AUSTRALIAN POLITICS: Tony Abbott isn't going anywhere

The former PM is back on the talking points, painting himself and Dutton as "reluctant challengers" and orating about "the betterment of mankind".

Bad news for all those hoping Tony Abbott will leave Parliament soon: on Monday, Abbott told a packed crowd of adoring fans at the uber-conservative Centre for Independent Studies in Sydney that he isn’t going anywhere. Abbott is already negotiating some kind of “Indigenous envoy” role with his new leader Scott Morrison. It’s as if the Liberals don’t have someone like the Member for Hasluck, who may know a thing or two about Indigenous affairs.

Abbott was scheduled to speak on the vexed subject of immigration, after his calls for a national reduction. But given the events of the past seven days, it was only logical for him to provide his side of the #libspill story. As expected, he also was totally unrepentant.

Politics today is better than it has been in the past few days. Peter Dutton was a most reluctant challenger last week, just as I was back in 2009. Peter Dutton was someone who, above all else, wanted to change policy and not change leader.

Abbott almost seemed to be taking credit for the rise of Scott Morrison who, he claimed, had restored the government to

... that sensible centre-right Liberal conservative mainstream ...

of economically liberal and socially conservative.

Abbott was in no mood to compromise on key areas of policy such as energy, social security and immigration either. Listening to the way he spoke, one could almost think he was auditioning for the role of leader again. He insisted that energy policy under the new administration will be designed

... to cut price, not to cut emissions … the important thing is to get price down and let emissions look after themselves.

Abbott declared himself no believer in

... the green religion.

To applause from the well-heeled crowd, Abbott went on to declare that social security must be more

... like a trampoline than a hammock.

The former PM seemed pleased with Alan Tudge’s appointment as Minister for Cities, Urban Infrastructure and Population. However, it seemed he didn’t quite understand Tudge’s portfolio. He repeated his “Team Australia” mantra, saying:

... immigration will go hand in hand with integration and in particular the stress for all primary applicants will be on having a job and joining our team and making a contribution from day one.

In other words: new migrants will again have higher expectations placed upon them than the rest of us.

Abbott said that under Morrison, the policy contest will be much sharper than under Turnbull. He claimed a key weakness of Liberals in recent times has been “seeking a false consensus rather than prosecuting a real contest”. Abbott said such an approach made little sense in a world where political differences are becoming wider, not narrower.

He closed his presentation, astonishingly, with an observation from Ben Chifley:

Our great objective is not to make someone premier or prime minister. It’s not putting sixpence more or less in someone’s pocket. It is working for the betterment of mankind. Not just here but wherever we can lend a helping hand.

The audience didn’t seem to mind. Apart from the journos, the audience was all nods and smiles. Among them was Maurice Newman, who was a member of PM Abbott’s Business Advisory Council and is highly sceptical of the existence of climate change.

Abbott claimed his objective has always been to work to help others achieve their best selves. We didn’t see much evidence of that last week.

First published in Crikey on 28 August 2018.

BOOKS: A Sunday afternoon trying to make the Liberal Party great again

A new book proposes a plan to fix the Liberal parties leadership woes.

Sunday afternoon at a pub in North Sydney and Sky News presenter Ross Cameron is launching the first book of conservative apparatchik John Ruddick. It’s called Make The Liberal Party Great Again.
I’ve known John since 1994 when I found myself in the conservative faction of the New South Wales Young Liberals known as “The Team”. Ruddick was our officially endorsed presidential candidate at a time when the non-conservative faction (known as “The Group” but also known by other labels such as “The Left” and “The Pink Triangle”) had firm control over the entire NSW Party.

Ruddick is a likeable bloke who sells home loans for a living. He has appeared a fair few times on Sky News’ Outsiders.

The basic message of his book is that the Liberal Party is neither liberal nor democratic enough in relation to its members. Its processes lead to organisational instability and electoral ruin. When the selection of the leader is just left to elected MPs, ego and vested interests alien to the membership get in the way and the door to leadership change revolves ever so quickly.

Ruddick’s solution? Follow trends overseas. Non-Labor parties across the Western world (and in the UK even the Labour Party) have democratised the process of choosing their parliamentary leaders, including grassroots party members. In this way, the parties mimic the democratic process of general elections.

Ruddick argues the Liberal Party should hold a mega-convention every three years (mid-way through the parliamentary term) to choose the leader of the parliamentary party. The convention need not be in one place but can be spread across numerous cities. The media will be welcome to cover the event. The entire nation can thus see how Liberals choose their leaders instead of relying on media “elites” to deliver whispers and leakage.

In theory it sounds fantastic. In practice, Jeremy Corbyn. Imagine trying to keep a party membership united after such a process. And who would get to vote? If attendees at Ruddick’s launch are anything to go by, it would be a bunch of retired and semi-retired wealthy white folk. Even if the Liberal Party adopts Ruddick’s prescription of mass democratisation, the people attending the Liberal mega-convention would still be about as representative of Liberal voters as Mark Latham is of ALP voters. 

I didn’t see any sitting MPs at the launch raising the question of whether anyone who could take this change on is even listening.

The closest was Stephen Mutch, former federal MP for Cook (the seat ScoMo currently holds). And, of course, there was Ross Cameron, a former MP whose Liberal Party membership has been suspended for four and a half years.

