Opinion: Appalling, gutless response as racial hate allowed to run rampant

Unease and helplessness is spreading as people begin to realise that the fabric of the country they love is being picked apart thread by thread writes Mike O’Connor.

There’s a sense of unease in our cities and suburbs fuelled by a feeling of helplessness as people begin to realise that the fabric of the country that they love is being picked apart thread by thread.

The shambles that unfolded in Canberra surrounding the defection of Senator Fatima Payman from the Labor Party was a straw in the wind, a further sign that the nation is fragmenting into groups whose agenda is self-interest with no thought for the good of all.

You might well wonder how a person for whom 1621 people voted in Western Australia is now attempting to direct the foreign policy of those 26 million of us who didn’t vote for her, and how she managed to be endorsed by the Labor Party in the first place, unless of course the fact she was a woman of colour and a Muslim played into it.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is now reaping the harvest that he has sown with his vacillation, lack of leadership and half-hearted support of Israel over the Gaza issue and the anti-Semitism that has been allowed to flourish on our streets and in our universities and most recently on the roof of our national parliament.

Having an each-way bet might be fine for a punt on the Melbourne Cup, but as Albanese is finding to his cost, it doesn’t cut it when you are dealing with racial hate, vitriol and calls for the extermination of the Jewish people.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Martin Ollman/NCA NewsWire

The appalling, gutless approach of university vice-chancellors in failing to deal with the invasion of their campuses, and then capitulating to pro-Palestinian activists demanding a say in the way the universities are run, is a disgrace.

These protesters are now claiming a victory. Now that they’ve discovered how easy it is to intimidate university authorities they’ll be back for more, making more and more outrageous demands and chanting “from the river to the sea” as they do so. Jewish students no longer feel safe on campus. How can this happen in our country?

I have no answer other than to suggest weakness, a lack of moral fibre and a desperate desire on the part of the vice-chancellors to hang on to their obscenely bloated salaries.

The Vote Muslim Movement says it will now run candidates in seats for federal parliament with large Muslim populations, pushing a Muslim agenda. Clerics recently claimed it was sinful for Muslim students to pay indexation on their student loans, as do other Australian students, and wants them granted a dispensation. One rule for them, another for the rest.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton raised the spectre of the Albanese government being voted into a minority and having to do deals with the Greens, teals and Vote Muslim members in order to govern.

He voiced a reasonable concern, but predictably was branded a bigot.

The recent pro-Palestinian activist encampment at University of Queensland

This political fragmentation follows upon the avoidable disaster that was the Voice referendum, which revealed that there were those people who did not regard themselves as Australians but as a group deserving of special treatment, with those who opposed this view vilified as racists.

It was a case of us and them, with the dictum being that if you’re not with us you’re against us.

Every other day, people awake to the news that an Indigenous group has been granted native title over another slice of the country, increasingly over prime real estate such as on the Sunshine Coast, Redland and Moreton Bay areas and on Fraser and Moreton islands.

The narrative is always the same – nothing to see here, no need for non-Indigenous Australians to worry about access and usage. But why bother to spend vast amounts of taxpayer dollars paying lawyers to argue these cases if it’s all going to be hunky dory and business as usual?

People are told not to worry, but if Premier Steven Miles was to park himself beside any suburban backyard barbecue he would quickly discover that people are very worried about what this will mean for the nature of the society in which their children and their children’s children will live.

I’m old enough to remember the days when even though people held opinions that differed from yours, it was understood that we were all in this together and agreed to disagree in the interests of the common good.

Those days are fast disappearing. I wonder if we will ever see their like again.

Originally published as Opinion: Appalling, gutless response as racial hate allowed to run rampant