verging_on_random

What does Labor stand for anyway?

June 25, 2007 on 8:12 pm | In Uncategorized |

I just listened to an old recording of a story about a middle-aged hunchbacked Englishman who falls in love with a beautiful child from a poor family. He entices her to visit him at his lonely seaside hideaway by keeping a menagerie of injured animals that he nurses back to health.

Disgusting, eh. Blokes like that should be locked up for life.

Actually the recording is a setting to music of Paul Gallico’s The Snow Goose. It’s narrated by the late Ruth Cracknell. Its hero, Philip Rhayader, ends up getting killed at Dunkirk trying to save English soldiers from the Nazi army while the snow goose circles overhead and young Fritha, left alone in the wilds of the English marshes, finally admits that she loves him. It’s appallingly sentimental stuff which never fails to cause a lump in my throat when I listen to it every few years.

These days of course it would never be published; it would be dismissed as a sick apologia for pedophilia. Which it is for all I know, but for decades after the Second World War The Snow Goose was a much-loved classic, set as a text in countless English courses around the world as a story of the way love can rise above evil.

Is there love in Australian indigenous settlements or are they just a lot of wild animals where the men regard children as objects of sexual gratification? I don’t know to be honest but I rather suspect that indigenous people exhibit more or less the same range of emotions towards children as the remainder of the human species. If so, that makes a government program centred on police, troops and authoritarian measures to control Aborigines’ lives a grotesquely inappropriate one.

There’s been a lot of discussion of Howard’s road-to-Damascus conversion to the cause of saving the little indigenous children. By far the saddest aspect of it has been the way so many Labor supporters have couched their arguments in terms of what will help get their party elected. Compromise, they say, is sometimes necessary. One must recognise political realities. Kevin Rudd must choose the issues carefully on which he wants to buy a fight.

Fine expedient sentiments, reeking of exactly the opportunism for which Howard’s mob have been rightly condemned for years.

Tens of thousands of indigenous Australians have endured decades of misery thanks to incompetence or worse on the part of successive federal governments. Now Labor supporters want us to turn a blind eye to yet another betrayal of these people, on the grounds that it’s politically expedient. Must keep an eye on the vital issues don’t you know, like getting revenge on the evil Howard Government. Much more important than doing something constructive for Aborigines … we might be able to do a few token things in the second term. One after that at the latest.

Well screw the lot of them. That is exactly the morally vacuous logic used by supporters of half the evils done by governments down the ages.
If the Labor Party won’t - or can’t - stand up and promote the interests of the most disadvantaged group of Australians in the nation they’re no better than Howard’s mob and I couldn’t care less which party is in government.