When Malcolm Fraser instituted his “Lebanon Concession” in the late ’70s, fast-tracking visas from a country gripped by civil war, frantic advisers tried to alert the PM to its inherent dangers. Firstly, the people Fraser purported to be ‘helping’, Maronite and Orthodox Christians, were not even being persecuted, anyway. Most of them chose to stay at home and fight for their country.
Secondly, the people who flocked to exploit the concession, Muslims from backwater villages who saw an economic opportunity, were a clear and present danger to Australia. “Conflicts, tensions and divisions within Lebanon will be transferred to Australia,” immigration officials warned. “The balance between Muslim and Christian applicants has risen to 90 per cent Muslim… A high percentage [are] illiterate. Personal hygiene is poor.”
Pigheaded, Fraser refused to listen until it was too late. From 3400 Lebanese-born Muslims in 1971, there were 15,600 within a decade. Most settled in a few suburbs of Western Sydney. These included names who would later grab headlines for all the worst reasons, including Egyptian-born Sheik Taj El-Din Hilaly. Not to mention the dozens of fanatics who would over-represent two-thirds of the last 33 Australians charged with terror offences.
Anthony Albanese is from the opposite side of the political aisle to Fraser, but he’s every bit as cluelessly pigheaded.
And Australians will undoubtedly pay the grim toll of his obstinate stupidity for years to come.
The truly bizarre aspect to the Albanese government’s issue of nearly 3000 tourist visas to people from Gaza is that it seems to have happened almost by accident: without any caucus debate and certainly without any formal public announcement.
Because if they’d admitted what they were up to, Australians would have rightly arced up. Especially with October 7 and the sight of hundreds of Muslims chanting “Gas the Jews!” on the steps of the Opera House.
Yet within scarcely a month of the October 7 atrocity and Israel’s response, more than 700 tourist visas were issued to people from Gaza – a fact that emerged only because a journalist asked about it, after word started to circulate within the local Palestinian diaspora.
And the nearest the government has come to an explanation for what it has done is Industry Minister Ed Husic’s observation last weekend that it had deliberately issued visitor visas because that was quicker than refugee visas (less checking).
Husic, remember, is a Muslim, who took his oath of allegiance in parliament using a Koran. Like many of Labor’s most senior MPs, his seat is in Muslim-dominated Western Sydney.
So, no surprises who’s being pandered to here.
Hence the suspicion that this whole business was something hurriedly cooked up between the Prime Minister and former immigration minister Andrew Giles, in the wake of October 7, as a goodwill offering to the Greens and to Muslim activists threatening to campaign against Labor cabinet ministers. And likely absent intelligence input from ASIO which, as was later revealed, had been removed from the national security committee of cabinet by Albanese.
How much danger must Australians be subject to, just to save the Albanese government’s miserable skin?
It’s an extraordinary failure of governance to admit thousands of people from a terrorist-controlled war zone without any obvious formal process, blind to risks and logistics, and without any explicit formal explanation and justification to the public.
Worse is the fact that we’ll be stuck with these Hamas-supporting, Jew-hating, grifters for good.
Make no mistake: hardly anyone who comes here from Gaza will ever go back, regardless of the visa they arrive on. If people from Gaza want to stay forever (and who, once here, would not?) they can apply for permanent protection and drag out any appeal process almost indefinitely as some 500 of the 1300 who’ve so far arrived already have.
And don’t let us delude ourselves about just what Albanese is hand-waving into the country.
After all, [Gaza] is a terrorist statelet where most people are educated from infancy to regard Jews as evil and the West as oppressors. And where non-conformists on political, religious and sexual grounds routinely are killed, sometimes with extreme savagery […]
Perhaps the most significant fact to emerge from the whole tortured process of trying to drag detail from a government that refuses to be transparent has been the boss of ASIO’s admission that “rhetorical” support for Hamas would not disqualify people from coming to Australia.
The only grim satisfaction that might come from all this is imagining just what will happen when Australia’s ‘Queers for Palestine’ run into actual Palestinians.
Pass the popcorn.
