Did anyone see this article http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/ram-your-heartless-racist-exploitation-of-peoples-...
WA GREENS Senator Scott Ludlam has launched a scathing attack on the Prime Minister during his final parliamentary speech ahead of next month’s election re-run.
During the adjournment debate speech, delivered on Monday night, Senator Ludlam invites Tony Abbott to visit WA, but urges him to leave his “excruciatingly boring three-word slogans at home”.
The speech concludes with the Greens Senator telling the Prime Minister to take his “heartless racist exploitation of people’s fears and ram it as far from Western Australia as your taxpayer funded travel entitlements can take you”.
“When you arrive at Perth airport... understand that you are now closer to Denpasar than to Western Sydney, in a state where an entire generation has been priced out of affordable housing,” Senator Ludlam told Parliament.
“Recognise that you are standing in a place where the drought never ended, where climate change from land clearing and fossil fuel combustion is a lived reality that is already costing jobs, property and lives.
“Mr Prime Minister, at your next press conference we invite you to leave your excruciatingly boring three-word slogans at home. If your image of Western Australia is of some caricatured redneck backwater that is enjoying the murderous horror unfolding on Manus Island, you are reading us wrong. Every time you refer to us as the ‘mining state’ as though the western third of our ancient continent is just Gina Rinehart’s inheritance to be chopped, benched and blasted, you are reading us wrong.
“Western Australians are a generous and welcoming lot, but if you arrive and start talking proudly about your attempts to bankrupt the renewable energy sector, cripple the independence of the ABC and privatise SBS, if you show up waving your homophobia in people’s faces and start boasting about your ever-more insidious attacks on the trade union movement and all working people, you can expect a very different kind of welcome.”
Senator Ludlam is one of six WA Senators preparing for a fresh WA Senate election on April 5 – six months after winning back his lost seat in the controversial recount, which saw 1370 votes go missing.
He hopes to win a crucial balance of power seat in the new poll.
“People are under enough pressure as it is without three years of this government going out of its way to make it worse,” his speech continued.
“It looks awkward when you take policy advice on penalty rates and the minimum wage from mining billionaires and media oligarchs on the other side of the world-awkward, and kind of revolting. It is good to remember that these things are temporary. For anyone listening in from outside this almost empty Senate chamber, the truth is that Prime Minister Tony Abbott and this benighted attempt at a government are a temporary phenomenon. They will pass, and we need to keep our eyes on the bigger picture.
Just as the reign of the dinosaurs was cut short to their great surprise, it may be that the Abbott government will appear as nothing more than a thin, greasy layer in the core sample of future political scientists drilling back into the early years of the 21st century...
“Mr Abbott, your thoughtless cancellation of half a billion dollars of Commonwealth funding for the Perth light rail project has been noted. Your blank cheque for Colin Barnett’s bloody and unnecessary shark cull has been noted. Your attacks on Medicare, on schools funding, on tertiary education-noted. The fact that your only proposal for environmental reforms thus far is to leave Minister Greg Hunt playing solitaire for the next three years while you outsource his responsibilities to the same Premier who presides over the shark cull has been noted too.”
Senator Ludlam went on to tell the Prime Minister “every time you open your mouth, the Green vote foes up”, before telling him to ram his “heartless racist exploitation of people’s fears”.
“You and your financial backers in the gas fracking and uranium industries have inspired hundreds of people to spend their precious time doorknocking thousands of homes for the Greens in the last few weeks,” he said.
“Your decision to back Monsanto’s shareholders instead of Western Australian farmers has inspired people across the length and breadth of this country to make thousands of calls and donate to our campaign.
“As for the premeditated destruction of the NBN and Attorney-General George Brandis’s degrading capitulation to the surveillance state when confronted with the unlawful actions of the US NSA-even the internet is turning green, ‘for the win’. Geeks and coders, network engineers and gamers would never have voted Green in a million years without the blundering and technically illiterate assistance of your leadership team.
“For this I can only thank you.
“And, perhaps most profoundly, your determined campaign to provoke fear in our community-fear of innocent families fleeing war and violence in our region-in the hope that it would bring out the worst in Australians is instead bringing out the best in us. Prime Minister, you are welcome to take your heartless racist exploitation of people’s fears and ram it as far from Western Australia as your taxpayer funded travel entitlements can take you.
“What is at stake here, in the most immediate sense, is whether or not Prime Minister Tony Abbott has total control of this parliament in coming years. But I have come to realise that it is about much more than that. We want our country back. Through chance, misadventure, and, somewhere, a couple of boxes of misplaced ballot papers, we have been given the opportunity to take back just one seat on 5 April, and a whole lot more in 2016.
“Game on, Prime Minister. See you out west.”
game on lol
