The progressive ruling establishment’s global playbook to stifle popular discontent with massive unchecked immigration in Western nations is being rolled out to full effect in Australia. The One Nation Party is the Down Under populist party now enduring an operation already meted out to global migration opponents in Germany, England and the US, to name but just a few examples.
Americans who have not been comatose for the past 11 years will instantly recognize the dominant media framing. “Australia’s far-right One Nation party won a seat in a state parliament long held by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s center-left Labor Party, continuing a surge that had gained the populist group its first seat in the national lower house,” Reuters reported Aug. 30.
Observe how center-left goes together smoothly in the Reuters universe. It represents normality. Unlike these wild-eyed right-wingers who are now sadly on the rise.
“Founded in 1997 [by House of Representatives member Pauline Hanson], One Nation long occupied the political fringe, but its hard line on immigration has drawn more support amid public frustration over housing shortages, high living costs and a general decline in support for Australia’s major parties,” the wire service continued.
This is standard boilerplate for big-box media operatives forced to explain why the people they have constantly portrayed as “fringe” fanatics are growing more and more popular among the general populace. After the social problems fueling this growth are grudgingly recognized when they can no longer be ignored, the establishment seeks to inform the “frustrated” public that they are deeply misguided in the way they seek to address them.
It's the End of the World As We Know It
“One Nation [on Sept. 14] said it would cut the number of temporary migrants in Australia by more than 750,000 over three years, targeting international students and family members of skilled migrants,” The Guardian reports. Such a “policy would ’smash the Australian economy’ and force hospitals and aged care facilities to close, [the ruling] Labor [Party] has warned, while the university sector has urged against a ‘race to the bottom’ on cutting overseas arrivals,” the paper breathlessly stressed.
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The familiar bewailing that the nation will collapse if its cheap menial labor pool is reduced is given the Aussie touch. Prominent business organizations such as the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the National Farmers Federation are tapped to publicly wring their hands over the devastating economic consequences to come. The ruling government quickly amplifies the claims.
“Hospitals and aged care facilities would be forced to close,” Home Affairs Minister Tony Burke is quoted as saying. “There’d be a chronic shortage of backpackers to work in hospitality and tourism, or to help farmers pick their crops. The construction sector would grind to a halt. Regional universities would have to radically shrink or go broke.”
All this caterwauling set off by a fairly simple, forthright policy plan that would merely set back temporary visa numbers to 2017 levels, as The Guardian itself acknowledges. “We will take back control of who comes here and how many we accept, train more Australians, restore living standards and put the safety and security of Australians first,” One Nation has proclaimed.
Is Australia really going to sink into the sea if that were to happen?
‘Setting Up a Slush Fund to Legally Harass People’
Fresh claims of ominous “neo-Nazi” ties and other outlandish slurs are par for the course in describing a party that would do all of this. Another well-worn tactic, applied here long before Democrats utilized it against populist Republican President Donald Trump, is lawfare. Australia’s Labor Party committed itself to an organized, financed campaign of legal harassment of One Nation over 20 years ago.
“One of the Howard Government’s most senior ministers [has] revealed he raised nearly $100,000 to lay the groundwork for Pauline Hanson’s prosecution for electoral fraud,” The Sydney Morning Herald reported in Aug. 2003. John Howard led the ruling Labor Party’s government at the time.
The party bigwig involved was far from apologetic about his actions.
Minister for Workplace Relations Tony Abbott “was absolutely unrepentant,” after the news broke, the paper noted. “There was nothing wrong under electoral law, he said, with people of one political persuasion setting up a slush fund to legally harass people of another political persuasion.”
In fact, Abbott duly informed the Australian Electoral Commission of his doings, he stated.
“I wrote back to them saying the entire purpose of Australians for Honest Politics was to fund legal actions against One Nation,” he declared.
Does it remind you of anything going on in America today? And in the UK, Germany and France, for that matter.
The One Nation Party is also being forced to wage a cultural war against the credentialed establishment. It too mirrors events in the US and throughout the West. A constant campaign of teaching children that their country’s entire history is one giant litany of wrongdoing is flourishing in the public schools of Australia.
Getting to the Kids in Australia
The state of “Victoria’s only One Nation [Member of Parliament] Rikkie-Lee Tyrrell has pulled her 16-year-old daughter out of school to escape the relentlessly partisan politics forced onto students, declaring that educators peddling political propaganda belong on the unemployment line,” One News Australia, a news site associated with the party, reported Sept. 14.
“Tyrrell said some teachers at her daughter’s school had compared Pauline Hanson to Hitler, and her daughter’s response was that ‘Pauline doesn’t kill people,’” One News detailed. “She said the school also pushed what she calls the ‘Rainbow Brigade’ onto students, with kids who didn’t dress up on mufti day and ‘pay the dollar to support the LGBTQI plus movement’ left to be shunned and picked on by other students.”
Young schoolchildren have been harnessed to rally against One Nation’s temporary visa plan.
“Hundreds of students have taken to the streets of Sydney to protest against policies raised by Pauline Hanson and One Nation,” 9News in Australia reported Sept. 17. “Similar rallies were held in other Australian cities. ‘We already have enough division in humanity, and I feel like we don’t need any more,’ one student told 9News.”
“Another student said they were concerned about what a future One Nation government could mean for young Australians. ‘I don’t feel safe with her being the prime minister when I’m older and for my future.’”
And so it goes. A global progressive political establishment that is clinging to power by its fingernails in nation after nation in the West has resorted to throwing every conceivable cultural, legal, political and social roadblock in the way of citizens seeking to organize unified opposition to their increasingly despised policies. How long can the credentialed power of out-of-touch elites hold off the rising tide of popular discontent?
