“I know you. You’re Norma Desmond! You used to be in silent pictures. You used to be big!”
“I am Big! It’s the pictures that got small!”
If it’s December then this must be the Sutherland Shire.
UP TO a third of Black South Africans coming into Australia may have TB and some have AIDS, according to One Nation founder Pauline Hanson.
Ms Hanson will never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Although she believes her role is to be a voice for the voiceless, I believe that voters expect their elected representatives to have some regard for the truth when they make public statements on matters of policy.
Baird is correct, nowadays Hanson is all piss and wind, fast becoming the Norma Desmond of Australian politics.
And I promise you I’ll never desert you again we’ll make another picture and another picture. You see, this is my life! It always will be! Nothing else! Just us, the cameras, and those wonderful people out there in the dark!… All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.”
Hanson is just warming up for another run at the Senate. Last time she earned more than $180 000 dollars. She only needs 4% of the vote. Really easy money.
It’s all about the celebrity with Pauline. Dancing with the Stars was probably the acme of her achievement and she loves the limelight. She’s also worked out that you get paid a helluva lot more to sit on your arse in parliament than your average joe gets for flogging chips or Gold Coast real estate, plus people actually pay attention to what would otherwise be just another boring, bigoted, uninformed, opinion.
She’s actually the worst incarnation of her own nightmare – an aspirant time-serving apparatchik desperate to snuffle in the taxpayer-funded trough to no discernible purpose other than self-enrichment.
She should be laughed back into well-deserved obscurity.
She’s just an older, more downmarket version of Paris Hilton. Pathetic.
Blood tests and lung x-rays are a required part of the migration application. What on earth is she talking about?
“Up to a third of Black South Africans coming into Australia may have TB”
She’s clearly understating the case. I’d suggest up to 100% may have TB, same as us locals. With a minimum of 0% who actually do.
Let’s not even think about those Russians and Eastern Europeans with antibiotic-resistant TB strains running rampant through their systems. Australia shouldn’t let a single one of them across the flight bridge at Kingsford Smith… unless they can play tennis or pole vault or swim or buy big clubs like Arsenal or something.
Elanor said it best for me today:
Why do I get the feeling that the issue of diseased Africans wont be stopping any barbeques any time soon.
So you just know the PM will be asked the question, will he be hating it in anticipation, or loving it?
“Blood tests and lung x-rays are a required part of the migration application. What on earth is she talking about?’
She’s too pig ignorant to have a nuanced understanding but a small number of the 5,000 people who enter Australia annually under the humanitarian entry program do actually arrive with HIV and TB. It’s a tiny proportion of the total and not all that surprising when you consider that many of the humanitarian entrants have spent years living in refugee camps in countries where these diseases are endemic. If people meet the criteria for humanitarian entry then TB – which is eminently treatable – obviously shouldn’t – and doesn’t – prevent them coming. Nor should HIV. HIV is a chronic manageable disease in Australia and a handful of refugees from sub-Saharan Africa (often married women) pose zero infection risk to Australians.
The vast majority of migrants are subject to health checks as a condition of entry.
It’s screw-ups that feed people like Hanson. Last year an African international student enrolled in the postgraduate law programme at my old law school. He had TB. His brother had died from it. Every single student in the course had to undergo testing; some had chest x-rays. It was a major fuckup, and emerged as a result of inadequate checks. How many law students told people about that case?(this is my first example of telling tales out of school on this issue). Did Hanson get the goss? Who knows?
Don’t trust the government to get stuff like this right
So what are you saying Helen? An exception does not make a rule. That’s the problem with this kind of “grain of truth” information in the hands of racists like Hanson (and she is, so let us in this age of no political correctness call her for what she is), no context and an easy topic to twist beyond reasoning.
I’m with Geoff. Hanson probably couldn’t care less about whatever diseases immigrants may or may not have. She wants the publicity, and the dosh from commonwealth funding if she runs for the Senate.
Do you reckon Mark, I think she actually believes her own shite, and while there is an element of her cashing in in her “branding” she is a racist through and through.
No surprise that she was on Alan Jones show today, she’s currently getting a big run on the tabloid shows which I’m watching right now disgusting!
Either way, she’s a Queensland problem despite living in the Shire here in Sydney.
Err, Phil, I’m not following how she’s our problem since she’s moved against the tide and moved out of our fine state down south!
I really do think she’s just playing it up for publicity and dollars. I have no doubt she’s not exactly a model of enlightened liberalism, but I suspect all this crud is just pure whoring for publicity calculated to make the maximum impact. After all the anti-Asian lines needed a lot of updating a decade down the track.
Boo to Alan Jones for giving her air.
Heh, and the Shire no less, she knows where she’s a comfortable fit.
Re Jonesy, it was an outside morning show held at what looked like an RSL packed with the olds, let’s just say that the message resonated…..judging by the post show interviews.
As an aside, Jones’ demographic is seriously gray………….
On the day we hear in the news that a woman air traveller farted with such colossus that they had to land the plane early, after her lengthy desperate attempts to light them, we hear also of Pauline Hanson and her latest. A rare perfect day.
I should point out that she’s talking about running in Qld, not NSW so Bruce Baird is safe from having to address this nonsense in the run up to polling day.
Yes Robert, and Pauline’s was a brain fart.
Pauline Hanson on Alan Jones?
Good to see her embracing the gays.
I’m just making my standard libertarian point, Phil. I was one of the people who copped a chest X-ray. And if you’re a poor person in Logan City or Inala who’s had to fight with immigrants/refugees who charge less for ironing/washing/housecleaning, you’ll be in Hanson’s corner (my mum was, before she died in 2003).
The whole analogy works, Phil, even at a career level. The only difference is that our energetic air traveller was banned from flying that airline.
