Saturday, May 11, 2013

Who does Tony Abbott call the most worthy Australians?

If you want to retain any hope that Tony Abbott will represent a conservative view as a future PM you had better stop reading now.

In the paper today there is a story titled "Liberal Party swats the WASP type with a more inclusive approach".

The story reports on a multicultural meeting organised by the Liberal Party in Melbourne last month:
TONY Abbott has declared the rebirth of a "more inclusive" Liberal Party which has ditched its WASP traditions as the Coalition fields a record number of ethnic candidates.

With the opposition heavily favoured to win September's election, the next federal parliament is shaping as the most multicultural ever, with the Liberal Party fielding at least 21 candidates from diverse ethnic backgrounds...

Mr Abbott said such an event would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

"The Liberal Party would have been reluctant to have explicitly reached out to recently arrived immigrants," Mr Abbott said.

"Because of our reputation for being a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) party, a lot of newly arrived migrants would probably think the Liberal Party was not for them."
 
I was curious to find out what Abbott said at the meeting and so looked up his speech. It's a shocker. I'll quote it later, but he is at pains to emphasise that migrants are better than natives.

Why would he think this?  The late cricket commentator Peter Roebuck explained why he believed immigrants were better than native born Australians this way:
It is debatable whether people born in this country should be allowed to vote. It is no achievement to emerge from a womb. They could just as well be in Winnipeg.

That view hasn't just been plucked from a hat. If you are a liberal who believes in the self-making, self-defining individual then it probably is true that immigrants are superior to natives. It is immigrants who have made a self-conscious choice to move to a particular country - it is an act of "self-making". The native born aren't such good liberal individualists - their identity is an inherited one.

And this view is even more pronounced amongst right-liberals. What matters to right-liberals is having the freedom and the opportunity to be self-made within the market. Therefore, having a positive view of your country means seeing it as a land of opportunity for all those wishing to "make themselves" within a free economy.

Therefore, those individuals who cross borders from countries with less opportunity to be self-made into a more advanced one will seem particularly virtuous - like an ideal type of right-liberal citizen. And the greater the leap the higher the virtue: to take a hazardous journey from poverty in a closed economy to opportunity in a more open one will seem like the ultimate, heart-warming act of self-making to a right-liberal.

You get a sense of such an outlook in some of the speeches of Ronald Reagan. He said once in support of high immigration:
...I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace, a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity, and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it and see it still...
 
With all that in mind, consider what Abbott said in his Melbourne speech (abridged):
For a long time, I regret to say, our Liberal Party did not fully reflect the diversity of modern Australia...we were too slow to change and to accommodate the diversity, the richness, the multiculturalism of modern Australia. But we have well and truly changed and we have well and truly learnt a necessary lesson and I want to tell you that if all of our candidates are successful, by far the most common surname in the Liberal Party Room will be Nguyen.

People who have come to this country from many parts of Asia; who have come, worked hard, prospered, succeeded and become first class Australians – that is the face and the name of modern Australia. 

...I want to say how brave every single migrant to this country is, because every single one of you has done something that those who are native born have never done. You have been gutsy enough to take your future in your hands and to go to a country which is not yours and make it your own. Modern Australia is absolutely unimaginable without migration and migration ... has added a heroic dimension to our national life, because so many of the people who have come to this country have been fleeing persecution, have been leaving countries where the freedom, the justice, the prosperity and the solidarity that we take for granted are absent. So, you have added a heroic dimension to our national life.

...You have brought to this country a sense of family, a sense of enterprise and a sense of community. Almost every one of you have come to this country and you have worked hard, often in small business. You’ve built community amongst people from your own background and amongst the wider Australian community and you have cherished family. As a result of your hard work, our country has security, prosperity and liberty.

...I particularly respect and value the hard work and the skills that everyone brings to this country when they come to do a job from day one - in particular, those who come to this country as skilled migrants...they might come as temporary migrants originally, but they make the very best Australian citizens eventually. They are the most worthy, the most welcome parts of the Australian family...
 
One thing I find particularly interesting is that Abbott is happy to give all the credit for Australia's security and prosperity to recent immigrants. In doing so he is throwing over his own pioneering ancestors. Why does he feel comfortable doing this? It's because in his mind the whole issue of ancestry and ethnic loyalty doesn't matter.

What matters to him is the act of being self-made in the market. So it wouldn't register to him that he is losing anything in throwing over his own forebears.

In other words, it's not that he is hostile to those who do have such loyalties, and he even goes so far as to praise recent immigrants for having "built community amongst people from your own background". But for himself it doesn't matter.

That attitude is perhaps a little better for us than the current left-liberal one. It is likely to be a little more tolerant of our efforts to hold onto our own traditions.

