Sydney residents will understand immediately where I’m coming from. Labor has form when it comes to denigrating the contributions made by people born overseas, or of their children. For me this current debate – which centres on the party’s moves to push aside a candidate from a CALD (culturally and linguistically diverse) background in favour of Senator Christina Kenneally – has strong echoes of 2019.
Kenneally had been in danger of slipping down the ladder of places in the list of Senate candidates, so wanted to move to the lower house of Federal Parliament in order to stay there. The casualty was Tu Le, who’d already put herself forward for Fowler.
But on 25 March 2019 the ABC ran a story that contained this:
NSW Labor leader Michael Daley has announced that he will be standing aside as the state's Opposition Leader until the upcoming federal election is over, calling it "the right and proper thing to do".
A little before that date he made a gaffe that cemented his future.
NSW Opposition Leader Michael Daley has apologised after a video emerged of him telling a Labor function Sydney jobs were being taken by foreigners "from typically Asia".
"Our young children will flee, and who are they being replaced with? They're being replaced by young people, from typically Asia, with PhDs," he said.
"So there's transformation happening in Sydney now where our kids are moving out and foreigners are moving in and taking their jobs."
Premier Gladys Berejiklian called Mr Daley "two-faced" because he when spoke to Chinese media he would praise the contribution of Asian migrants.
Labor in 2021 shows it has the same morals as Daley had back then, or at least that they harbour in their hearts the same ideas that allowed him to speak so callously of a segment of the population that is hard-working, frugal, and law-abiding. I was not surprised when the news about Kenneally surfaced.
Comments