It’s unsettling when I find logical reasoning in Andrew Bolt’s column:
This latest fuss started with Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews saying we’ve filled our quota of African refugees for this financial year and no more will be allowed until the next.
From the screaming since, you’d think three things are sickeningly true, which in fact are reassuringly false.
…
Third: you might also think that the Sudanese are incredibly violent.
False again. Yes, there is a particular problem with young Sudanese men. But do the maths. Victoria has some 18,000 Sudanese in a population of five million and 327 of them were arrested last year by police, who picked up 155,439 other Victorians as well.
That means more than 3 per cent of Victorians were arrested last year (assuming no one was arrested twice), but only 1.8 per cent of Sudanese. That doesn’t spell crime chaos to me, or give me reason to cross the street when I see a black man coming. I’d be far more wary of a West Coast footballer.
However, he manages to surround that bit of rationality with straw man arguments (I can’t say I know of anybody who would actually think his first two things are true) that reassure me that he’s still Andrew. And then he draws this conclusion:
But if you still feel you need to whack someone in this latest race riot, have a (mild) crack at Kevin Andrews for making the Sudanese seem worse than the crime figures suggest, by saying he cut the proportion of Africans in refugee intake from 70 per cent last year to 30 now because they’d had trouble settling in.
Thank you, Andrew, but I’ll choose to take much more than a mild crack at Kevin Andrews for this one. By using this argument to justify cutting the African refugee intake by more than half, he has used his Ministerial authority to potentially taint perceptions of an entire cultural group – despite the fact that, as you yourself have uncovered, the objective evidence does not support his claims. And yet you still think he “may well be right”? On what basis?
It’s bad enough when Andrews does this to one person’s reputation at a time. What’s more, even if there are issues with a group of refugees adjusting to Australian society and culture, does that mean the solution should be to exclude them from coming here? Shouldn’t the role of the Government in such a generous and tolerant society as our own be to develop plans to ease the process of acculturation?
I’ll agree with you that most Australians have good hearts and racism is not everywhere (although I would also point out that racism should not be thought of as dichotomous – there is a continuum of degrees of racism). But when our Government attempts to leverage the racism that does exist, to sow the seeds of cultural divisiveness to suit their political ends, then it is not a mild problem – it is irresponsible governance.
UPDATE: It seems Anna Bligh is going to continue Peter Beattie’s efforts to act as an alternative federal opposition. Bravo.