If the Liberal Party is to have any future, it should embrace the generation of young people represented by three youngsters present at the pub with their Asian-Aussie mum. In a broad Strayan accent, one of the boys boasted that he spoke fluent Thai and was learning Vietnamese at school.

As long as the Liberal Party is held hostage by a xenophobic far-right, solving for the leadership problem alone won’t work.

First published in Crikey on 24 September 2019

BOOKS: The new book by an IPA fellow that is head-scratchingly nuanced

Matthew Lesh's heavily researched theory on socio-economic divides would give Andrew Bolt a heart attack.

It’s always a surprise to see brown people at an Institute of Public Affairs event, but there they were. Last Friday night a youngish crowd including several Sri Lankan women and a very anti-Communist Chinese guy gathered at a trendy Melbourne CBD bar to launch the first book of a young IPA-type named Mathew Lesh.

The book, Democracy in a Divided Australia, is highly referenced with plenty of data and quantitative analysis. The notes and bibliography combined make up 73 pages. Though it looks like a PhD thesis, to Lesh’s credit, the 210 pages of text are very accessible read. Quite a change from the poorly referenced negativity one usually gets from our handful of right-of-centre thinktanks.

Despite this, don’t expect to read this paragraph on the opinion pages of The Australian:

Not everyone should be expected to live the same lifestyle; within the confines of the whole, every sub-culture should be able to keep their distinct qualities … We should celebrate, or at least tolerate, political, cultural, social, religious, racial, ethnic, gender and sexual preference differences … Australia can only function as a connected nation. What we share is more than what divides us.

It’s enough anti-assimilation policy to give Andrew Bolt a cardiac arrest.

So exactly what is the problem then? Why the subtitle “the inners-outers ripping us apart”? Who are the “outers” and who are the “inners”? Basically, the inners are inner-city cosmopolitan types, highly educated, able to afford an overseas holiday and eat out often without any fear of African gangs or South African white farmers. Inners can be left or right. Initially the inners were very happy when Malcolm Turnbull knocked off Tony Abbott.

The outers can also be left or right. They grew up in outer suburbs, in regional areas or in the bush. They prefer beer to a chardonnay, occupy blue-collar jobs and read newspapers freely available at McDonalds. Other groups are also included among the inners and outers — the “aspirational”, the “old elite” and “new elite” and the “left behind”. You’ll have to invest around $30 and buy the book to learn how the whole model fits together.

The book was launched by the youngest looking person in the room, one Senator James Paterson, a former IPA apparatchik and no good friend of Malcolm Turnbull. Paterson delivered an amusing speech referring to incidents from the life of the book’s author why the latter was more of an inner than an outer. It sounded more like a speech given by Paterson as best man at Matthew Lesh’s wedding.

There were lots of in-jokes which showed the speaker assumed he was only speaking to an in-crowd. Paterson should get public speaking lessons from Turnbull.

Lesh took to the floor and provided a 10-minute summary of his argument. He insisted I not record his speech, so I can’t provide direct quotes. In question time, I asked him whether he considered “outers” to also be defined by ethnicity, migration status, gender etc. I noted that I couldn’t see too many Somalis or South Sudanese in this elite thinktank audience.

To my surprise, quite a few of the white folk nodded. Lesh said he didn’t collect data on ethnicity and other factors I’d mentioned. Afterwards John Roskam, the IPA’s Executive Director, came up to me and the four Sri Lankan ladies and warmly welcomed us. He also encouraged us to join the IPA and even said we could pay our membership fees later.

Could it be that I have been mischaracterising the IPA all along? Or is the libertarian right in Australia beginning to realise that it’s uber white image is doing it no favours and that the free market of ideas, just like the free market of goods and services, tends to punish racism?

First published in Crikey on 09 October 2018.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS: Guess who’s coming to $150-a-head anti-Islam dinner?

Who on Earth would turn up to Kirralie Smith's "Defending Freedom of Speech Halal Choices" fundraiser? Spoiler: it's Bernardi. And Christensen. And attention-starved Ross Cameron.

The other day my mate and I went to Nissin World Delicatessen, a popular supermarket for expats in central Tokyo. In the meat section, I saw imported meats from Australia, the United States and New Zealand. The Kiwis do roaring business here in Japan, and the huge, loud halal signs don’t seem to worry anyone. In this majority Buddhist nation, and even among its expatriate community (many of whom would be nominally Christian), the idea of eating the flesh of a cow or lamb slaughtered in the name of Allah isn’t going to lead to a House of Councillors inquiry.

The same is largely true in Australia (apart from the futile Senate inquiry into kosher and halal certification). Indeed, most halal-related litigation Muslims involves halal butchers suing halal certifiers, halal certifiers suing other certifiers and religious bodies seeking to enforce contracts in which certifiers promise to pay some stipend. Halal v Halal.

But now Australia’s fractured far right has joined the halal fray, largely a case of yesterday’s anti-Semites becoming today’s anti-Halalcertifites. As Dr Shakira Hussein notes, kosher certification was once used as a means to attack America’s Jewish minority. Now the same racist themes are being used to attack halal certification and the tiny minority of Australians who identify as Muslim, including ones like me who are happy to eat halal-uncertified McDonald’s in Tokyo.

