of whom had the misfortune to be guests of Nazis in the real Auschwitz.
Burnside, however, felt a need to share those thoughts on a blog on which he regularly posts sermons reprimanding Israel, defaming the Israeli army and comforting their enemies.
Two years ago Burnside and 59 other anti-Zionists signed a letter imploring then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to “rethink its one-sided support for the Israeli government” and cancel the visit of his counterpart, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Burnside’s obsession with the sins of Israel will antagonise Kooyong’s 1000 or so Jewish voters.
Double standards abound. One moment Greens MP Adam Bandt is tweet-shaming “racist hate speech” and Pauline Hanson’s xenophobia and the next he’s posting an image on Facebook of a hook-nosed banker based on images published in Nazi-sympathiser newspaper Der Sturmer during the Holocaust.
Greens leader Richard Di Natale hijacked a condolence motion in the Senate to launch a unfounded character attack on former Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres.
The Greens have proposed policy demanding the Australian government “halt military co-operation and military trade with Israel” and “recognise the ongoing injustice done to the Palestinian people”.
Yet the Greens have never condemned Palestinian violence or terrorism against Israelis.
Instead they parrot baseless claims from Palestinian propaganda, as in October 2015 when senator Scott Ludlam claimed that “Israeli military forces have repeatedly stormed the holy site of the al-Aqsa mosque”.
At its national conference in November 2015 the Greens passed a resolution formally recognising the state of Palestine “as a contribution to securing a negotiated two-state solution”.
Former Greens senator Lee Rhiannon in NSW used her Senate printing allowance to produce posters advertising a Naqba Day rally to “Protest Israeli apartheid”, calling for the “right of return”. Rhiannon took the microphone at the rally to accuse Israel of “ethnic cleansing”.
The Greens may claim to reject the boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign against Israel but it apparently does not censure Rhiannon for supporting it.
In Burnside’s defence, his offensive comments could not be said to single out Israel’s supporters in particular. They are offensive to any Australian with an understanding of history and a sense of proportion.
“I do not wish to deflect attention from the mistreatment of Palestinians for one moment,” he writes, “but it is worth noticing that we have a parallel set of events in Australia.”
Aborigines, apparently, are our own Palestinians.
They have a “different, and inferior, legal status,” claims Burnside. They have been “turned into aliens in their own land”.
And don’t forget the children. Palestinian children, Aboriginal children in the Don Dale Youth Detention Centre, asylum-seeking children in detention, even when there aren’t any, the plight of oppressed children real or imagined is dragged on to the stage to allow Burnside to display the virtue of his calling as a lawyer for human rights and a dedicated righter of wrongs.
Burnside’s Mahatma Gandhi, posting: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win.”
Progressive politics, however, demands nothing less than total obedience to the faith, as Burnside discovered in a TV interview on International Women’s Day after being pinged for being a member of the men-only Savage Club.
“Don’t interrupt,” he told senator Jane Hume.
When he realised his mistake he announced through Twitter he’d be resigning: “I joined the Savage Club 40 years ago as a very different person to the one I am today. I’ve argued for change from within but it’s too slow in coming.”
It was too late however, for The Guardian had already disclosed the Savage Club’s other little secret: a range of indigenous artefacts hung on its walls.
Labor’s indigenous candidate for Kooyong, Jana Stewart, reached for her Twitter account.
“Hey Julian, when you go into the Savage Club on Tuesday to cancel your membership, would you mind taking the artefacts out so I can return them to Traditional Owner’s where they belong? My old people would appreciate it. Thanks JS.”
Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.
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