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Once again, the legacy media give an object, if unintentional, lesson in just how out-of-touch with mainstream Australia they really are – and just why the surge in support for One Nation has left them utterly bewildered.
When the news broke that Australia’s most-decorated living soldier was arrested, the political establishment was shamefully silent, while the legacy media could barely contain their glee. This is hardly surprising, given that it’s the legacy media who’ve been driving the hounding of Ben Roberts-Smith for years. Proving, once again, Orwell’s WWII observation that left-wing intellectuals “could not help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated”.
“Within the intelligentsia,” he wrote, a “derisive and mildly hostile attitude” toward their own country “is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in many cases”.
Just as many English left-wing intellectuals “were undisguisedly pleased when Singapore fell or when the British were driven out of Greece”, Australia’s left-wing intellectuals are unashamedly cock-a-whoop that a war hero is being publicly hounded and humiliated.
Many, many ordinary Australians, though, are outraged – and Pauline Hanson instinctively shares their outrage, to the sneering bewilderment of the legacy media.
Pauline Hanson’s visceral defence of Ben Roberts-Smith over alleged war crimes of murder was immediate, unequivocal and completely at odds with the cautious approach of Anthony Albanese and Angus Taylor.
“Cautious”? More like shamefully craven. Hanson is made of different stuff: her reaction was as unfaked as the sneering disdain of the media-political establishment.
While the prime minister and opposition leader refused to comment on criminal charges brought against Australia’s most highly decorated soldier, the One Nation leader launched an attack on Australian Defence Force hierarchy and the major parties for abandoning Roberts-Smith […]
“I haven’t made a political decision here. I go on my gut feeling and what I feel is right – to support that man and his family,” Hanson told the Australian. “What they’ve been through for years now is appalling and in some ways I can relate to it. What was done to me in the court system, I know what his family has gone through and I think it’s wrong what they’ve done.”
And millions of Australians cheered, once again, ‘Onya, Pauline!’
Hanson is a ruthless political operator. No issue or subject is out of bounds and her “drain the swamp” rhetoric has helped One Nation to surge in the polls.
Note the sneering ‘basket of deplorables’ tone, yet again. The other, obvious, conclusion is that she is the one in touch with mainstream Australia while the elites furiously scoff to each other over their quinoa and Whittaker’s Miraka Kirīmi.
The only member of the establishment political class who even remotely gets it is, no surprise, Tony Abbott.
Abbott said: “There are rules that have to be observed and enforced, even against soldiers in times of war. Still, it’s wrong to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life.”
Much less by the lofty standards of the sneering, inner-city elite whose greatest sacrifice has been deciding between the organic, heirloom kale and the fair trade skinny soy latte.