Kirralie Smith and her colleagues from the Q Society/Halal Choices/Australian Liberty Alliance have found themselves defendants in a defamation claim brought by one of Australia’s major players in the halal meat game. Smith posted a video on Facebook headlined “Mosques promote bigotry. Islam is divisive”. She mispronounces the name of the dreaded faith as “Izlaam”, claiming that it isn’t a religion in the same way as Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism or Christianity. She claims Islam is a “totalitarian ideology” with both political and military aspirations. She also says that we don’t want people who behave violently against those who disagree with them.

But Smith has come across a Muslim businessman who prefers not to get angry but instead to use the non-sharia civil law system via defamation proceedings. She needs every dollar to defend the court case and has organised public events in early February in Sydney and Melbourne to raise funds. For just $150 you get

... a sparkling welcome, a variety of fine finger food and a generous serve of free speech. Article 19 UDHR applies. Drinks at bar prices. 

And where does the money go? The promotional material states:

All proceeds and donations go towards the legal expenses incurred by Q Society of Australia Inc, Kirralie Smith, Debbie Robinson et al. in the defamation action initiated by Mr Mohamed El-Mouehly (Halal Certification Authority Pty Ltd) before the NSW Supreme Court.

It continues:

This is a landmark case with considerable ramifications for freedom of expression in Australia.

How does litigation pursued in accordance with a jurisdiction legislated in Australia since 1847 have considerable ramifications for freedom of speech?

Indeed, how often do you see senators and MPs involved in fundraising for one side or the other in a free speech case? Even in the case of Danny Nalliah’s defence of religious vilification claims brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria, entertainingly covered by Hanifa Deen’s book The Jihad Seminar, Peter Costello delivered an Australia Day message to a meeting organised by Nalliah and had been the recipient of Nalliah’s prayers, but that’s about it.

Peter Costello also won’t be on the podium of the ALA event. Neither will Danny Nalliah or Fred Nile or even Pauline Hanson, who has campaigned heavily on Islam-related stuff (from halal meat certification to sharia law to toilets in the Tax Office building). No one from the United Patriots Front or the Reclaim Australia mob will be present.

Indeed, were it not for the presence of Cory Bernardi and George Christensen, the event would hardly have been worth reporting on. This event is more conspicuous by who will be absent than present. The Islamophobic space in Australia has some powerful media and political backers. But its hardliners are deeply divided, mirroring the divisions in the Australian far right, for which hatred of Muslims has replaced hatred of Asians and Jews and other “Others”.

In the electoral stakes, at 0.66% of NSW Senate votes Kirralie Smith came well behind One Nation (4.1%), Fred Nile (2.7%) but ahead of Danny Nalliah’s Rise Up Australia Party (0.17%). When it comes to the “Islam-critical” sector, as John Howard once never said,

The things that divide us are more important than the things that unite us. 

Instead of other prominent Muslimphobes, Shariaphobes and Halalphobes, the podium will include a crime writer, an ageing hard rocker and some bloke named Ross Cameron. And now a couple of Coalition backbenchers.

First published in Crikey on 10 January 2017.

AUSTRALIAN POLITICS: Why George Christensen might make a great immigration minister

Barnaby Joyce reckons George Christensen needs to be given a portfolio. Would Immigration be a good fit? Have you head the rumour? Apparently National Party leader Barnaby Joyce is training up George Christensen for a ministerial gig. At least, I think it’s a rumour. At least I hope it’s a rumour, both for Malcolm Turnbull’s sake and possibly for the sake of the public servants whose jobs come within any portfolio handed to Christensen. And Fairfax says it’s

... time to take George Christensen seriously.

All this raises a few questions:

1. Which portfolio would be suitable for someone with Christensen’s set of interests and skills? 
2. If no such portfolio exists, could a new portfolio be created from Christensen? 
3. By George, what on earth is Barnaby Joyce thinking? It may be true that Christensen is “authentic”, “well-read” and “intelligent”, but what is the broader political strategy here? Is the aim to cash in on a possible Trump factor? Is it to steal votes from One Nation? 

Or perhaps I am being a bit too cynical. Maybe Joyce wasn’t just throwing some praise in Christensen’s general direction to add to a juicy Fairfax Good Weekend profile. Perhaps I should go study Christensen’s colourful parliamentary history for clues.

Let’s start with Christensen’s views on immigration. The guiding principle of any immigration policy, according to Christensen, is that we should not allow (or at least we should heavily restrict) immigration from countries that don’t share our values. Or to put it another way,

... ending immigration from countries with a high level of violent extremism.

To make this policy work, we need to define what our values are. How do we manifest our values and how have they emerged from our history?

These are huge questions that I hope Christensen, for all his wide reading, can answer. Former PM John Howard once defined Australian values in a generic fashion — things like mateship and equality for women. As if people in, say, Afghanistan, don’t have ideas of mateship and friendship. And if broader European attitudes toward sexual assault (yes, 27% of Europeans think rape is acceptable in certain circumstances) are any indication, maybe we don’t need more European migrants.

