04 August 2010

We’re not racist, but...


For months our political “leaders” have been falling over themselves insisting that clear signs of an ugly streak of racism in Australian society are anything but. Attacks on Indian students are not motivated by racism, they are opportunistic, it is because they carry iPods, it is because they work late at the 711 store and go home by themselves, and a thousand and one excuses.

The Prime Minister says that just because you are “anxious” about asylum seeker boats arriving on our shores, that doesn’t make you a racist.

A refreshingly honest punter from a Brisbane suburb gave the game away this evening in a vox pop on ABC Radio National’s evening current affairs program PM.  Explaining why he was troubled by the arrival of the small numbers of boat people, he replied:

It’s not so much the numbers, it’s where they are coming from.

Quite.

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