via reader Jamie Bloomfield STOP THE PRETENSE! Abbott and Co should once and for all be HONEST with the Australian public and STOP THE PRETENSE! They have NEVER been concerned with the welfare of asylum seekers who arrive by boats. They couldn’t give a shit about the deaths which have occurred. It’s always been about VOTES – politics pure and simple, and it’s about time they were honest and admitted it! The “Stop the Boats” mentality started in 2001 with John Howard. On the ropes and haemorrhaging votes to One Nation, the Howard government was in danger of losing the 2001 election. And then along came Tampa, 9/11 and “Children Overboard”. By combining it all and equating asylum seeker boat arrivals with terrorists/terrorism, Howard successfully dog whistled up the preference votes of racists, rednecks, xenophobes and bigots and won the election. It worked so successfully because most asylum seeker boat arrivals are non-white, non-Christian and are, unlike those true illegal immigrants who arrive by air and overstay their visa, highly visible. They are the perfect political victim and the Coalition have just kept playing the race card ever since. Howard himself made it perfectly clear that the lives of boat arrivals didn’t matter. It was all about the politics. At his 2001 campaign launch he said: “"We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come." And ever since, they have done nothing but denigrate, vilify and punish asylum seeker boat arrivals. It helped win them the 2001 and 2004 elections, and clearly they feel that it can win them the 2013 election. STOP THE PRETENSE!
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 04:41:01 +0000
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