I’d hate to see Christensen’s version of Australian values emerge from some of the history in his own electorate. Many Australians don’t know this, but slavery was practised in certain parts of the colonies. Most worked on sugar plantations in northern Queensland, where Christensen’s electorate is located. When the Commonwealth of Australia was established in 1901, one of the first pieces of legislation was The Pacific Islander Labourers Act ordering the deportation of all South Sea Islanders to their home islands by 1906:

These Islanders had originally been brought to Australia as sugar slaves. At this time 9324 South Sea Islanders lived in Queensland … They also included those who had lived in Queensland since before 1 September 1879 … Some had married and had families in Queensland. Others had lived here for a very long time and grown old. It would have been difficult or even impossible for Islanders to return to their home islands. Records and knowledge of precise origin were often scant as a result of the questionable recruitment processes and decades making lives in a new country.

To his credit, Christensen acknowledged the cruelty of this slavery policy and the extreme discriminatory legislation that affected them. He even called for a national apology to the Australian South Sea Islander community in 2013.

Just as we’ve had an apology on behalf of Aboriginal Australians who were a part of the stolen generation, we’ve had an apology for those who were forcibly adopted, that in this instance it’s only right that we have a national apology to the South Sea islanders for the treatment they were given.

This is a side of Christensen that is rarely reported. It is also a side he needs to articulate more in relation to those fleeing slavery-like conditions to our shores. Slavery was being practised in Islamic Sate-held territories in Iraq and Syria. This included sexual slavery of women from all denominations and ethnic groups. ISIS is not the first group or state to use sexual slavery as a weapon of war. 

Perhaps we can appeal to Christensen’s better angels. You never know. He may turn out to be a compassionate immigration minister one day.

First published in Crikey on 5 December 2016.

CULTURE WARS: The real reason so many conservatives are suddenly standing up for the queer community

They fought it for years. Until they realised it could be leveraged to malign an even greater foe.

Last week the Prime Minister hosted a dinner for a bunch of Muslims at Kirribilli House. I didn’t get an invite. But I do know a fair few people who did go, as they plastered their Facebook walls with photos of them sitting and standing with the PM.

Now I’m glad I didn’t get an invite. Since the dinner, News Corp papers have been picking off the names of a host of invitees, linking them to something that might be linked to something that might be linked to some event overseas.

Overnight, columnists for The Australian, Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph etc have suddenly discovered the evils of homophobia. Why? Because somehow they feel the urge to link the PM hosting a Ramadan Iftar dinner to Omar Mateen, the security guard who shot dead 50 people in an Orlando gay night club.

But reading through the reports and op-eds leads me to wonder whether the ideological crime of homophobic Muslims is that they are treading on the territory that should be reserved for Australian conservatives.

Imams are being accused of spreading teachings on the evils of homosexuality that you can regularly hear if you attend a service of Fred Nile, Rise Up Australia’s Danny Nalliah or some other clergyman with whom the Coalition regularly shares preferences and who is defended by Peter Costello or Andrew Bolt. Or if you attend the kinds of conferences that Tony Abbott attends or Kevin Andrews almost attended.

Then the Oz lambastes a Sydney psychologist who signed a recent press release supporting LGBTI communities. The Oz effectively denounces her as a hypocrite for backing LGBTI people now. Hanan Dover is a controversial figure in Muslim circles — at best. It is true that she did once promote “gay conversion” therapies, something very dangerous for a practitioner to do. The unfortunate thing is that the Oz cites her words from 2002. That’s 14 years ago. And what the paper does not say is that the types of therapies she promoted were not from Iran or Turkey or Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. They were from the United States,

They were developed by conservative Christian groups. Has Dover changed her mind? I’m not sure. She did sign the anti-homophobia press release. But then so did regular Crikey writer Shakira Hussein (who has written and tweeted against Dover’s homophobia). But when was the last time we saw Gerard Henderson or Janet Albrechtsen or Piers Akerman (who has been known to refer to David Marr as a “homosexual activist” and who repeated “rumours” on national TV about Julia Gillard’s partner) or Andrew Bolt sign a document supporting the rights of LGBTI communities in Australia?

I’m not aware of prominent imams opposing same-sex marriage. I’m not aware of Muslim leaders opposing the Safe Schools program in the manner former Iranian refugee Rita Panahi has. The allegedly conservative commentariat have been defending the homophobia that exists among them and also in the churches and the Australian Christian Lobby in the name of “freedom of speech” and “freedom of religion”.

“But aah, Mr Yusuf, we don’t see conservatives or Christian clergy or ACL saying that homosexuals should be put to death,” you might say as you point to this article published in the Oz about imams and homosexuality. And as you point to reports of a British Shia Muslim scholar who left Australia of his own accord.

Indeed. But let me put these points to you:

* Imams Shady Soliman and Yusuf Peer play leading roles in the Australian National Imams Council (ANIC);

* This bombastically named body consists only of a minority of Sunni Muslim imams;

* This council does not include imams of the Cypriot and Turkish communities, which make up one of the largest and oldest ethno-religious bloc;

* There are no women in ANIC despite there being female religious scholars in Australia;

* The idea of what makes a person an “imam” and what his/her role should be is contested across different cultures;

* Unlike the church, there is no agreed hierarchy of imams; and

* To get some idea of how influential ANIC is, its announcements on the beginning and end of sacred months such as Ramadan are largely ignored.

