Most Australians
Posted by Campbell on | February 27, 2006
Apparently Prime Minister Howard thinks that most Australians find Muslim women’s traditional head-to-toe costume confronting. According to a report in The Age today:
“I don’t mind the headscarf but it’s really the whole outfit, I think most Australians would find it confronting,” Mr Howard told Southern Cross Broadcasting.”
and
“I don’t believe that you should ban wearing headscarfs but I do think the full garb is confronting and that is how most people feel.
Well for fuck’s sake!
Firstly, just for the record, I am Australian. I do not find it confronting.
Secondly if I did find it confronting I trust it would trigger some introspection about my own fears and ignorance not these veiled threats (pun intended). This smacks of ‘Will no one rid me of this troublesome priest?’ (Or even ‘I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country’?)
And dressing it up in language that sounds more like an agony aunt’s advice on what to wear to the deb ball doesn’t help either.
But what really gets me is the way it is all layed off on ‘most Australians’. Have they polled this? Where are the results?
I wonder if we’ll hear the PM quoting these results from recent Morgan Polls:
- Most Australians (70%) think there should not be more uranium mines operating in Australia . (October 2005)
- Most Australians (61%) disagree with the proposition that the Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations be handed an ‘Essential Services’ power to declare strikes illegal if considered a threat to public welfare or the economy. (October 2005)
- Most Australians (57%) believe the Government acted unethically over ‘Grain to Iraq’. (February 2006)
- Very few Australians (15%) view Federal Members of Parliament as having high or very high standards of ethics and honesty. (November 2005)
- Only 1% of Australians know the number of the Government’s National Security Hotline. (February 2006)
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One Response to “Most Australians”
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February 28th, 2006 @ 8:11 am
The scary part of Howard’s comments is that he has been around long enough as a public figure to know better. However he also knows that comments like that will go down very well with a lot of Australians.
Which is sad.