Here is the Greens housing spokesman, Max Chandler-Mather:
There’s a reason that every time we’re in the middle of a cost of living crisis where people are doing it tough that the rich and powerful bring up migrants because is an excellent way for people like Peter Dutton to distract from the real culprits of this cost of living and housing crisis.
Massive profits for the banks, massive profits for property developers, massive profits for property investors.
The reality is that we could build enough housing for people coming to this country. We could phase out the tax handouts screwing over renters trying to buy a home. We could put caps on renting increases. And we could raise taxes on big corporations and use that to ensure everyone who comes to this country has the resources to live a good life.
But who would lose out of that? Property investors, big banks, large corporations who get away with paying out without paying any tax. And I think we should live in a country where we’re proud of multiculturalism, where we don’t use it as a scapegoat and migrants coming to this country as a scapegoat for a crisis they had nothing to do with.
In the false binary of Max Chandler-Mather’s world, you are with immigration, or you are a hater of migrants.
This is disgraceful rhetoric from an upstart progressive with no experience in Australia before and after immigration.
Unlike this child, I am old enough to remember both.
The Australia of the 1970s and 1980s was a masculine, hard culture of outsiders. We clung to our coastline, afraid of what lay beyond. It was intensely populist and often racist.
It was often said that there was no identity at all.
Yet these shortcomings became strengths as Australia opened to the world in the 1980s and 1990s. Ironically, the very hollowness of the culture enabled the development of remarkably peaceful multiculturalism.
The outsider culture lacked the intense identity structures of Europe. It was rough, but it had large psychological spaces that migrants could fill. They were purpose-built for it, in fact—themselves outsiders who fitted right in.
Multiculturalism developed more seamlessly than anywhere else because of this cultural phenomenon.
Yes, there were racist labels for migrants, and there were genuine racists.
But most migrants were rapidly accepted as people and mates, and, over time, the badges became the kind of ‘sticks and stones’ labels that afflicted all Aussies in the hard culture.
As time passed, we grew together, and the nation melted into a pot of multicultural connections.
It was a stunning transformation for a country that mulled the White Australia policy only a few decades later.
This humanist triumph was a source of immense pride for my generation, culminating in the Sydney Olympics, when crass Australiana was celebrated globally with the cry “Aussie, Aussie Aussie, oi, oi, oi” by all manner of peoples.
But since then, something has gone wrong.
A few disillusioned French theoretical Marxists dedicated themselves to destroying language and meaning, stimulating an education revolution that prioritises labelling over reason.
This has disgorged a generation of activist phonies obsessed with cancelling cultural figments they deem offensive.
Notions of common decency have given way to punitive finger-pointing.
And what made multiculturalism work, the outsider culture, was replaced by evangelical insiders prosecuting whoever was deemed “fascist”, as if these ideological spoiled brats even knew what that was.
Thus, today, we have less tolerance and connection between ethnicities, not more. Australians are less accepting of immigration, not more.
The Greens embody this transformation for the worse. In the 1970s and 80s, rugged naturalists stood before bulldozers to protect old-growth forests. They made a real difference because they were real.
Today’s ersatz Greens tap away on Reddit, applying the “Nazi” label to anybody that resists the environmental or social consequence of wildly out-of-control population growth.
This is breathtaking hypocrisy. But, worse, it is the brainwashing of the feeble-minded. Exhibit A for this is the Greens’ good housing reform platform, which is rendered entirely useless by its extremist views on mass immigration.
So, I’ve got news for you, Mr Chandler-Hater. My generation made multiculturalism, not yours. I’m very proud of it and fervently hope it survives your infantile assault upon it.
Equally, your out-of-control population growth is causing immense social dislocation and environmental destruction. All the things you claim to resist.
You’re the hater here, mate, a hater of youth, working classes, the environment, multiculturalism and truth.
Only self-hate, acted out, could be so toxic.