Your average Muslim knows what silly and ridiculous attitudes many imams have. It reminds me of the story of a sheikh in India who was asked a businessman who regularly donated to his mosque: “Sheikh, why do our religious scholars talk such crap?” The sheikh responded with a question: “Imagine you have two sons. One is very intelligent, the other is a buffoon. Which would you send to London to study to become a barrister and which would you send to my madressa to study to become an imam?”

Finally, regardless of how ridiculous the views of some imams (or some clergy or some rabbis or some other religious figures) are, to suggest they in any way reflect the opinions of any sector of mainstream Australia is ridiculous.

Unless, of course, you don’t regard Australians who identify as Muslim as being part of mainstream Australia.

First published in Crikey on 20 June 2016.

RELIGION: Why are conservatives so damn obsessed with Islam?

From what we know about Omar Mateen, this massacre was not an act of Islamic State-sponsored terrorism. 

When it comes to fighting nasty brown-skinned Muslim terrorists with unpronounceable names, you really don’t want to look like Neville Chamberlain appeasing Hitler. Hence, when introducing counter-terrorism law number 56 (or was it 57? I’ve lost count) in September 2014, then-PM Tony Abbott invoked Winston Churchill and declared: “I refuse to be impartial as between the fire brigade and the fire.”

Hitler and Churchill are long gone. But Hitler’s rhetorical and ideological legacy arguably live on in the person of the US Republican Party’s likely presidential nominee, Donald Trump. True, Trump hasn’t called for Hispanics and Muslims to be thrown into gas chambers. But then, neither had Hitler called for such treatment for Jews, disabled people, homosexuals, etc, when negotiating with Britain.

When it comes to the obvious danger arising from the election of Donald Trump, Australia’s conservative side of politics — its pollies and its media — are looking a lot like Chamberlain. Should Americans elect a President with xenophobic tendencies, it’ll just be a case of peace in our time for Malcolm Turnbull and Julie Bishop. Meanwhile, these same conservatives are attacking Bill Shorten for sounding more like Winston Churchill in alerting voters to the dangers of a Trump presidency. 

Nowhere has this been clearer than in the recent Orlando shooting. In case you’ve been asleep for the past 72 hours, here’s just a little of what we know so far about the killer Omar Mateen:

* He was born in New York, not in the mysterious nation of “Afghan” as Trump suggested;

* He dialled 911 and allegedly told the operator he was acting on behalf of the violently homophobic terrorist group Islamic State;

* Witnesses say he frequently attended the Pulse nightclub, approached men for sex, identified himself to friends as gay and used multiple gay apps such as Grindr;

*He occasionally went to the mosque with his son and performed congregational prayers. He did not attend the Friday prayer during which sermons were delivered; and

* He was violent and vicious toward his first wife.

Yet from Donald Trump to Andrew Bolt to Rita Panahi to Greg Sheridan to the editorial writer for The Australian to even Emma-Kate Symons, the message is that this is about the Islam, the whole Islam and nothing but the Islam.

And notwithstanding their almost constant linkages of terrorism to Islam, radical Islam, Islamism, Muslims, Islamists (and perhaps even those awful nasty pus-filled islamicysts), many of these same pundits allege that there is a conspiracy of political correctness stopping them from linking terrorism to Islam, radical Islam, Islamism etc etc. And when someone at the front line of fighting terrorism — say, for example, the ASIO chief — tells them that their rhetoric isn’t helpful, they go completely nuts.

This fixation with anything remotely Islam says more about alleged conservatives than it does about your average Yusuf Blow who buys halal/kosher certified products at the supermarket. Conservatives seem to have lost the ideological plot, more so than their most paranoid anti-communist forebears. Seriously, communism was an international threat with nuclear weapons and the ability to send men and dogs into space. Can we really compare groups like Islamic State, al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiyah and Boko Haram to the combined super power of the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies?

First published in Crikey on 16 July 2016.

CULTURE WARS: A message to mono-cultural chestbeaters

Abul A'la al-Ma'arri (973-1057BC) was an Arab philosopher and poet who lived to the ripe old age of 84 in the district of Aleppo in Syria. When it came to denigrating religions, al-Ma'arri was an equal opportunity offender. French-Lebanese novelist, Amin Maalouf, quotes one of al-Ma'arri's more famous verses in his The Crusades Through Arab Eyes:

The inhabitants of the earth are of two sorts: Those with brains, but no religion, And those with religion, but no brains.

His words were almost prophetic. Decades later, European crusaders led by Raymond de Saint Gilles and Bohemond of Taranto stormed Abul A'la al-Ma'arri's home town, murdered 8000 civilian and then cooked and ate their remains. In 2013, the al-Qaeda affiliated Nusra Front in Syria finally got to punish al-Ma'arri by beheading his statue.

Al-Ma'arri's message is strangely relevant today as we see self-declared Christian politicians and their pundit pals using every opportunity to attack a religious tradition which is oh-so similar to their own. Their crusade/jihad may not involve cannibalism or beheading statues. However, it does involve a strange mix of patriotism, prejudice and political opportunism.

The rhetoric about Islam, a faith whose Australian adherents are from more than 160 countries and who make up barely 2 per cent of the population, has never been terribly sophisticated in Australia. Middle Eastern religion isn't one of our strong points. Many Australians are still offended by depictions of Jesus as black or of Mary wearing a veil. The Aussie Jesus must be whiter than Santa Claus, his mother a Roman-era Lara Bingle.