That’s not exactly a standard libertarian point, SL. Surely economic liberals would welcome the transnational mobility of labour enabling enterprising refugees to undercut others in the labour market?
It’s us social democrats who might have a problem with it!
All rumour and innuendo Bob, he’s just a flamboyant and lifelong batchelor………….really.
“I was one of the people who copped a chest X-ray”
The results were?
A positive result for libertarian hobgoblins and boogy men. I hope the x-ray service was fully privatised.
Here I was thinking that her stint in prison might have taught her to see things from a different point of view …
Now, did you get those electoral commission forms filled out, and is your party registered legally under the Electoral Act? Are you sure you’re not rorting money from the State electoral commission? Are all of the members of your Party properly enfranchised within the public structure? No? For shame!
</falsetto>
She better watch out Tony Abbott doesn’t throw her in gaol again.
I tend to be in Steve Edwards’ corner, Mark, on this issue. One of the principle reasons setting a minimum wage in the US has been such a spectacular failure has been mass-migration from Mexico (the minimum wage is undercut in an instant). Australia doesn’t have that issue, so I have no concern with Australia acting like a large corporation and recruiting exactly who it wants to recruit. I lived two streets away from the mosque that burnt down in 2001, and I’m quite happy to make a judgment call in favour of poor whites and indigenous people, if only to prevent the same crap from happening again.
We get the economic benefits attached to keeping the wolf from the door, help those who respect our property rights, and abolish the minimum wage. You can’t lose.
Protectionism doesn’t work, but stopping the poor and the sick – in all but the most extreme circumstances – from turning up in your country is a much cheaper and more workable alternative.
Sedition 101.
Seditious Intention
Section 24 defined a seditious intention as [a]n intention to effect any of the following purposes:
(g) to promote feelings of ill-will and hostility between different classes of Her Majesty’s subjects so as to endanger the peace, order or good government of the Commonwealth; Sear Wikipedia.
Then there’s racial vilification. Africans suffered between 8-9 million dead in their slow-motion slave holocaust. Imagine if PH said something about jews and bacilii.
There would be righteous outrage and she might be charged – she should be charged now inmho and Rats-for-honest-politics is looking into it.
Well this isn’t really a debate about immigration policy. Notwithstanding any slips ups on health checks this is simply about Hanson engaging in a non-sequitur. Don’t want to bring in ‘diseased Africans’? Let’s screen people for disease before they are allowed in which is what we already do … duh. The odd mistake here and there doesn’t give her anything to run on. That’s as if she was saying ‘oh my god! someone’s house got broken into last night. why don’t we have laws against burglary’
she is making a goose of herself as usual.
Time to change the Electoral Act to make public funding payable only as reimbursement.
Still, she pledged to talk about industrial relations (but watch her direct preferences to the coalition…) I can see her IR policy: ‘Diseased Africans on temporary protection visas are taking “our” jobs’
IF Hanson is going to make a run for the Qld senate, she will probably stuff it up again, so buckle up for another fun ride.
Remember in 1998 she ran Heather Hill for the Qld Senate, who forgot to check her eligibility as a candidate. Turned out Hill was a British subject, not an Australian citizen, and the High Court voided her election on the basis that she was in breach of section 44(i) of the Constitution (in the meantime, declaring Britain a foreign country, what does that say about “our” Queen?), and Len Harris was put in as a seat warmer.
And I do hope they keep replaying that bizarre murder tape…
I’ve got the campaign slogan, people.
Your stealth DIMA agent reports -
There has been exactly one known case of a person with infectious TB getting past health checks in the last five years. This only became an issue because the relevant airport and hospital (I won’t shame them by naming the city) both dropped the ball and it wasn’t reported for several days. When it did come to light, passenger lists were pulled and all people who had been potentially exposed were contacted. Fallout was minimal.
Someone in my Department needs to sit on this woman hard and shut her up. If we can take a break from handing money to IBM hand over fist and actually look after our own business, this may happen.
Sweet Liam.
If Hanson is going to make a run for the Queensland Senate, the Coalition, Family First, Fishing Party, CEC et al may quite possibly stuff it up for the rest of us by preferencing the Greens last and getting her elected. She was the last Senate candidate eliminated in 2004, being only some 50,000 votes (or 2 per cent of the total vote)behind Barnaby Joyce after Family First preferences were distributed, and almost pulling ahead of Joyce on the second-last count. QED my point on another thread about the Greens needing to maximise their Senate primary vote in a hostile preferencing environment.
Yes, we do. Then, as Geoff said, we let them in anyway. So what’s the point?
And it’s absolute rubbish to say that the risk of transmission is zero. I’m sorry. It may be low but it’s not zero.
I’m more concerned about the ill informed Australians who don’t vaccinate their children.
I wonder if that will be part of Hanson’s policy platform?
Grace, Heather Hill in fact had dual citizenship, and the High Court’s 4-3 ruling against her was a highly contentious decision described by Malcolm Mackerras as “a victory to the vexatious litigants”. Whatever else might be said about One Nation’s general standards of competence, you should not rush to the conclusion that Hill “forgot to check her eligibility as a candidate”.
William, Hill was not an Australian citizen at the time of her nomination (she apparently applied around April 1998) and did apparently forget to check her constitutional qualifications. You might be mixing up this case with an earlier one, Sykes vs Cleary, where other candidates were found to have dual citizenship.
Mackerras’ view is nonsense (not for the first time) – he is not a constitutional lawyer and was not involved in the proceedings. The motivations of the litigants do not cancel out the importance of this constitutional decision – the High Court would have thrown the case out if it did not meet the requirements for a petition before that court.
See here for a description of the proceedings and the decision:
http://www.aec.gov.au/_content/Why/committee/jscem/1998_election/sub232.pdf