My random note to the letters column of the Australian (below) made the cut yesterday. This triggered the complimentary response also below, in today’s Australian.
“..Malcolm Turnbull just lost the election I suspect. I further suspect that his comments just confirmed Pauline Hanson’s election to the senate.
It was this kind of put down and commentary that got Pauline Hanson elected in 1996 and Australians hate it.
Talk about confirm peoples preconceived notions and give them another reason not to vote for you. Turnbull simply confirms yet again that he is a big end of town elitist snob and Hanson is just an ordinary Australian whose views resonate with many similar minded people across the nation.
It’s the people in their wisdom and judgement who will decide whether Pauline Hanson has a place in Canberra, not elite poseurs like Malcolm Turnbull and his silver tail cronies. The democratic process doesn’t operate like some kind of Michael “Odious” Photios loaded and factional, Liberal or Labor Party preselection.
It’s hard to believe that the Prime Ministers political antennae is so scrambled that he can’t do something as simple as read the room or read the mood of the nation and has no idea what’s going in middle Australia beyond the Canberra beltway or the tree lined boulevards of Wentworth.
Up until now, Turnbull has been quite open about getting rid of the Monarchy but now it seems, he’s being quite open about getting rid of democracy as well. July the second may well send him a message that he’s the one not welcome and has no place in Australian politics..”
JB
Any doubts I had regarding my Senate vote have been resolved by the excellent letters from Richard Congram and Jim Ball (2/6). They called to the surface my resentment at the treatment meted out to Pauline Hanson in the past. She was ridiculed, demonised and imprisoned for channelling the sense of alienation from the political mainstream felt by many Australians. A Senate with Hanson may well be a complete pig’s breakfast, but voting for her becomes something akin to a moral obligation for me.
Terry Birchley, Bundaberg, Qld