09/12/2013
From: Arthur Redding
Re: Max Suebian’s article “Lifeboat Australia” — Could Abbott’s Victory Attract Anglosphere Refugees?
It was gratifying and fascinating to read VDARE.com’s articles by Max Suebian and Steve Sailer on the recent Australian election. Thanks for running them.
Overall, the Australian electoral result was pretty fortunate. The media were widely predicting a landslide for Tony Abbott, and the reduction of the Labor Party to a mere rump.
This didn’t happen. Although Tasmania was a very good result for Abbott, and Victoria moderately good, Labor kept several New South Wales seats that it really should have lost. And the great anti-Labor swing that Queensland was supposed to undergo failed, disobligingly, to occur at all.
I approve. A huge majority for Abbott would have encouraged neocon hubris, just as Gingrich’s triumph did in 1994 before his self-destruction.
Abbott will now have a solid majority (around 30 seats) in the House of Representatives: no more, no less. He has yet to conquer the Senate, the final composition of which won’t be known for at least two weeks.
The bigger the House of Representatives majorities Liberal (= conservative) Prime Minister John Howard got (in 1996, 2001, and 2004), the worse he governed. Only between 1998 (when he actually lost the popular vote, while being narrowly ahead in terms of parliamentary representation) and 2001 did Howard govern like a radical conservative leader — apropos, for instance, the illegal immigrant-laden ship Tampa. [See Nice Guys Get Illegal Immigrants and Anti-Immigration Policy Produces Australian Election Triumph.]
Howard’s finest hour was East Timor in 1999. There’s no question: his defiance of genocidal Indonesia constituted the most statesmanlike act by any Australian pol in my lifetime. The Great Indonesian Moloch, to whom Prime Minister after Prime Minister had been making craven moral sacrifices for 24 years — ultimately for no better reasons than that principled opposition to Indonesia’s state terrorism was considered “racist” and that its East Timorese victims were Christians and thus deserving of death anyhow — turned out to be a latter-day Wizard of Oz (pun not intended).
But by every other criterion, the Australia which Howard left behind him when he lost his constituency at the 2007 election was more victimized by unrestricted — albeit legal — Third World immigration (see Peter Wilkinson’s book The Howard Legacy) than the Australia he found when he came to power 11 years beforehand. We can’t afford a repetition of this, any more than we can afford a repetition of the middle-class welfare and ethno-masochism which were Malcolm Fraser’s chief — indeed only — contributions to government during his 1975-1983 tenure.
Of course, we should all wish Abbott’s new government well. Yet there is all the difference in the world between wishing a government well, and exhibiting mindless loyalty to it merely through fear of a Labor (= Democrat) alternative.
Six months of an Abbott administration should suffice to tell VDARE.COM readers whether, ultimately, we're dealing with a mensch or a mouse.
Arthur Redding lives in Melbourne. See a previous letter from him here.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.