When I read the Eric Abetz article in the Features Pages of The Mercury on Wednesday 7 December 2016 I had the weird feeling that someone from a parallel universe was trying to make contact with Planet Earth.
Eric Abetz seems to live in the sixth dimension who are born with blinkers and extremely narrow minds.
I watch the ABC News nearly every night and they reported Castro’s death in neutral terms showing the grief in Cuba and joyous celebrations of the Cuban exiles in Florida.
The News Presenter made no value judgements which was the proper way to present the news.
It would seem that the only way the ABC would satisfy Eric Abetz was if it only presented coverage of the joy in Florida coupled with a right wing diatribe about Castro being an evil dictator.
That presentation of course would be improperly unbalanced.
Eric Abetz’s comments are made out of context in that in the last 50 years nearly every country in Latin America except Mexico has for at least some of the time been controlled by an evil dictator or two, or more.
Eric Abetz would have credibility as a Human Rights Advocate if he also condemned the evil dictators that the CIA helped to install in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.
Eric Abetz is of course a member of a Government which has placed people fleeing prosecution by evil dictators in prison camps where conditions are such that the refugees and their children have suffered severe psychological damage. One person was so distressed he set himself alight and one man died of an infection which if treated in a timely fashion would not have caused his death.
Those gross breaches of human rights have only led to an attack by members of the Liberal Government upon the Human Rights Agencies and media which have exposed the abuses.
I had the same weird feeling a couple of years ago when Abetz attacked Phillip Noyce’s film “The Rabbit Proof Fence”.
Abetz’s article implied that he had seen the film but the contents of his article didn’t seem to bear out the implication because Abetz complained that the film failed to show that the public servant in charge of the program to remove Aboriginal children from their parents believed he was doing the best for the children in the circumstances.
I have seen the film and one of its features is a brilliantly nuanced performance from Kenneth Branagh who portrayed that public servant as accepting that he was implementing a harsh policy but who believed that the policy was the best thing for the children in the circumstances.
The circumstances being that the racial discrimination against Aborigines would cause their children to have a life that would be short, brutish and nasty; but if the children were removed from their parents (especially the lighter skinned children by mixed blood) and brought up to be ‘white’ and trained to work in menial jobs they will have a better life.
I cannot understand how Abetz could miss the subtleties of the script and performance.
*John Green is a recently retired barrister. His parents were working class, but not very politically active. He joined the ALP when he was at uni. He is still a member, but a rather disillusioned one.
He was an ALP member for Denison in the State Parliament from about 1974 to1980.