The Anglo left-liberal attitude goes further than not registering or caring about an ethnic identity of their own. Instead it makes a white identity exceptional, by claiming that whiteness is at the source of human inequality (because it is held that whiteness was invented to justify unearned privilege and a racist oppression of others). In the left-liberal view an expression of European identity is treated not as a normal expression of identity but as an immoral assertion of supremacy.

But even if the right-liberal attitude is less hostile than the current left-liberal one, it is still blind - still oblivious - to the mainstream tradition. It is a mistake to think that someone like Abbott can represent us. If you think he is better than Gillard and therefore worth making the effort to vote for, then fine. But don't have illusions that it's possible to vote him in and then sit back while he puts things right. That just won't happen. If things are to improve it will because we ourselves work steadily toward goals of our own. It won't simply be gifted to us from above: we have to take it for ourselves.

23 comments:

  1. Tony Abbott is either a sell-out, or excessively "altruistic".

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  2. "One thing I find particularly interesting is that Abbott is happy to give all the credit for Australia's security and prosperity to recent immigrants. In doing so he is throwing over his own pioneering ancestors. Why does he feel comfortable doing this? It's because in his mind the whole issue of ancestry and ethnic loyalty doesn't matter."

    What a politician says and what the same politician believes are two different things. I still believe that Tony Abbott is a true conservative at heart, but like most conservatives these days he's running scared. The spin doctors are telling him he has to reach out to people who will never vote for him anyway, and he lacks the strength of character to realise that it's futile trying to chase votes that you'll never get. That's the problem with conservative parties world-wide - they're wasting their time chasing the gay vote and the environmentalist vote and the ethnic vote instead of making their appeal to the sorts of people who are realistically going to vote for a conservative party.

    With a massive majority in the next parliament to bolster him he may show a bit more spirit, or he may turn out to be as spineless as Barry O'Farrell. Time will tell.

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  3. Anon,

    Sorry, I agree it's depressing. It has to be discussed, though, to avoid the cycle of "hope against hope, remain passive, vote, be disappointed".

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  4. What annoys me as a young anglo man is the world doesn't see a young white straight man trying to immigrate to another country and make himself in the same way.
    I speak from personal experience. As I tried to migrate and settle in Europe and it failed.
    Even with an enviable support base of local friends (the privilege often leveled at whites). I still failed because the concept of a young white man needing to make himself was incomprehensible.
    I failed because there was not only indifference to me trying to start from nothing in a new country. There was hostility and even suspicion at my motives.
    It was made more insulting because there was an apparent obsession with the immigration of foreigners from the 3rd world. Everything revolved around them and their "plight".

    Basically if you are not from a well off family or already made you are up the creek as a young anglo man. Everywhere.

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  5. I appreciate your theory....but I think this is cold practicalism mixed with stupidity.

    The Jews have been trying to infiltrate Asia for ages. And not just the Jews, but many white gentile douchebags who see a vast untapped market.

    Colonialism is out...so what to do?

    The Chinese economy is closed...so it's hard to get inside. Asian Immigrants are like a water spout...through them we can get into their host societies. It's much like financial debt. Sure China owns all the U.S. debt....but what does that really mean?? It means that the banksters now have a funnel, an octopus hand to move into Chinese financials.

    Why does Murdoch have an Asian wife really?

    It's a strategy....Mainly Jewish strategy with a few dumb white liberals in tow.

    Tony Abbott is that dumb....But the people who fund his stupidity know exactly what they are doing.

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  6. Anon, I disagree.

    The Liberal Party has for decades had two wings: a purist liberal one and a fusionist one.

    The purists want a liberal politics based on individual autonomy with no admixture.

    Senator George Brandis is a leading figure of this wing of the party:

    the sovereign idea which inspires our side of politics has always been the same: our belief that the paramount public value is the freedom of the individual ...

    the most important single thing we must do is renew our commitment to the freedom of the individual, and restore that commitment to the very centre of our political value system: not one among several competing values, but the core value, from which our world view ultimately derives.

    in qualifying the Liberal Party's commitment to the freedom of the individual as its core value, and weighing it against what he often called social cohesion, Howard made a profound departure from the tradition of Deakin and Menzies.

    Liberalism ... has such a central guiding principle - respect for the freedom of the individual, his dignity and his autonomy; his right ... to be the architect of his own life [i.e. to be a self-determining, self-creating autonomous individual]

    Every one of those reforms extended the bounds of human freedom, gave individual men and women greater autonomy ...


    This represents a world view - a set of assumptions about what is valuable in life and what a social order should be oriented to.

    If you follow the Brandis purist liberal view then your focus will be on removing impediments to individual autonomy - on how an individual can be "the architect of his own life" (the self-making individual).

