The Age thinks that Gary Anderton, the 24 year old Liberal candidate for the safe Labor seat of Lyndhurst in the upcoming Victorian election, should lose his preselection. Some blog remarks a couple of years ago, as reported on the newspaper’s front page yesterday (it was a very slow news day – that some of the thousands of letters written to the Immigration Minister on particular cases came from Alan Jones was the laughable lead story), are the problem. I reproduce the worst of it here:
Mr Anderton tells in an entry called “Anglo-Saxon Doctor Please” of going to the GP and being seen by “an Indian doctor, of all things, that absolutely stunk and obviously received a full fee degree. In other words, (he had) no idea.”
After asking the clinic for an “Australian doctor, that could speak English and was youngish (hopefully female)”, he was treated by an “Asain (sic), male, 50s, and had a speech lingo (sic) as good as Melbourne Lord Mayor (John) So”. …“I could go back to genetics
Andrew Norton 
hmm, the fellow looks like he may have had a few very recent non-Caucasian forebears himself.
storm in a teacup but a warning to all aspiring candidates never to keep blogs or if they do to write as if everyone in the world will be reading you.
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This situation is similar to the repeated stoushes we’ve had over at Catallaxy when people have turned up to abuse me. I do not like dividing politics into simplistic dualism, but the ability to accept that people can mature is in rather short supply on TEH LEFT. Your point about leftist support for the rehabilitation of serious offenders is also well made. Interesting that they’re unwilling to extend this to their ideological enemies.
I think it’s also worth pointing out that Hanson’s comments on Aborigines were far milder than Anderton’s, and made in the context of differential benefits in a community where everyone was/is poor.
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one has to wonder though what the guy’s story is given how he looks. Perhaps he was going through some sort of identity crisis when he wrote that, which some people of mixed heritage can likely be prone to?
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Some of the nastiest prejudice I’ve ever seen has been between members of various minority ethnic groups. When I was a kid, Chinese and Aborigines tended to have pretty unpleasant things to say to/about each other. The same may be true for other parts of the country.
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On the other hand perhaps they should disendorse the socialist for the implicit criticism he is making of full fees!
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Jason – I don’t think he is necessarily having (or had) an identity crisis. As far as I can tell from looking at surveys, people have prejudices that are not linked to any over-arching theories about race. So a dislike of one ethnic group has no predictive power as to attitudes toward other groups. In the case of the unsatisfactory doctors mentioned, the prejudice looks like over-extrapolation from one characteristic Anderton did not like.
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“But should his juvenile remarks, made when he was 22, be grounds for loss of preselection now?”
Andrew, you make it sound like he made these remarks a long time ago; he’s matured a lot in the mean time, so there’s no reason to bring them up at all. But Anderton made these remarks just two years ago. They are hardly ancient history. If he believed what he said in 2004, why should anyone think he doesn’t believe it in 2006? (And retracting them because Liberal Party HQ leant on him doesn’t count.)
I don’t doubt at all that the Labor Party leaked the story to The Age. They probably googled him and every other Liberal candidate and struck gold. And you can be sure the Liberals have done the same. Parties have long pre-selected people with, shall we say, unorthodox views, for seats they cannot win. They are usually desperate to find a candidate, the first person to put up their hand gets the gig and since this person won’t win and will be forgotten the day after the election, there’s no need to check up on them.
But in the age of google, it’s different. Everything is on the record.
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Spiros – Anderton probably didn’t mean his comments to be taken very seriously when he made them, much less now, though it is a pity we cannot see the full context, just The Age’s take on them.
Frankly, I am far more concerned about the Liberals’ dopey plan to make public transport free for students.
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“the Liberals
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Free public transport – Economically irresponsible ($285 million over 4 years that can be better spent) and also unfair (if we make public transport free, which I don’t think we should, why should it be just for students and not for pensioners or the disabled who need it more!). Honestly, it is just an example of policy desperation – Which is when you can’t think of any decent policy so you just opt to make something free. Whilst I liked Mark Latham, Medicare Gold was a similar sort of policy.
