The Australian Labor Party, like the left in general, can never, ever forgive its ideological pets for going astray. The very people who have their heads jammed firmly up their arses with their own assumed moral superiority on ‘racism’ howl the most vile racial epithets when the likes of Nyunggai Warren Mundine or Jacinta Nampijinpa Price leave the back of the left bus and are welcomed to the front seats by conservatives.
Now, they’re sharpening the knives for Asian Australians who are flocking to the One Nation banner. The lily-white lefty hacks at the Guardian and the ABC are in fainting fits at Pauline Hanson’s demand for a multiracial but monocultural Australia – but non-English speaking households now support One Nation above all other parties. How dare they!
There are few Asian Australians the left are less inclined to forgive than Dai Le. The Vietnamese-born politician infuriated the left, and the Albanese government especially, by ‘stealing’ one of the safest Labor seats in the country from under their feet. Even more unforgivable – to them – she chose a visibly patriotic statement for her inaugural parliamentary speech.
Now, the PM no less is going for her throat.
“If she’s got a suggestion or an allegation about anyone, she should actually say it,” Mr Albanese said.
“This isn’t a council. This is a serious parliament.”
You could have fooled us.
The coalition benches erupted and rightly so. Anthony Albanese’s cheap shot at local government was as low as it was revealing. Dai Le holds a council position alongside her federal seat. The prime minister, who loves to boast about his own local government record, suddenly decided councillors were beneath contempt the moment one of them asked an awkward question.
The lady is not for turning: Dai Le didn’t back down. She rephrased and pressed for reassurance that the budget leaks hadn’t been turned into personal profit. After question time she made her position plain – and noted that Albanese completely avoided answering her question.
“I wanted the PM to assure the Australian public that these significant changes to our CGT and negative gearing which cause disruption to the markets, were done with safeguards and that no one in government acted on it, to benefit themselves or those connected to them, prior to the budget,” she said.
“The PM didn’t give a strong answer to that. The fact that he could not provide that reassurance is a matter of concern.”
On Albanese’s council swipe she was equally direct.
“It was disappointing that, rather than directly addressing the issue, he chose to take a swipe at local councils and councillors, to divert the importance of his role to answer a simple question,” Ms Le said.
“Councils are often the closest level of government to the community and deserve respect for the role they play in representing local residents. Hence I called out his disrespectful attack on council.”
This is the left’s standard operating procedure when one of their approved minorities defects. First they piously assert that only they can speak for ‘diversity’. Then they discover the minority in question has a mind of their own and suddenly the same people who spent decades lecturing everyone else about racism start spewing grotesque abuse at a minority. A Vietnamese-born woman taking a safe Labor seat and asking hard questions about transparency is apparently unforgivable. Better she had stayed grateful and quiet.
The same pattern is playing out with Asian Australians more broadly. Non-English speaking households are deserting Labor in droves for One Nation. The progressive commentariat cannot compute it. Their entire worldview rests on the assumption that minorities will remain permanent clients of the left, forever grateful for the scraps of identity politics. When they don’t, the mask slips. The same people who invented ‘microaggressions’ suddenly discover they are perfectly comfortable with macro ones when the target is a brown face on the wrong side of the culture war.
Pauline Hanson has been saying for years that multiculturalism without a dominant Western culture produces exactly this: imported tribalism, divided loyalties and the weaponisation of grievance. The left’s hysterical reaction to Dai Le and to Asian support for One Nation proves her right. They don’t want a confident multiracial Australia united by shared values. They want a collection of grievance groups permanently locked into the Labor client state. Anyone who breaks ranks must be destroyed.
Albanese’s over-the-top reaction to a straightforward question about budget integrity tells its own story. If the government had nothing to hide, a calm reassurance would have sufficed. Instead we got theatrical outrage and a gratuitous insult to local government. Dai Le called it what it was: an evasion dressed up as parliamentary high dudgeon.