Surprisingly, Tony Abbott appears to have joined the ranks of the monocultural chest-beaters. There was a time when he doggedly refused to follow the Howard line on multiculturalism, penning articles for Quadrant and The Australian declaring multiculturalism to be an inherently conservative idea worth defending. He refused to buy into the anti-Muslim rhetoric of colleagues like Bronwyn Bishop or pundits like John Stone and Andrew Bolt. Abbott's Catholicism did not even lead him to mimic his close friend Cardinal Pell's speculative diatribes on Muslims.

And then Mr Abbott became prime minister. We soon discovered he wasn't the suppository of wisdom on national security. Our law enforcement agencies cringed as Abbott lectured Muslim spokespersons to convince him they really meant it when they said they followed a religion of peace. It was a patronising performance from a prime minister born overseas to religious communities largely born in Australia.

Still, the numbers of young Muslims heading off to Syria to join Islamic State didn't exactly skyrocket as a result, remaining steady at about 0.0002 per cent of the total Muslim population. The few successful prosecutions of Muslim terrorists have involved tip-offs from Muslim communities, including mosque leaders giving crucial evidence at trials.

ASIO and law enforcement officials are aware of these facts. They are aware of the pressures minorities face when their traditions are constantly maligned and pilloried, when they are treated as security threats and as people whose transnational connections make them a danger in the imagination of others. Yes, many people working for ASIO are middle-aged Catholics who, like Abbott, are not too young to remember a time when Catholics, their faith and institutions were treated as foreign, a security threat and not very Australian.

"But ah, Mr Yusuf", I hear you say, "What percentage of Australian Catholics turned to violent extremism?" I'm not sure. Perhaps 0.0002 per cent of them?

Mr Abbott says not all cultures are equal. Or perhaps he was echoing the words of that great foreign fighter George Orwell by declaring all cultures are equal but some are more equal than others. But can one speak of Muslims whose ancestry is from more than 160 different countries as possessing one single culture? Why are so many mosques and Muslim religious bodies divided along ethnic and linguistic lines? In this respect, how are Australian Muslims any different to Orthodox Christians or Buddhists?

Even some Coalition MP's seeking to "defend" Islam have made a meal of it. Concetta Fierravanti-Wells has argued that we need "a more modern interpretation of the Koran". Seriously? Is the problem one of exegesis? Do people who tick the Muslim box on their census forms stop and consult the Koran before they decide whether to shop at Coles or Aldi?

Why do Coalition MPs imagine that Muslims are any more or less religious than the rest of Australia? Is it all about religion? Are Muslims just characters in some Koran-bashing freak show? 

Such speculative forays do become frustrating for Muslims who are often too busy working to pay mortgages and school fees to worry about what some Coalition MP or obsessive Kippax Street columnist is saying about them. But I strongly doubt the unholy Islam circus will push Muslims over the edge and into the hands of IS.

I appreciate the phone calls made by the ASIO boss to Coalition MPs, but I wonder whether it was as unnecessary as the many rounds of anti-terrorism laws that ASIO has supported over the past decade or so. Still, if our civil liberties can be curtailed for the sake of national security, why can't the verbiage of pollies who love the sounds of their own voices?

Irfan Yusuf is a PhD candidate at Deakin University's Alfred Deakin Research Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation. First published in the Canberra Times on 20 December 2015.

COMMENT: Things I learned about asylum seekers today

Here is a summary of learnings I gained from various smart, important and influential people today on the subject of asylum seekers today:

[01] If you pay for the funeral of a dead asylum seeker, it just encourages more of them to jump on boats.

[02] If an asylum seeker wants to bury their 9 month child at taxpayers' expense, s/he needs to come up with a decent policy proposal.

[03] Funerals cost so much money, and we should all be angry. They explains why Scotty Morrison remarked on Macquarie Radio:

I know probably more than anyone how strongly people feel about this issue, how angry they get about the costs that are involved. I share that anger, and I want to see that changed ...

Funeral directors can look forward to tough times ahead.

[04] Both compassion and sex are not beyond budgetary constraints. As Barnaby Joyce correctly remarked, the price of compassion is ...

... not limitless. You can't do it with a completely open cheque book.

I'd hate to do it with a chequebook fullstop!

[05] We need to have an asylum policy that favours Christians over Muslims. We don't have that at the moment. Hence you have this kind of thing happening:

At Castlebrook Cemetery in Rouse Hill, five more coffins were lowered into the ground; a husband and wife, their young son and daughter and an aunt. A little girl in a purple dress and leggings stood out against eight weeping family members and friends dressed in black.


The victims were Protestants from Iran. "They had dreams of a better life and they came to our country searching for something,'' said the Reverend David Misztal from St Jude's Anglican Church, Dural. ''They desperately wanted a place to call home."

This would never have happened if we had a pro-Christian asylum policy. But we still shouldn't pay for the funerals.