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Nice to see you’ve mellowed re forgiving people their past sins, because I seem to remember you recommending (on Catallaxy) that anyone who had been a member of the Communist Party should be shunned, apparently never to be forgiven.
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Given that I’ve just – not entirely seriously – compared the entire Abrahamic theological tradition to Hitler-worship over at my blog, I think I can forget about running for the Liberal Party any time soon…not that I’d actually want to.
Of course, the ALP was out of the question ages ago!
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The Wayback Machine has a sample of Anderton’s old blog:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050312034208/http://www.garyanderton.com/blog/
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I’m not sure I buy the idea that the Labour party dug the dirt in this case. Surely if they wanted to cause maximum damage they would have waited until the campaign started. There are still isolated pockets of social progressives left in the Liberal party who perhaps favoured a different candidate (it’s just as plausible).
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As for the racists comments the candidate made two years ago, we’re missing both the context of the comments and the context of the retraction. If the party thinks this young man will turn out to be a good local member, why don’t they get him involved in some cross-cultural charity work to show he really understands what is going on? He’ll only be 28 when the next election rolls around, which gives the locals plenty of time to allow any lingering doubt to both dissipate and be easily countered during an election campaign. Ergo, have him ditched until he grows up properly.
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“I do not like dividing politics into simplistic dualism, but the ability to accept that people can mature is in rather short supply on TEH LEFT.”
That’s not strictly true – former KKK members in the US Senate and Islamic fanatics such as Khalil Eideh do alright these days.
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‘Free public transport – Economically irresponsible’ Maybe. I would have thought that lowering the prices on public transport would encourage usage and reduce so-called greenhouse effects. I’m always surprised when individuals who claim private transport imposes high costs don’t want to lower public transport fees. Just a thought.
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Russell – With the great Catallaxy server crash, all my inconsistencies have gone the way of out-of-favour communist officials, down the memory hole. More seriously, I do think that people can change, though I would say that anyone who has become a communist in the last 60 years shows more than the usual capacity for huge errors of judgment, with their current views considered in that light. And I think there is something to the argument, which Jason among others made in other lost posts, that personality is more consistent than ideology. So a dogmatic left-winger will not become an empirically-minded centrist, he will become a dogmatic right-winger.
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Andrew, most (if not all) of your stuff is back on Catallaxy. We only lost material from late July to the end of September. Tom hasn’t sorted it into categories yet, but it is all there.
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I’m glad that all of Catallaxy’s archive has not been lost, even if it does mean that there is more material to be used against me in any future pre-selection:)
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I thought Pauline Hanson’s maiden speech was ok apart from the loose use of the term over-run regarding Asians in some parts of the country. The way it was reported was very different from the real thing. One old person of my acqaintance who heard the speech live (insomnia) and then read the Sydney Morning Herald next day wrote off for Hansard to do a check which completely discredited the SMH.
As Andrew noted, the people on the left have got more skeletons in their cupboards than careless people like Anderton will ever have.
So we have lost posts from July to end Sept? Fantastic, I think I had some heavy posts in that period. At first I meticulously filed all my serious posts separately but gave up the practice a long time ago.
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Whilst at uni, I recall Tim Holding getting into strife as a university student for alledgedly forging student Identity cards using a laminating machine in order to rig studetn elections. And he grew up to be the Minister for Police! The journo who wrote the story ( Batchelard ) was apparently a uni mate of Holdings. Can anyone confirm any elements of these stories?
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Speaking of immigration, what a pity that some of the vast and unsubstantiated generalisations about “the left” and “the right”, which add nothing useful to debate (at least in this kind of forum), are finding their way onto this site from their permanent residence on Catallaxy.
