It is a short term fix for a short term campaigner. McKew has no long term interest in public administration and, having done the job she was hired to do, might walk away from public office tomorrow. However, McKew has unleashed a very ugly force into Australian politics which may well render the long term goals of her own party unachievable.
There is no such community as an 'Asian Community.' There is greater diversity among Asian peoples than there is between human races. Mr Howard never pretended to represent any one race or community, instead, he represented his constituents and extended his heart to all, regardless of race, color or creed. Mr Howard is a Christian, but as a leader, he governed in the interests of all.
McKew believes in nothing, but hatred of conservatism which Mr Howard represented. In her campaign she enlisted the aid of Mr Hawke, who famously cried after Tiananmen Square, but whose innate racism supported the regime that committed the act. Keating's administration gave us activists with known links to terrorists. One might remember Latham's great difficulty in wishing well to those survivors of tsunami.
Yet McKew has had supporters make promises to people of Korean or Chinese ethnicity which she will not keep. McKew cannot give support to her own electorate to the level Howard gave. It is not Chinese peoples who will benefit, but possibly mainland government. South Koreans will not benefit and the Northern government won't want the endorsement.
How long before Bennelong will realize they were scammed? How will Bennelong respond?
Thursday, December 20, 2007
How Maxine Achieved Office Through Racism
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A toxic race to top
by Piers Akerman
HAVING maintained an air of lofty serenity throughout the election campaign, the new MP for Bennelong Maxine McKew has now decided to tell her adoring public what she really thinks. And it’s not pretty.
Putting aside the grace with which she accepted the compliments of defeated prime minister John Howard scarcely a week ago, the former ABC star has branded the last five years of the Coalition government as toxic and brutish.
This will no doubt come as some surprise to Labor voters who switched sides to keep the Coalition in government through two elections prior to the 2001 poll and returned it again in 2004 - while McKew was leading the cheer squad for Labor’s then leader the flawed Mark Latham.
Now McKew even endorses the opinion of the embittered former Labor prime minister Paul Keating, who has never recovered from being soundly rejected by voters some 11 years ago.
“I think Paul Keating got it right,” McKew said at the launch of a book on her campaign.
“You know, this election has wiped away the toxicity. People are smiling, a sort of sense of, we can get on and do things.
“And I think we all want to get on and do things in a certain way, in a civil way, in a sensible way and get rid of perhaps I think that brutishness that has characterised our politics probably since 2001.”
Labor’s revisionist mythology machine has now recast Keating as a benign if somewhat whacky Godfather of Our Nation.
It’s a bit of a reach to imagine him in this role.
Keating ached after a Parisian lifestyle, after all.
That’s when he wasn’t redesigning the great boulevards of Berlin while rewarding Australians with the recession they had to have.
McKew evidently sees her election as the symbol of some new, still rather vague ethos.
So far it’s short on delivery but long on promises.
This new era is taking shape even as the trade union movement threatens to take industrial action to goad the Rudd Labor Government into delivering on its promises to kill WorkChoices stone dead.
New could grow old very quickly.
So could McKew’s grating moral superiority.
The new member for Bennelong says “a terrible thing happened then (in 2001), but we all, we all have assembled here today, haven’t we?
“And I think it’s time to get rid of that horrible absolutism - because it’s just not going to get us through the complex issues we need to solve.”
Of course, Labor was all about absolutism in its election campaign - signing the useless Kyoto Protocols, rolling back WorkChoices and so on, but now it is starting to waver and wander.
In Bennelong, the local election was even more absolute and toxic. It was about race.
Former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke kicked the race can as hard as could in a speech at a dinner for the candidate with the local Korean community on October 3 that was under-reported in Sydney but drew more attention outside NSW.
According to The Age, he declared that “every person of Asian origin” in the seat of Bennelong should vote against John Howard.
Mr Hawke repeated remarks Mr Howard made in 1988 when he said “if it is - in the eyes of some in the community - that it’s too great, it would be in our immediate-term interest and supporting of social cohesion if it were slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb it was greater.”
Mr Howard has since retreated from that position but Mr Hawke said they remained “a despicable stain” on his record.
Mr Hawke was backed by a Labor team of Chinese and Korean-speaking young people, according to Ms McKew’s biographer Margaret Saville.
In an interview with The Sydney Morning Herald, she said that the operatives were groomed through the Young Labor movement and worked the ALP’s Electrac data system to target Asian voters with emails and visits.
They were later integrated into the predominantly Asian “Maxine Support Group”, or MSG.
Stanley Chin, a member of MSG, told the ABC’s PM program that the group had “principally wanted to target the Asian votes for Maxine because we realised that there is quite a large number of Asian voters in the electorate”.
McKew’s campaign office secured a phone number that ended in 888 - a number many Chinese believe to be particularly lucky - and printed thousands of how-to-vote guides in Chinese and Korean.
Rudd’s daughter Jessica and her new Hong-Kong-born husband Albert Tse were used frequently, with Tse addressing Chinese in Cantonese and Jessica in Mandarin.
The Chinese language newspaper Sing Tao devoted several front-page stories to Bennelong.
The tactic worked and the electorate was split into English-only speakers and those who spoke Chinese.
Having run racist campaigns, will the ethnic blocs now make the sort of demands on their representatives as critical ethnic constituencies are now making on politicians in the UK and in France?
McKew may talk about toxicity but having been elected courtesy of a campaign which effectively discourages integration and promotes division and the perception of victimhood, she might consider the nature of the poison she and her backers have been pumping into Bennelong.
"Mr Howard never pretended to represent any one race or community, instead, he represented his constituents and extended his heart to all, regardless of race, color or creed." Thanks for the belly laugh.
Anonymous .. can you provide an example where he did otherwise?
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