Make Australia Great Again

[Culprit]

The LNP have hit the panic button and here we go. "Australians First". Nothing like Trumpisms to grab the people.
1 - Play Race Card Again

[David]

As the old saying goes, desperate times call for race-baiting measures.

Interesting that one of the sample questions provided by the Department of Immigration for the front page of the Herald Sun today (all of which, unsurprisingly, referred to customs associated with conservative Islamic cultures and mistreatment of women) was "when is it ever acceptable to cut a female's genitals?". Obvious answer: never; it's UnAustralian!! I just hope they pair it with the question of when it's acceptable to cut a baby boy's genitals, just for clarity's sake.

[Culprit]

[Skids]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKggnBh2Mdw

[ronrat]

What I found interesting was the need to speak English fluently within 4 years. It makes some sense but there are people who have been living here for 40 years in some communities that have a very basic understanding of it and never bothered to learn. A mate of mine is 62 years of age, born here, and his parents passed 3 years ago. They never spoke English in the house at all and his Australian wife had to go to Italian classes at night school to learn to talk to them.

[Tannin]

Speaking English: there are people born here to English-speaking parents who have been living here for 40 years that have a very basic understanding of it and never bothered to learn. Some of them post on Nick's.

[stui magpie]

We are talking about the citizenship test here aren't we?

What's the problem? is there a proposal to deport people who fail the test that i missed or if they have permanent residency do they just continue as that without being able to become a citizen?

is it aimed largely at muslims? not a lot of doubt but again, so what? if people want to live here as a citizen we want them to assimilate to Australian culture. practice their own religion by all means, retain their own cultural heritage by all means, but understand that if you're an Australian citizen, we have one set of laws for all.

[Tannin]

[Tannin]

More generally, this is just one more example of the well-worn Howard-era strategy to deal with public discontent about dysfunctional cities, housing shortages, and out-of-control population growth.

People are sick of getting too many immigrants. But the Liberal Party's masters make money from overrpopulation, so they can't actually do anything about the problem.

So, instead, they make no attempt at all to slow the flood, and do everything they can to blame someone else for it. This is why LNP politicians make speeches blaming (the tiny handful of) illegal immigrants for the congestion and overcrowding in Western Sydney; why they take delight in making life as hard and brutal as possible for refugees; why they have "abolished" 457 visas (and replaced them with another scheme which is pretty much exactly the same thing; why they make speeches pretending that putting an extra question about the national anthem on the citizenship form will make everything so much better; and so on. They've been pulling the same three card trick for decades, and a lot of voters, sadly, have been falling for it every time.

(Labor is a little better, by the way. Labor's stance is, on the whole, merely down at snake's belly level in the cesspit.)

Basically, the Liberal Party's immigration policies amount to finding ever more creative ways to be mean and nasty to some people so as to avoid ever doing anything about the actual problem.

If the Liberals were farmers and they had too many rabbits eating in the vegie patch, they wouldn't put up a better fence up to protect it, or even close the garden gate, they'd just encourage the rabbits to come in as they please and keep the wife and family quiet by stringing up a few random animals and torturing them in nasty and creative ways.

"Look how much I'm doing about the rabbit plague darling! Wow! I bet this one's really sorry!

[stui magpie]

[David]

South African philosopher David Benatar has a really fascinating chapter on this in his book The Second Sexism. We think of FGM as a really cruel, fundamentally different phenomenon to male circumcision, and in most cases it is. Benatar, though, raises an instance in the US in which doctors were advocating tiny ritual nicks to baby girls that in fact would have caused less pain than male circumcision and no long-term damage or desensitisation whatsoever. The idea was that this compromise would have satisfied most mothers from conservative African Muslim and Christian communities and stopped them from seeking dangerous and illegal underground procedures on their daughters (which, while rare, still occur in Australia to this day) – yet these proposals were heavily campaigned against and eventually proved unsuccessful.

This seems relevant because, in the wording of the phrase used as an example on the front page of today's Herald Sun, citizenship might rest on considering such a minor procedure absolutely unacceptable, unAustralian, etc., while an arguably crueller phenomenon of religious/cultural cutting is still considered acceptable. Of course anyone who believes otherwise is just going to lie anyway.

The point of my comparison is that this exercise has nothing to do with applicants needing to show a sophisticated understanding of what's tolerated and what's not tolerated in Australian society. If the sample questions are anything to go by, no nuance or complexity will be involved – the whole thing is merely an opportunity to grandstand by presenting questions that are only permitted to be considered in black or white terms.

It's not about educating foreigners, it's about sending a message to Herald Sun readers back home: we're going to keep the barbarians out.

[swoop42]

[Mugwump]

Fascinating. The presumption here seems to be that we shall have a large number of immigrants, because we must. No-one really remembers why ; our property prices are absurdly high, our cities losing their quality of life, our water supplies under strain, but we can't not have a large number of immigrants because someone - I guess employers and the anarchist Left - knows that we must. I guess our way of life is under threat if we leave the managing of this country to the present population, I don't know.

Anyway, given that we must have a lot of immigrants, we need to take steps to assimilate them, apparently. If we actually needed them for their skills or because of their passion to join the Australian way of life and culture, it's a pretty fair bet that they'd assimilate themselves. But sadly, apparently we are importing a lot of people who do not want to be part of us, so we need to expend special efforts and resources to make them do so. This is what happens when you tell a population what to think, but not how to think.

As for FGM, anyone performing or procuring it should be imprisoned for a lengthy spell and then deported. They can then practise their barbaric customs where those barbaric customs are regrettably, er, customary. Male circumcision is so clearly different from FGM in its intent and effects, that it's not worth the bytes to argue with the FGM apologists who wish to equate them.

[swoop42]

David look away.

I must admit whilst I was riding along in a tram yesterday I had to have a chuckle to myself thinking about the whole North Korea situation.

Judging by the amount of Asian Australians we now have there is a good chance we might be able to fool little Kim into believing where actually part of China.

Not that I'm really bothered by it, hell if nothing else the melting pot of nationalities we have is good for a perv.

LOL.

Still I'm not a fan of the big Australia idea of a 50 million population unless they do something with the big red centre of ours.

Hell we could do with our own Vegas.

[think positive]