So maybe Uncle Wilson isn't that mad after all?

A SENIOR member of the Australian Tamil community says former Tamil Tiger fighters are definitely among the influx of boatpeople to arrive on our shores.   Australasian Federation of Tamil Associations secretary Victor Rajakulendran said the high proportion of young men on the boats, coupled with the risks faced by the Tigers in Sri Lanka, made it certain some arrivals were members of the defeated Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Now, as Mr Rajakulendran goes on to say, there's no reason necessarily why any Tigers who might slip in this way would pose a threat to the general community, but this yet again highlights just how bogus and pretended the prime minister's "outrage" at the recent comments by Wilson Tuckey were. And it's not that Mr Tuckey's comments were particularly over the top: There could be the occasional terrorist in a boatload of people. If you wanted to get into Australia and you have bad intentions, what do you do? You insert yourself in a crowd of a hundred for which there is great sympathy for the other 99. You go on a system where nobody brings their papers, you have no identity, you have no address. Which is not much more than has been said previously by Kim Beazley and Labor refugee advocate Michael Danby. Yet Mr Rudd goes into hyperbole overdrive in describing Mr Tuckey's remarks as "deeply divisive, disgusting." It's also interesting to see how most members of the media are quite happy to reflexively frame anything Mr Tuckey says within the "mad uncle" meme, without ever bothering to consider what he actually says. Now I realise that Mr Tuckey has given ample examples in the past of some pretty 'out there' comments, but one of the things I believe we have a right to expect from journalists is a constantly sceptical mind set that always seeks to look behind and beyond commonplace assumptions, and not just repeat them.

Posted via email from Garth's posterous