MEDIA: Andrew Bolt's anti-racism poetry

The January 2011 edition of the notoriously left-wing magazine IPA Review includes a lengthy profile piece on Andrew Bolt by one Tony Barry. It features a revealing poem Bolt wrote and had published at age 13. Barry notes:

It certainly isn't Les Murray, but it is a fascinating insight into the young Bolt's mindset ... it is unmistakenly written as an outsider railing against racism and the mob mentality.

Or is it? I'm not so sure. But I'll let readers be the judge.

Fear
by Andrew Bolt (aged 13)

The jeering, gloating ring of youths
Closed in around a solitary boy,
Teasing and taunting him
Because he was black

The boy staggered from a blow,
The yells grew louder,
Humiliating and bewildering the boy

The colour of his skin was a cause
For ridicule

I wanted to help him
But fear sealed my mouth,
Held me back.

And soon I was yelling with the rest.

By the way, in case you were wondering why I described the IPA Review as a notoriously leftwing magazine, it is because Tony Barry describes The Age as ...

... the notoriously leftwing Melbourne broadsheet.

And when I look at the IPA's website, I notice all these crazy leftwingers like Chris Berg and Julie Novak writing for both The Age and IPA Review. What a bunch of Commies!

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POLITICS: Liberal plane set to crash if crew bombs left wing

Here's a scenario for politically astute, frequently flying Canberrans. A passenger jet is about to make its descent to its destination. The pilot, Captain Blackadder, orders the cabin crew to prepare for landing.

But some of the crew have a cunning plan. They harbour a strange belief that this plane should fly with only one wing. They have strapped makeshift bombs to the left wing of the plane, attempting to cause irreparable damage, if not destroy it. They then plan to enter the cockpit, knock out Captain Blackadder and take charge of the plane.

It all sounds like a cunning plan. And one likely to lead to a rather bumpy crash landing, one with perhaps more crash than landing.

In certain sections of the Liberal Party, such delusional crash-landing politics has become the norm. Some Liberals seem to think it's not only possible but necessary to fly their party's plane with only a right wing. This kind of Liberal thinking might work well in campus politics, where often only the most doctrinaire ideological creatures congregate.

Indeed, many allegedly conservative Liberals insist that anyone not as conservative as they should find another party. NSW Young Liberal presidents have often subscribed to this school of factional aeronautics. Back in May 2005, one Young Liberal president openly criticised moderate party members. The young man told the Sydney Morning Herald:

Nobody joins the Liberal Party to be left-wing. If you stand for compulsory student unionism, drug-injecting rooms and lowering the [homosexual] age of consent, you can choose the Greens, Labor or the Democrats.

He went further and promised conservative stacking to mould the NSW Liberal Party in his own image.

I'm about a long-term philosophical shift in the Liberal Party to the right ... I do not shrink from signing up people who believe in conservative agendas and the free market. I'll sign as many as I can up every day of the week.

That young man is now a federal member for a safe Sydney seat. He is hopefully now embarrassed by the words of his political youth. If he isn't, Tony Abbott might be in for a crash landing soon.

The arch-rival of this Young Liberal was then NSW Opposition leader John Brogden. Many NSW Liberal right-wingers, both young and old, were of the view that Brogden would be unelectable. They argued that the electorate would only vote for conservative Liberals. Small ''l'', limp-wristed wets would never attract votes.

Brogden's response? '

The Liberal Party is a broad tent, capable of encompassing many views, but someone is auditioning for the role of clown.

Sadly for Brogden, the broad-tent model descended into a circus. Labor won the following NSW election. And it's fair to say that the likely result of the next NSW election would be better described as an ALP loss than a Coalition victory.

The ideological NSW Liberal right also cost Tony Abbott the Lodge. Abbott should have won western Sydney seats such as Lindsay and Banks. He could have defeated Julia Gillard's divided and demoralised ALP.

But the factional one-wingers in his home state, who prefer stacking branches with people with little incentive to hand out how-to- vote cards on election day, missed a golden opportunity to secure government for Mr Abbott, not to mention staffer jobs for themselves.

Liberals in Julia Gillard's home state have managed to pull off what Tony Abbott's Liberals could only dream of doing. They have soundly defeated both the ALP and the Greens. They have achieved the kinds of swings of seats that, if replicated at a federal level, could have avoided the prospect of a hung parliament in Canberra. And they did it with a leader who was probably to the left of his Labor opponent on a host of social issues.

Ted Baillieu is the kind of Liberal leader that Labor voters would feel comfortable voting for. He isn't a raving monoculturalist or a theocratic fruit loop. He isn't the sort of chap who would be invited to submit regular opinion pieces to a certain national newspaper.

Baillieu is the kind of Liberal premier New South Welshmen could have had back in 2006 if a certain group of Young Libs hadn't tried to dynamite the left wing. As the eminently sensible Charles Richardson wrote in Crikey recently:

Ted Baillieu has consciously branded himself as a social liberal, and even those who held no brief for the Liberal Party have wished him well in the hope of preserving that strain in the party's heritage.

The last thing the Coalition needs is to be seen as a political force that will happily "stop the boats" but ignore the electorate. As Richardson notes, Baillieu's election shows that ...

... the party has an alternative to the Howard-Abbott model of hard-right populism.

And that's a good thing not just for the party but for our democracy. If only believers in one-winged crash-land politics would understand this.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of the comic memoir Once Were Radicals. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on Wednesday 1 December 2010.

