Useless information for Monday January 10, 2011 The flexibility that public health care just can’t provide

Another biased and factually inaccurate “documentary” on the TV

January 11th, 2011 at 04:22am

This time it’s SBS’ three-part documentary “Immigration Nation” which premiered on Sunday night.

The main aim of this show appears to be to make Australians feel inadequate or guilty for the actions of previous generations, and as usual, the method for achieving this is to re-write history in some rather bizarre and alarmist ways.

My favourite claim from the tripe which aired on Sunday was that the White Australia policy made Japan jealous because they saw themselves as a great power and didn’t like the idea of some insignificant little country stopping them from freely immigrating to said country (question: if Australia was so insignificant and Japan was so great, why would they have wanted to immigrate to Australia?), so over time their jealousy grew and then, as a direct result, World War Two occurred. Yes that’s right, according to this “documentary”, Australia’s immigration policies caused World War Two.

When this documentary, as SBS documentaries tend to do, gets shown in high school classrooms, it will be interesting to see the brighter kids pick up on its direct contradictions with the rest of the curriculum…and then be labelled as “inconsiderate” or “racist” by teachers (welcome to my high school experience, where it was “wrong” to believe anything that the “racist” John Laws said…although I did find one teacher who, whilst disliking John Laws, did agree with him on a number of things…I think he was a closet listener who wouldn’t acknowledge it for fear of alienation by his peers.)

I wasn’t expecting much from a “documentary” which has been running radio ads for some time now which have been doing their best to paint the country as racist…but even I was astounded by this complete revision of history.

There were a number of other pearls of tripe, including some nonsense about Australia being the same as South Africa (there were similarities in legislation, sure, but the two countries were far from being the same) and that restricting immigration from Asia somehow created more of it. There was more, but I can only think of so much of it before I want to start screaming.

I haven’t decided whether I want to watch it next week or not. It would be an interesting exercise in torture, so it will probably depend on whether I am in the mood for some torture by the time it airs next week. If it were on tonight, I’d definitely be giving it a miss.

Samuel

Entry Filed under: Samuel's Editorials,TV/Radio/Media

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