So out of touch

I WOULD like someone to explain this extraordinary disconnect to me.

In 2016 the Australian Election Study found that 42 per cent of voters wanted immigration to be reduced. By August 2017 the Australian Population Research Institute found that 54 per cent wanted lower immigration and in an April 2018 Essential poll this had risen to 64 per cent.

This week new Australian senator Fraser Anning — a member of the Katter Party — made his inaugural and somewhat controversial speech.

In the speech Senator Anning said Australia was entitled to insist migrants were predominantly of the “historic European Christian composition”. He went on to say “ethno-cultural diversity — which is known to undermine social cohesion — has been allowed to rise to dangerous levels in many suburbs. In direct response, self-segregation, including white flight from poorer inner-urban areas, has become the norm.”

He called for a cultural counterrevolution to restore traditional values and redefine national identity.

Despite the majority of senators shaking his hand after the speech, they then took to social media and any news outlet they could get their hands on, to roundly denounce and vilify his statements.

So why this significant disconnect?

According to the polls 64 per cent of the community want immigration levels to be reduced yet 100 per cent of our pollies said they are against the wishes of the people they represent.

So on this topic, just exactly where is my representation in parliament?

Where’s yours and where is the wish of the community being upheld? Certainly not by our elected members of parliament who seem pathologically committed to pursuing their own agendas.

Dr Katharine Betts, Adjunct Associate Professor of Sociology at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, thinks the main reason pollies ignore the wishes of the electorate is quite simply because they can and believe that voters have nowhere else to go, except for minor parties.

Hello Senator Fraser Anning, from about as minor a party as you can get, but he at least would appear to recognise what troubles his voters.

Dr Betts believes this disconnect between elected leaders and the community stems from the elite origins of the growing class of university graduate MPs, a class imbued with progressive values who then become politicians.

Bill Shorten — Xavier College, Monash and Melbourne universities.

Malcolm Turnbull — Sydney Grammar and Sydney University

Richard Marles (pictured) — Geelong Grammar and Melbourne University and the list goes on and is drawn from a similar pool of graduates, many embracing progressive values including enthusiasm for cosmopolitanism, globalism, diversity and social justice.

That’s all well and good but of course it is not what the bulk of their voters believe in or want to support.

Again Dr Betts sums it up well with the thought that politicians have an “in-group culture remote from the average voter, attention from well-heeled lobbyists, and a co-dependent relationship with media elites which all contributes to creating an insider class. On the immigration question they live in a world remote from that of most Australians.”

So that’s why there is a complete disconnect on the thorny subject of immigration.

My views on migration and immigration are well ll known, as I am not a great believer ver in our current policies.

Having said that I also found Anning’s speech ch antediluvian, slightly rambling g and at times illogical and revisionist. visionist. But he doesn’t deserve the widespread condemnation he e has received.

Many average rage people would identntify and support his thought that we should favour ur “European Chris- tian” values. On n banning all welfare payments to migrants in the first five years of living in Australia, labelling many asylum seekers as “welfare seekers” I’m not so sure.

However I’m positive there would be considerable support for his suggestion for a plebiscite on who comes to the country to allow people to decide whether they want “wholesale non-Englishspeaking immigrants from the Third World”.

Will our pollies treat this speech as a springboard to start off a sensible discussion on immigration actually taking into account the wishes of the electorate?

Of course not, much better just to shout out racist, fascist, bigot or any other pejorative comment to prove how morally superior they are.

They don’t have to live with any of the problems of course, do they?