    You won't focus on conserving supra-individual goods like particular ethnic or national traditions - these will either not be in your field of view or they might even seem to be a "limitation" on the sovereign individual as they make "external" claims on what an individual is and on what he should do.

    For instance, another member of the purist wing of the Liberals, Petro Georgiou, wrote:

    We as Liberals are committed to encouraging and supporting diversity in our multicultural society. We reject the sterile Anglo-conformity of past days.

    For Georgiou, the Anglo identity is something to be broken apart, an imposed "sterility".

    The fusionists also believe in this concept of the individual but they think you can have some sort of admixture with conservatism as well.

    However, the conservative admixture is usually a weak one, often along the lines of "liberalism is there to form our policy, but conservatism is there to keep social stability so that the liberalism can be more effectively implemented".

    If things are socially stable, therefore, the fusionists are happy to push on with a radical implementation of liberal policy.

    It seems to be the case as well that the American liberal right has influenced the values and outlook of Liberal Party politicians like Tony Abbott.

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  7. Slightly OT, but this was a recent Facebook discussion re 'racism'.

    Me: Damian, I'm genuinely curious; what would you say was/is the best working multicultural society?

    Damian: I would say the UK does very well. Many cultures and religions represented in parliament, sport and media. Amazing melting pots like the East End of London where a staggering array of cultures rub along together. And those religions and cultures feeling very free to express themselves and represented at all levels of society.

    As an example of the live and let live attitude, our house in London shares boundaries with the following households:
    - Large British/Pakistani muslim family where the mum lived nearby from age 10 and father grew up in Pakistan
    - "Conventional" British family with two kids where the parents grew up nearby
    - An Irish/Danish (I think) lesbian couple and their daughter
    - Another "conventional" Brit family and their daughters
    - A an art studio owned by a South African artist previously occupied by an Italian heavy metal musician and a French digital artist
    - A British Carribean woman and her husband
    - And our house - the Aussies

    New York is also an amazing melting pot but I think London trumps it.

    And while I think it's better to compare cities than countries (because it's hard to believe that either Sydney or Hobart typify Australia) I would have to say the UK is more multicultural than Australia because of the cultural mix of regional towns and cities too. You really have to go to isolated pockets to find monocultures.

    --

    I find it enlightening that he considers the UK to be a multicultural success. I would agree with him, but only because I think the purpose of the multicult is not what he believes it to be.

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  8. AFrica for Africans, ASia for ASians, White Countries for Everyone!!



    Mr. Abbott's views are in complete agreement with "Anti-racist Hitler"


    Great company Mr. Abbott.

    What a parasite.

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  9. Jason,

    That's interesting. Damian is obviously enthusiastic about the multicultural experience.

    But a lot of his fellow Londoners don't experience the melting pot in such a positive way. The Daily Mail has run a series of articles mapping white flight out of London - 600,000 over a ten year period.

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2281941/600-000-decade-white-flight-London-White-Britons-minority-capital.html

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2320002/How-rise-white-flight-areas-dominated-ethnic-minorities-creating-segregated-UK.html

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2269058/British-families-self-segregate-whites-abandon-urban-areas-countryside.html

    Damian also needs to think a bit more long-term, as the logic of his multicultural policy is not different communities inhabiting the same place generation after generation but the permanent melting away of the white populations.

    Already there are 84 schools in the UK with no white pupils at all - and this number is rapidly rising:

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2323220/Shock-84-schools-NO-white-British-pupils--double-years-ago.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

    For a culture to reproduce itself it needs to have the "space together" to do so - something that multiculturalism doesn't allow for. In this sense it is an "anti-cultural" policy.

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  10. Australia's founding Anglo-Celtic population is being rapidly displaced by Third World migrants and our "leaders" are applauding it.

    Frank Salter is correct:

    Anglo Australians are a subaltern ethnicity. They are second-class citizens, the only ethnic group subjected to gratuitous defamation and hostile interrogation in the quality media, academia and race-relations bureaucracy. The national question is obscured in political culture by fallout from a continuing culture war against the historical Australian nation.

    Full article

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  11. Anglo Australians are a subaltern ethnicity. They are second-class citizens, the only ethnic group subjected to gratuitous defamation and hostile interrogation in the quality media, academia and race-relations bureaucracy. The national question is obscured in political culture by fallout from a continuing culture war against the historical Australian nation.

    Its the same on the otherside of the world in Europe. Europeans are taught that Anglos are the greatest monsters in history. We are referred to as extra-nazi amazingly by people in nations that were allies to the nazis! We who fought them. Its madness.

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  12. So who does an Anglo Australian vote for?
    The I hate your guts Labor party?
    Or
    The I don't care about you Liberal party?

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  13. "For a long time, I regret to say, our Liberal Party did not fully reflect the diversity of modern Australia."

