No shit.
Crusty old white man expects others to change but not himself.
The irony is that it is the waves of migration of people from different backgrounds and cultures that has made Australia the place it is today.
No one but Howard looks back on the boring, white bread, meat and three boiled veg culture that was Aus in the 1950s with any sort of nostalgia.
I mean unfortunately there are those that do but god damned.
When my mum and her lot got off the boat from Poland they were talked down to, isolated, and told to fit in and shut up.
My mum never taught us the language because she wanted us to fit in and not have the awkward time at school she had.
Now you can hear multiple languages, see a blend of architectural styles, enjoy all sorts of festivals/art/cusine, you can see other perspectives, religions, philosophies.
It’s far from perfect, it’s not like we’re post racism or anything but we’ve come so far. What pride I have in our country comes from how it has grown from its dubious origins (in the modern nation state sense), the beautiful shit we create when we mix our differences together, and how far we might yet still go.
65000 years of indigenous Australians: “This dude said what?!”
“Strange… that sounds like the kind of thing a racist would say.”
Remember the good old days, when, straight off the boat, Giovanni would change his name to John, and schoolboys would be caned for playing soccer rather than rugby or Aussie Rules? Howard does.
Remember the good old days when Australia’s closest thing to pizza was a quiche with tomato sauce on top.
My Nono and his family got straight off the boat and were interned in Darwin on suspicion of being commies. Ahh the good old days.
Bigots generally do.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
John Howard has declared he “always had trouble” with the concept of multiculturalism, because immigrants should be expected to “adopt the values and practices” of the country they move to.
The former Liberal prime minister made the comments at the inaugural conference of new right-wing political forum the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (Arc) on Wednesday in London.
Critics including the former Labor prime minister Paul Keating have accused Howard and other reactionary conservatives of “outrageously and wilfully misinterpreting” the referendum result in an attempt to return to “the great assimilation project”.
When Pauline Hanson, a former Liberal, was elected to the lower house and formed the reactionary One Nation party, Howard responded by adopting some of her anti-Asian rhetoric including his suggestion that Asian migration should be “slowed down a little, so the capacity of the community to absorb [was] greater”.
The voice was one limb of the Uluru statement from the heart, which also calls for truth-telling and treaty-making, which is founded on the fact sovereignty of Indigenous nations has never been ceded.
Addressing the audience assembled by Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and backed by a pro-Brexit hedge fund billionaire and a Dubai-based investment group, Anderson decried the influence of “cultural elites”.
The original article contains 914 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I wish the media would just stop letting this has-been steal oxygen. There are other people with way more relevant opinions.
The media in this country has so much to answer for in terms of the people they give oxygen to.
Try an interesting little exercise some day. Punch Howard’ and ‘multiculturalism’ into the Hansard database. You will find he has never mentioned the word.
When you punch in ‘Howard’ and ‘multicultural’ you do get it nine times but each and every time he is referring to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs.
(From when Albo was cosplaying as a leftie)
Conservative of politics, but really rather radical of eyebrow.