UPDATE I: An anonymous person surnamed Darby and formerly of Fred Nile's Christian Democratic Party sent this interesting response:

I'm sure the Liberals appreciate being lectured to by a revoltingly fat and smelly Pakinigger. How about fixing your sad life and mental illneses before trying to fix the Liberal Party? Alex Hawke and Tony Abbott can at least get out of bed without needing to scoff kebabs and cakes. The best thing you can do for Australia is leave it. There is no need to apologise for being alive. Just get out of Australia and don't come back.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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COMMENT: Switzer isn't into tea ...

Former Opinion Editor of The Australian Tom Switzer makes some interesting observations about the Tea Party.

Some argue that the Tea Party's success in Republican primaries is evidence of a rejuvenated right dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism and commitment to small government. But while the Tea Party is tapping into the economic anxiety and political estrangement that voters feel across the nation, the movement itself has its fair share of problems.

He continues.

It not only sports a few clowns and creeps who make embarrassing pronouncements; it is also leaderless and riven by chronic divisions over social and foreign policy. Moreover, it is not clear whether the Tea Party resonates with the broader electorate.

And what about some of the Tea Party's stars?

... some in the Tea Party scare centrists - think of Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell, the former anti-masturbation advocate who "dabbled" in witchcraft. She will almost certainly lose a seat the Republicans should have won.

America, Switzer seems to say, is in economic and social free-fall at the moment. The Republicans would have won, with or without the Tea Party. Buut winning with the Tea Party is likely to be a one way ticket to long term political irrelevance.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

COMMENT: Watching the election in boganville ...

I have my computer with me at McDonalds in Mackay city, taking advantage of their free internet connection. I'm surrounded by alien and ugly looking creatures with tattoos running up and down their arms. But I needn't worry about them reading what I type. It's likely they cannot read.

OK that's a little slack. 95% of them cannot read. And their English vocabulary is generally limited to words consisting of no more than four letters.

A large number of these people would have voted for the Liberal National Party (LNP). You have to wonder about people who would vote for a party whose name makes it sound more like a New Zealand soft drink than a serious political choice.

I'm told such people don't by any means represent the majority of people in this fine city. I won't be staying here long enough to find out if this is true.

But what of the ALP? Ever since Julia Gillard decided that irrational hatreds and fears of boat people is the way to survive in politics, the wingnuts in the Coalition have had even more reason to scream "STOP THE BOATS". Including those who themselves own at least one boat.

Anyway, as at 10pm, it's almost impossible to tell who is going to win. Or even whether there will be a winner.

If the Greens win both Grayndler (unlikely) and Melbourne (almost a certainty), can the ALP work with them in government? And what is Andrew Wilkie wins Denison in Tasmania (which I think he already has), what kind of minority government would the ALP form?

Then there is the issue of the three independents (Tony Windsor, Bob Katter Rob Oakeshott) who both have histories in conservative politics. Windsor has worked with a Labor government when he was a State MP. Would he work with Gillard and deny Abbott the Prime Ministership?

But let's give credit where credit is due. Tony Abbott has brought back the conservatives from the political wilderness. He worked hard. He showed discipline, far more so than his political opponents. He was always out there. He travelled the length and breadth of the country.

For sheer hard work, if anyone deserves to be PM, it is Tony Abbott. But I hope he doesn't become PM. Why?

Because he is surrounded by wingnuts who want to turn the Coalition into the Australian chapter of the Tea Party. Tony is a good decent man surrounded by an assortment of morons, bigots, racists, homophobes, muslimphobes, commonsensephobes refugeephobes, Sinophobes, Asiaphobes and closet anti-Semites.

For the sake of the country, let's hope Julia remains PM.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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POLITICS: Oh my God!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If someone had told me a decade ago that my politics would be this ...

My Political Views
I am a left moderate social libertarian
Left: 3.61, Libertarian: 2

Political Spectrum Quiz


... there's a possibility I would have shot them and/or myself.

Or perhaps I never was as conservative as I thought. Was I always a feel-good liberal hippy only interested in sowing the seeds of love?



Was I really only ever selectively conservative. Perhaps it's time to start writing the political sequel to this ...



UPDATE I: One of my admirers sent in this balanced comment for moderation:

The women of the world want you to kill yourself so that there is absolutely no danger of any of the sisterhood being sexually abused by you anymore. The test-tube scientists of the world want you to kill yourself so that there is no danger of your flawed genetic material being passed onto some new life form. Irfan it is well known that any opinion you might temporarily hold is purely the result of your own delusions and the varying effects of psychiatric pharmaceuticals. Existing as the most grotesque fat black freak in Australia does not entitle you to have a political opinion. Australian humans are entitled to any political opinion. You are not.

Thank you, Douglas Darby!

UPDATE II: Another message for moderation.

It's sad that your political views mirror your life situation as a nasty little social outcast, vicious gossip and a dependent needy lonely screw-up. It's not too late to give yourself an abortion with a massive overdose of psychiatric medication and an attention-seeking self-immolation. Your self-hatred and dislike of all humanity is the reason you continue to torture yourself and all Australians by continuing to exist. You are not going to get any happier by eating yourself to death so just have some dignity for the first time in your sad and lonely life and end it.

I love you too, Doug.

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