Pantomime politicians are the real racists, not Peter Dutton

More than half the country has been written off as racist, but Patrick Carlyon wonders if some of the country’s worst haters sit in parliament.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has joined the nation’s biggest club. He is the latest Australian to be outed as “racist”.

Teal MP Zali Steggall reached for that most contagious of slurs after Dutton called for a blanket ban on arrivals from Gaza.

The Alliance of Australian Muslims and the Australian National Imams Council were similarly “appalled”.

Decidedly mute in addressing the overt shows of racism at Pro-Palestine rallies in recent months, these bodies “unequivocally” condemned Dutton’s “racist comments”.

Is Dutton doomed to inclusiveness therapy? Will he denounce himself, and try to be less racist next time?

He may have overreached with his total ban call. Yet Steggall hijacked the issue when she applied the R word. She reduced an important debate to a label.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was labelled a racist by Teal MP Zali Steggall. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

MP Zali Steggall called Mr Dutton a racist after he called for a blanket ban on arrivals from Gaza. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Martin Ollman

In Australia, it seems, racism must be called out as a scourge, and never mind the lack of racially motivated violence here.

The search for racism is a national obsession, alongside swimming and breakdancing.

Like chlamydia, the STD often with no symptoms, racism must be eliminated lest it and its lack of symptoms spread further.

It appears that there are many, many “racists” in our midst.

Some are disguised as Mums and Dads who love their kids and goal umpire at the junior footy.

About 60 per cent of Australians voted No to the Voice last year, despite repeated warnings that such a vote would make them racist.

That was 9.452 million Australians who, if you accept the clumsy premise, expressed hatred for another ethnic group.

The Gaza crisis has exposed even more, some of them prominent people themselves fond of calling out racists.

Supposedly mainstream politicians, who are not Peter Dutton, have verged into hate in their Pro-Palestine exhortations.

Senator Fatima Payman has extolled the “river to the sea” mantra, which calls for the dispatching of a people. It would sound pretty racist if she was referring, say, to the removal of the Uyghurs in China.

Greens Leader Adam Bandt boasts his party is ‘anti-racist’. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Last November, Adam Bandt posted a map of the Middle East, sans the state of Israel. Picture: Instagram

Greens leader Adam Bandt runs a party that boasts about its “anti-hate, anti-racist” bearings.

He and his deputy, Mehreen Faruqi, see racists everywhere.

Faruqi cried “racist” after she was depicted in a satirical cartoon in The Australian.

She took Pauline Hanson to court earlier this year.

Hanson had told her to “piss off back to Pakistan” after Faruqi posted about the “leader of a racist empire” on the day of the Queen’s death.

In her defence, Hanson’s legal team argued that Faruqi was only against “certain forms of racism”.

Judgment in the matter will tell whether the lawyers were right.

The Greens website explains that their “plan actively tackles racism, white supremacy and far-right extremism, and provides stronger protections for the human rights of racial minorities”.

That’s great. Except that the Greens remit does not appear to include Jewish people.

Thousands march through Melbourne in support of the Palestinian people. Picture: NewsWire / Andrew Henshaw

A Free Palestine rally drew thousands in central Melbourne in July. Picture: NewsWire / Valeriu Campan

The party that likes to find racists under every bed also walks with racists who demand the annihilation of a people.

The Greens seek the triumph of one race of people over another race of people.

They may be stridently “anti-racist”, but bald shows of anti-Semitism are apparently OK.

On social media, last November, Bandt posted a map of the Middle East, sans the state of Israel.

In a photo, Faruqi stood near a poster depicting the Israeli flag being thrown in a bin.

That same month, Liberal MP Julian Leeser said it best: “We have seen from October 7 that the Greens are treating the horrors of the war on Israel as an opportunity to whip up anti-Semitic hate. The Greens behaviour online and in parliament … has been nothing less than disgraceful.”

The Greens masquerade as activists for freedom from oppression.

Defiantly simplistic, they represent a hot mess of ideological abstractions which shrinks at the first glimpse of reality.

They are pantomime politicians. No stunt is too crude. Scratch their intellectual surface, and you find more surface.

Bandt himself acts like a child trapped in a child’s body. It’s fitting that he avoids Australian flags (citing colonialism in his fight to reduce history to a headline), given his disdain for nationhood and its values.

The Greens don’t seem to care that their reckless indifference to logic or decency may incite outbreaks of extremism.

Or that by any modern definition, the Greens are the most racist outfit of people in public life.

Australia, of course, was built by racists, for racists, at least as seen through the narrow lens that dismisses more than half of today’s Mums and Dads as bigots.

We still have practising racists among our political representatives. Yet as far as we can tell, not one of them is called Peter Dutton.

Originally published as Pantomime politicians are the real racists, not Peter Dutton