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Bushwalking (tramping) in Tasmania can be a risky business. We used to have regular stories of ill-equipped and inexperienced hikers lost for days or weeks, holding off starvation with a chocolate bar. That all changed 24 years ago, with the introduction of the Westpac Rescue Helicopter Service, and the common carrying of emergency position-indicating radio beacons (EPIRBs). Suddenly, rescue in short order was just the push of a button away.
Anecdotally, the on-demand rescue service has had a notable effect on walkers’ behaviour: people are taking more risks. Risks that commonsense would once have told them to avoid. Now, though, ‘it’ll be right – if you get in trouble, just call a chopper’.
Similarly, the notion that, if trouble flares overseas the Australian government will immediately charter rescue flights, seems to have encouraged similar risk-taking. For months, now, the Australian government has issued a ‘Do Not Travel’ warning for Lebanon.
Yet, here we are, expected to save thousands of people from their own stupid decisions, yet again.
Lebanese-Australian community leaders say there are huge numbers of Australians who want to get out of Lebanon but can’t, and that the government has an obligation to assist them, as they accused leaders of ‘double-talk’.
On Sunday, Foreign Affairs Minister Penny Wong once again pleaded with Australians in Lebanon to “please come home” while Beirut Airport is still open and the window of opportunity appears to be closing.
They can’t say they weren’t warned. At what point do we just leave people to stew in their own stupidity?
Then there’s the question of why, exactly, 15,000 ‘Australians’ are residing in Lebanon?
This is the result, firstly, of Malcolm Fraser’s 1976 ‘Lebanese concession’: as Fraser was repeatedly warned, but ignored, Australia was importing thousands of people with no loyalty to Australia, who were gaming the system to transplant nearly entire rural, backwards, villages into a modern country, where they would inevitably form insular ghettos.
Secondly, the policies of allowing not just dual citizenship, but ‘portable’ pensions. Migrants can move ‘home’ and still collect an Australian pension.
And if things go tits-up in Bumfukistan yet again, Australian taxpayers will fork out millions to fly them back here.
We really are the world’s biggest mugs, aren’t we?
Well, we certainly have a habit of electing them. Labor will almost certainly bend over backwards for the Lebanese ‘Australian’ citizens-of-convenience.
The anger in the Australian-Lebanese community is palpable, [Lebanese Muslim Association Secretary Gamel Kheir] said, and there was “a lot of psychological damage being done at the moment” with air strikes on Lebanon.
“There’s red hot anger (in the community), we’re sick of being treated in a hypocritical way,” he said.
Well, that’s rich, coming from the people who’ve spent the past year banging on about ‘Palestine’, as if it has anything to do with Australia. And expecting the rest of us to weep over endemically anti-Semitic countries that don’t allow terrorists to endlessly attack Israel from within their borders, but are turning Australian streets into battlegrounds.
Head of the Islamic Council of Victoria Adel Salman said Australians were “outraged” by the attack on Lebanon.
Be buggered ‘we’ are.
“Lebanon is already in a very precarious situation, so there are Lebanese people who have suffered so much over the last few months and years, and this has brought further suffering upon the Lebanese people. The community is upset and devastated and angry that Israel could attack a sovereign country, and that Israeli attacks could result in the deaths of so many Lebanese civilians.”
You weren’t so ‘upset and devastated’ when Hezbollah were firing rockets from Lebanon and killing Bedouin kids playing soccer in Israel.
As for October 7, your community was out celebrating, letting off fireworks and cheering that they were ‘elated’.
Bugger it: leave them in Lebanon, and start undoing some of the damage Fraser unleashed.
