26 March 2019

It seems it is still too early to draw any clear conclusions from the disappointing result of the NSW election, although the early conversation between Ben Raue and Osmond Chiu is worth listening to. From a Victorian vantage point, the only real standout moments were when Michael Daley quite rightly told Alan Jones to get stuffed, and then when Michael Daley quite wrongly scapegoated migrants for cost of living pressures in Sydney: “Our young children will flee and who are they being replaced with? They are being replaced by young people from typically Asia with PhDs.” Liam Hogan argues this is a reminder that Labor has a long history of racism, and the party needs to be more careful in its treatment of various issues to avoid slipping into racist tropes. Responding to Daley’s invocation of “our children”, Hogan says: “We might start by being clear about who ‘we’ is. ‘We’ cannot be a proxy, even by accident, for white people, and neither can it be that subtle proxy for white people, ‘existing residents’. Let’s be clear that ‘our’ children includes children who have yet to be born, and are yet to migrate. ‘Our’ jobs includes jobs that are yet to exist, in industries that we can’t imagine yet. Our society and our city is going to change. What’s necessary is a society where the benefits of those changes are shared, and are seen to be shared.”