    Modern "diverse" Australia is only a relatively new beast. For instance, Australia's population was over 90 percent European as late as the 1990s. People tend to forget how rapidly Australia has been transformed through mass non-European immigration - a transformation that was engineered through stealth and without the democratic consent of the Australian people.

    Put simply, the notion that Australia has always been a kaleidoscope of races and cultures from all over the world is absolute rubbish.

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  14. "So who does an Anglo Australian vote for? The I hate your guts Labor party? Or The I don't care about you Liberal party?"

    Australia needs a new conservative party that protects the interest of this country's founding majority. The recent rise of the anti-open borders UKIP back in the Old Dart suggest that it can be done.

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  15. So who does an Anglo Australian vote for?
    The I hate your guts Labor party?
    Or
    The I don't care about you Liberal party?


    Anon, that's it in a nutshell.

    The new party being founded by mining magnate Clive Palmer is not an alternative either - he wants to fly refugees in directly as a cost cutting measure.

    Unfortunately I don't think the solution is a parliamentary one right now (though we shouldn't rule out trying to exert influence later on).

    We need to try to influence the political views of the next generation of young Australians - we need to raise criticisms of the idea of freedom as autonomy, and we need to raise criticisms of economism on both the right and the left (economism = "a theory or viewpoint that attaches decisive or principal importance to economic goals or interests").

    We also need to lay the foundations for non-parliamentary associations and institutions and to further develop an independent media.

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  16. Mark Richardson said...

    "We need to try to influence the political views of the next generation of young Australians"

    That's why I think we need a parliamentary approach, and a new political party. I think it's the only way to get the necessary media attention. Any kind of non-parliamentary association will just be preaching to the converted.

    The example of Pauline Hanson is very pertinent. By getting into parliament she got an enormous amount of media attention. Once you win a seat in parliament even the left-wing media has to notice you. The fact that they will attack you doesn't matter - in fact it probably helps. It's the only possible way to take the initiative and start setting the political agenda. And a new conservative party that focused on immigration could easily win seats in the Senate. The reason that Katter's party and Palmer's party will both fail is that they're not addressing the issues that really matter to people, and immigration is the number one issue. It's the hot-button issue that would virtually guarantee a party of winning Senate seats.

    The example of the Greens is also pertinent. The fact that they hold actual seats in the parliament guarantees them of media attention. There's no reason not to learn from our enemies.

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  17. Back in 1911 Hilaire Belloc and Cecil Chesterton described the Anglo political duopoly (on which Australia's is based) as a more or less complete fraud. Perhaps 102 years later, Australians will become capable of reading the exposé concerned (The Party System) and will cease adopting the same punching-bag role apropos Tony Abbott's Liberals (or John Howard's, or Barry O'Farrell's) that Rihanna adopts apropos Chris Brown.

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  18. For the new conservative party to be successful it will require getting the votes of 'rusted on' Labor working class white suburban voters in Lindsay, Greenway, Macarthur, Macquarie, etc. who despise the wealthy globalist elite that run the LNP. We also have to better explain to mainstream Australia how the elitist pursuit of globalism has made the good things in life, e.g. large properties, big families and job security unattainable for most of us.

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  19. "For the new conservative party to be successful it will require getting the votes of 'rusted on' Labor working class white suburban voters in Lindsay, Greenway, Macarthur, Macquarie, etc. who despise the wealthy globalist elite that run the LNP."

    I think that would be achievable. A new conservative party that put zero net immigration at its focus could win just as many votes away from Labor as from the Coalition.

    Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in the 1940s on the assumption that it would appeal to the "forgotten people" and right now we have a "forgotten people" who make up an enormous slice of the voters. There are huge numbers of voters out there who hate the major parties with a vengeance. They're just waiting for an alternative to come along.

    I live in the electorate of Dobell, an electorate that would certainly be winnable.

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  20. This beat me because it's so horrible I don't know what to say.

    You might as well vote for Marxists.

    If we're gone, dispossessed, destroyed, I don't care whether the other races that come after us live under Capitalism or Communism.

    cecilhenry: "Mr. Abbott's views are in complete agreement with "Anti-racist Hitler""

    Anti-Racist Hitler is the right comparison.

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  21. I suppose the logical conclusion of Mr. Abbott's speech is the imperative for each family to change countries every generation. If you stay put, you are showing no bravery, you are just living where you happened to be born, etc. To put it more bluntly, the Asian immigrant who moves to Australia and builds a good life should encourage his own children to emigrate out of Australia, right?

    Another point: What is so brave about moving to a country that is better than the one you came from? It would seem that true bravery would be for some Southeast Asians to move from their home country directly to Haiti, on the theory that Haiti needs help in building a good country for the future. Going where someone else has already built something good that is waiting for your arrival does not seem all that brave. Would it be brave of me to move from the U.S. to Switzerland?

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