Senator Anning will be censured by the Parliament when it returns in early April for the budget but One Nation leader Pauline Hanson on whose ticket Senator Anning entered the Senate, refused to condemn him. Senator Hanson said she would be abstaining from the censure vote. Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton urged his fellow Queenslanders to boot out Senator Anning at the election.
Mr Morrison said the mindless tribalism was taking hold in countries all over the world.
“If we allow a culture of ‘us and them’, of tribalism, to take hold; if we surrender an individual to be defined not by their own unique worth and contribution but by the tribe they are assigned to, if we yield to the compulsion to pick sides rather than happy coexistence, we will lose what makes diversity work in Australia,” he said.
“As debate becomes more fierce, the retreat to tribalism is increasingly taking over, and for some, extremism takes hold.
“Reading only news that we agree with, interacting with people only we agree with, and having less understanding and grace towards others that we do not even know, making the worst possible assumptions about them and their motives, simply because we disagree with them.
“This is true of the left and the right. And even more so from those shouting from the fringes to a mainstream of quiet Australians that just want to get on with their lives.
“Hate, blame and contempt are the staples of tribalism, it is consuming modern debate, egged on by an appetite for conflict as entertainment, not so different from the primitive appetites of the colosseum days, with a similar corrosive impact on the fabric of our society.
“It ends in the worst of places. Last week it ended the lives of 50 fellow human beings, including children praying in Christchurch.”
Mr Morrison said tribalists had appropriated legitimate policy issues such as the debate over population and used it as a tool to appropriate their agendas. He said a discussion about population and the annual migrant intake should not be a debate about multiculturalism.
“Just because Australians are frustrated about traffic jams and population pressures encroaching on their quality of life, especially in this city, does not mean they are anti-migrant or racist. To the contrary, Australians respect the positive contribution that migration has made to our country,” he said.
“For the overwhelming majority of Australians concerned about this issue, this is not and never would be their motivation.
“But that is how the tribalists seek to confect it, from both sides.”
He said the worst example was the “despicable appropriation of concerns about immigration as a justification for a terrorist atrocity”, such as that by Senator Anning.
But the Prime Minster also took aim at the other extreme which denounces calls for lower migrations rates as racially motivated.
“We cannot allow such legitimate policy debates to be hijacked like this,” he said.
“Managing our population growth is a practical policy challenge that needs answers.”
As a practical response to the Christchurch terrorist massacre, Mr Morrison said the $55 million for security upgrades would come from the Community Safety Grants fund and be distributed to religious schools, places of worship and assembly in grants ranging from $50,000 to $1.5 million.
Mr Morrison extrapolated his criticism of tribalism to federal Labor’s high tax policies which aim to take from some to give to others.
“Our fundamental belief (is) that one Australian does not have to fail for another to succeed, of rejecting the politics of conflict and division, we can best continue to bring Australians together, to reinforce the social fabric so important to our economic success and security as a nation,” he said.
“We will continue to engage in strengthening this social fabric – in finding a bigger place for ‘us’ and a smaller place for the idea of ‘them’.”
from Trendy Newses https://ift.tt/2W3sxWQ
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