What the hell is wrong with Australia?

Yesterday evening, as Gam and I were walking from the carpark near Coles, some dickhead yelled from a passing car "kill all the asians". He appeared to be directing it at a bunch of people, probably a group of asian students accompanied by a couple of parents, who were entering the car park as we left. I expressed surprise that this would happen in St Lucia, but Gam pointed out that he'd had things yelled at him from cars around here before. Which, sadly, is true.

Gam later spotted what he thought was the same car parked outside one of the student houses on our route home. It had a bull-bar on the front, suggesting the dickhead wasn't a local but had friends that are.

The guy was an Australian.

What makes him and his ilk any more worthy of Australian citizenship than a decent person with a poor grasp of english and no knowledge of cricket? The fact that he made a trip down some bogan's birth canal, or the fact that no other country would want him?

I bet I know who he'll vote for at the next Federal election. I'm not suggesting that racism is the sole domain of a single party, just that the Liberal leadership are better deriving votes from whipping up racist attitudes in the community. It should be that people like that guy should feel that Australia so frowns upon attitudes like his that he would never dare express them in public. Instead he feels perfectly comfortable driving through a happily multicultural neighbourhood grunting out expressions of racial hatred and violence.

Then at 8:30pm on the ABC was 'Life at 1'. Among the parents of the babies featured on the show was a young Australian muslim couple. The young woman wore a head-scarf, and she expressed concern for the environment her daughter would grow up in, saying she felt things were 'only going to get worse' in Australia, and that there were places she will not travel any more because of the abuse she cops for being a muslim. She goes some places and gets sworn at in the street.

Why is it a priority of the major parties to round on immigrants (read: especially muslim immigrants) for their alleged lack of knowledge of some intangible 'Australian values', when Australian women who happen to be muslim are afraid to venture out in some public areas because of the abuse they suffer at the hands of fellow Australians? Is that because such behaviour fits within our politicians' definition of 'Australian values'? Unfortunately it seems the above is something of a rhetorical question. The answer appears to be that the interests of politicians in the major parties lie in sucking the votes out of the racist section of the Australian community, not in stamping out this abbhorrent facet of our social identity.

There is something seriously wrong here.