This disgusting swan song from a Green was lauded on here as a milestone and a rival to Gillards misplaced misogyny rant.
The people who support this type of hate speech are not indicitive of the wider Australian people and to applaud this type of hate is appalling.
I will stand up to this type of thing and so will the majority of Australians. This person is not fit to be in parliament and he should be rejected wholeheartedly by everyone, which he will be come the WA re election, and good riddance to him and his ilk:
SPORTING dark suit and speaking in a calm, measured tone, Scott Ludlam is the acceptable face of the Greens.
He has spoken out previously against the “people’s revolt” against the carbon tax that sparked the “Ditch the Witch” nastiness.
Ludlam’s style is the antithesis of histrionics such as the current appalling rock concert concoctions of a fake prime ministerial beheading.
This week the West Australian senator rose to a near-empty chamber and delivered a prepared speech without raising his voice and with no one around to interject. Later, the 7 1/2-minute speech went viral on YouTube, a hit with the young Green Left crowd, attracting 400,000 hits within a few days.
But forget the style of the speech; it merely disguised a message that was divisive, vindictive and in the end subversive.
“We want our country back,” he said, just six months after a federal election. This is a senator who, with his colleagues, holds the balance of power in the Senate on about 10 per cent of the vote.
Yet he told supporters they were somehow disenfranchised.
Ludlam spoke of “predator capitalism” and a “murderous horror unfolding on Manus Island” as he launched an attack on the Prime Minister and his government. He suggested Abbott treated WA as a “caricatured redneck backwater” and that it was “kind of revolting” that the Prime Minister consulted with “mining billionaires and media oligarchs on the other side of the world”.
Ludlam provided no serious evidence or justification for his slurs. He even talked about Abbott - who I first met 20 years ago through a mutual gay friend and who has been publicly loving and supportive of his gay sister - as “waving (his) homophobia in people’s faces”.
We know the Greens are a party of protest but this invective was simply hateful.
“Prime Minister,” said Ludlam, “you are welcome to take your heartless and racist exploitation of people’s fears and ram it as far from Western Australia as your taxpayer-funded travel entitlements can take you.”
So Ludlam used the Senate to denigrate a freshly elected Prime Minister who is implementing his agenda - to the extent that he isn't blocked by Ludlam’s party - as racist, cynically manipulative, heartless and exploitative.
On what evidence?
This vitriol is subversive because it suggests a democratic government has somehow stolen the country. If Ludlam and his supporters want their “country back” surely the way to do it is through fair-minded criticism and a viable alternative.
No matter how calmly it is presented, unhinged hatred can’t help anyone.
