Friday, June 3, 2011

So Stupid It Gives Stupid A Bad Name

By now, you'll be aware that I think Australia's policies towards asylum-seekers and refugees are disgraceful in the extreme. Now, however, Gillard's government has shown me that no matter how obnoxious and stupid a government is, there's always a way to fall even lower.

We're letting Australian soldiers die in Afghanistan on the pretext of 'nationbuilding'. We're supposedly helping the Afghan people create necessary infrastructure and civil order, and in so doing, theoretically building a relationship between our two peoples. You know: so as to undermine the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric of the Wahabi idiots behind Al-Qaeda and other largely Islamic agitators.

We talk about engaging with moderate Muslims. We talk about tolerance. We talk about finding ways to cross the cultural divide, to promote understanding.

And then we send unaccompanied children off to Malaysia.


There's stupid. Then there's Pauline Hanson moronic. And then there's subhuman, brain-dead cretinism the like of which I don't think I've seen from a government in this nation before.

We've got couples all over the country who are absolutely desperate to adopt children. (Go ahead. Check out the waiting times.) We've got a precarious relationship with Islam and with various countries in this part of the world. And we've got a pool of innocent children without families -- children who ask for and need nothing more than any other child -- who come from some of these troubled countries. Some of them are certainly of the Islamic faith. All of them, without exception, are frightened and wretchedly alone.

It would take an absolute imbecile not to see the opportunity this presents. All we have to do is treat these children kindly. All we have to do is place them with decent people who want to have families of their own, in the Australian way. All we have to do is act like the fair-go nation we so loudly proclaim ourselves to be.

Children. They're just children. Are you really trying to tell me that they're some kind of security threat? Do you really expect me to believe these are heinous Al-Qaeda sleeper agents, just waiting to grow up so they can be fiendish domestic terrorists?

Why in the name of all that's sane and rational are we doing this? Why are we sending these vulnerable, innocent kids to camps in Malaysia, of all places? Malaysia, where caning is part of the official regime of legal punishment? Malaysia, whose record on human rights is spotty, to say the very least?

D'you think those kids are going to grow up as comfortable, decent people who remember Australia with kindness? Or do you suppose they might just possibly develop some kind of life-long loathing of the place and the culture which treated them so foully, and then rejected them so completely?

Are we goddam TRYING to raise a new generation of Al-Qaeda recruits?

How can anyone be this howlingly stupid? You know -- if the Opposition were to throw Abbott into the oubliette where he belongs and perhaps even put Turnbull in his place, I could even vote Liberal over this simple issue. Yep. That's right: green, anarchist me. I'd vote with the Liberals on this (if Abbott wasn't such a rabid dog) because -- and follow me carefully here -- ANY GOVERNMENT WHICH IS STUPID ENOUGH TO DO THIS IS TOO FUCKING STUPID TO LIVE.

Words fail me. I really thought I'd seen the depths of imbecility in governance. Gillard has just proved me wrong in the worst possible way.