Page 2742 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 20 October 1992
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population or 20 per cent of the viewing audience - I think that is its rating averaged around Australia - and, on the basis of envy, misinformation and mistrust, they have painted to the rest of Australia a view about a hated minority ensconced in Canberra. That is exactly the same tactic that Goebbels used, exactly the same tactic that the Nazis used in Nazi Germany and throughout Europe in the 1930s.
Madam Speaker, I wish to refer to an article from the Guardian Weekly of 18 October, an amended version of a speech given by Amos Oz in Germany. It was titled "When evil comes wrapped in a flag". It talked about how the type of vilification which Canberrans, the people who live here, were subjected to last Sunday night had been perpetrated in Nazi Germany during the 1930s. I quote:
There is no need to tell you that tainted language often heralds the worst atrocities. Wherever particular groups of human beings are called "negative elements" or "parasites", for example, sooner or later they will be treated as less than human.
That is the type of attitude that people like Carleton are using around Australia. But it is not just the journalists; it is not just the Richard Carletons, sitting back in their bigoted, biased way, who float into the ACT, a town that they lived in for 10 to 15 years when they were rookie journalists cutting their teeth on reporting the Federal Parliament, and waft up to what they well know because they lived there, Mugga Way - Mr Carleton's residence on Mugga Way is well known - and say, "This is the standard of living for people in the ACT". It is that sort of attitude which has allowed political parties, politicians and other reporters around this country to make cheap mileage out of envy; out of saying, "There is a group of people who all you people out there are paying for. You are all doing it hard, but these people over here are having it good. All of your problems that you have out there, Mr and Mrs Suburban Australian, are sheeted home to these people".
They did not say that it was sheeted home to Paul Keating. They did not say that it was sheeted home to John Hewson. They did not say that it was sheeted home to Tim Fischer, another noted Canberra basher. They did not turn around and sheet it home to them. They turned around and said, "The 300,000 people resident in the ACT are responsible for your problems. They should not be allowed to live like this. They should not be allowed to live in a city like this and they should have it taken away from them". That, in fact, is what is inferred in the types of programs which Carleton is responsible for.
To this stage, Madam Speaker, you will have noticed some commonality between what the two previous speakers from the Opposition have said, and what the Chief Minister has said. It is here that I wish to depart from some of the comments made opposite. It is not enough to say that what Richard Carleton has done is an isolated example of Canberra bashing. Whether it is John Button, whether it is Tim Fischer, whether it is Peter Reith, or whether it is John Hewson, who stand up and say, through bigotry and ignorance, that this town, our town, my town, needs to be decimated, needs to be gutted because it is privileged, I believe that I, along with everybody else in this chamber, should stand up and resist it. It is not much good to have piety and kick Richard Carleton and then on the other hand support policies and support individuals who do exactly the same thing. We must be even-handed.
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