Just what is this ‘Team Australia’?
Once again, it seems, the Liberal party spin
doctors are trying to cloud our minds and muddy the waters with yet
another two or three word slogan. This time it is ‘Team Australia’.
As if we were not already dumbed down enough with the pathetic, ‘stop
the boats’ and ‘axe the tax’ not to mention, ‘fix the budget’, here we
are, once more, being ask to leave our basic intelligence and our common
sense at the front door and enter this extraordinary world of the
mystical, unquestioned, not to be doubted, dumb-arse quotes of the day.
This time it is ‘Team Australia’. Yet another lame-brain, mean
nothing, distraction placed along our pathway for a compliant media to
pick up and run with. It is done so that we will forget the incompetence
thus far displayed, as well as the more pressing and relevant issues
before us and expend our energy by ramping up intolerance, ignorance and
sectarian fear mongering, something we have shown ourselves to be so
good at and which can, so effectively, divide us.
So, before we become so overwhelmed with the IDEA of what ‘Team
Australia’ is, perhaps we should all take a deep breath, step back and
place this rather obsequious slogan under the microscope.
Trawling through the news feed on Facebook this morning I came across the, ‘Starts at Sixty’ page and an article headed, ‘Do You Agree With Tony Abbott on This One?’The article then goes on to describe one woman’s experience living in a
Middle Eastern country for an undisclosed period of time. This is part
of what this otherwise unidentified woman wrote:
“While I was living there, everything I did and said had to be
done their way. I had to dress like they did, I wasn’t allowed to swim
at the beaches or lakes, I wasn’t allowed to speak or make eye contact
unless it was culturally appropriate to do so. Safe to say, living there
was incredibly different from what it is while I was in Australia. And,
I was OK with that. I was in their country, so I was happy to live as
they did.”
You can read the whole article here: http://www.startsatsixty.com.au/living/your-say-living/do-you-agree-with-tony-abbott-on-this-one
I am not going to suggest that this was a deliberate plant by ‘Team
Liberal’ although it certainly smells like it. But, one only has to read
the comments that the article has generated to see that it has had the
desired effect. The responses are predominantly a cross section of the
crass sectarian, if not racial, intolerance our nation experienced back
in 2001 when John Howard so cleverly manipulated the Australian psyche
with Tampa.
So far, there have been several hundred comments on the Facebook
page. The majority of those I have read seem to be under the impression
that if one lives in a Middle Eastern country and must conform to their
way of life, then that means those who come to this country must
therefore necessarily conform to ours. What the respondents are
therefore saying is that WE are no better than THEM.
While thankfully, there are a handful of respondents who have posted
rational counter arguments and warn of the danger implied in Abbott’s
‘Team Australia’, such a chant has the possibility of going viral and
igniting yet another hate campaign that ends up dividing the country on a
spurious issue that masks the more disgraceful things that the present
government is doing and wants to do.
Wehave always celebrated diversity. We have always encouraged
multiculturalism. What is it that we fear? More importantly, who is
driving this anti-Middle Eastern rhetoric? What did Tony Abbott mean
when he said, “You don’t migrate to this country unless you want to join
Team Australia.” What is ‘Team Australia”?
The unidentified author of the article wrote, “When I was over
there, I lived as they did, but when they live here, if we ask them to
adopt our practices or do their best to integrate into our lifestyle, we
are deemed as being racist.”
What utter rubbish.
What practices do we ask them to adopt here? What lifestyle is the
author referring to? Do we expect that they change their diet and eat
our food? Should they all renounce Islam and become Christian or
Atheist? Should they all forget their language and speak only English?
What is it precisely that we should expect of them?
I cannot help but feel that there are elements out there, mostly on
the highly conservative side of politics that have begun another round
of fear mongering that manifests itself in demonising anyone who is
different. This convinces me that a dark undercurrent of intolerance and
bigotry within our country has been targeted and that the process of
appealing to the lowest common denominator in humanity has begun and is
on the rise once again. It goes by many names, easily recognised for its
nationalistic spirit, like ‘Team Australia’.
(image from theage.com.au)
It worked for John Howard and one can be certain that if we are not
careful, it can work again. We can stop it by demanding to know just
what such catch-calls like, ‘Team Australia’ actually mean and what are
its objectives.
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