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Sinclair Davidson – What encourages use of public transport is better services, cheaper or free tickets can help but not if you are stuck in the outer suburbs at 8pm on a Sunday with no bus services running…
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Re Is The Age scribe Batchelard ( story on Liberal Candidate for Lyndhurst) suggesting that a person should be condemned forever for a mistake made at the age of 20 and while a person is still at uni? Gee, the Labor front benches would be empty if we used this criteria. As for Tim Holding, I recall a Liberal MP at the time giving ( Geoff Leigh, I think) the laminating machine Tim Holding used to create student IDs for the purposes of swaying student elections a very good airing in Hansard!
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Andrew, you make the point that Anderton made these stupid comments when he was young, and deserves a second chance. He was 22 when those comments were posted. He’s 24 now. Obviously I have no evidence, but I would struggle to believe he’s completely reversed his extreme position in two short years.
At any rate, Gary applied for a job at my old workplace a few years ago, and it was my task to go through the resumes and sort the wheat from the chaff, as it were. His resume was loco. Talking about himself in the third person, which I hate, and declaring things such as “Gary Anderton is widely tipped to be a future leader of his community”. Self indulgent rot.
And then there was his website. Good heavens. We’ve all read the reports on “the wit and wisdom of Gary Anderton”, but the site was so much more than the sum of its parts. I laugh still when I think back to his online gallery, which included a picture of the twin towers on fire, set to the background of a bald eagle – with a tear running down its cheek!
After sending the link for his website around the office (everyone had a great laugh) I tore up his resume, set it on fire and pissed on the ashes. He had the perfect qualifications for the job, but was obviously a bigoted twit and, in all likelyhood, a real drag to be around. And before you accuse me of being a bigot in not considering him for the job, remember – I’ve seen the website, you haven’t.
If I had known he was standing for election, I would have alerted the press myself.
Point is, if your humble writer can recognise a dangerous idiot so quickly, how on hell did he get preselection for the libs?
Peace.
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Flashman peed on the ashes of a kid’s resume ? Flashman, it seems that the Kid was saved from a moron of an employer!
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Flashman – Presumably, nobody else wanted to get defeated by a margin of 25%.
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This is no doubt true, Andrew – I can’t imagine anyone would want to get their arse flogged in such spectacular fashion. This may be the reason why the libs went for Anderton, but it certainly isn’t an excuse. Surely I don’t have to explain why this is so …
Reading back through this blog, condemnation of Anderton’s views remains conspicuously absent. C’mon people. It ain’t good enough for anyone – let alone a candidate for a state election – to believe the things the little pissant does. Let rip, people. Let the wider online communityknow that libs don’t stand for racism.
And no, I don’t buy his half-arsed apology. He’s not sorry for what he wrote; he’s sorry he got caught, that’s all.
And Frances, yes, you are also correct. My (ex)boss is a moron, but those who worked for him were and are ripper people. Funny how that worked out; maybe it’s because he let us filter job applications before they got to him.
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Flashman – I put them in the category of stupid things done when young, and perhaps Anderton is a twit more broadly – I’d never heard of him until Saturday, and your reports have doubled my knowledge. But I don’t think many people would be traumatised by these witless insults, and so I put them in misdemeanour category.
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Stupid things done when young? I’m guilty of that and, at 28, no doubt have a few more stupid acts up my sleeve. Watch this space …
Traumatised, though, is not the correct word to describe Anderton’s impact on people. Most would be smart enough to understand he’s talking balls, but the damage comes from the fact an authority figure holds these beliefs. How would this make a Koori (or someone of Indian descent) feel? I’m a white male who doesn’t give a contintental about anyone’s opinion, so I don’t know. But using my limited powers of empathy, I suggest it might engender a feeling of isolation.
But we’re skirting the issue I raised in my first post. It took me all of thirty seconds (the time it took to read the cover letter on his job application) before I realised this particular cat was an ignorant, arrogant and offensive fool. Yet the libs, with all the powers at their disposal, put him up for election. The fact he had bugger all chance of winning is irrelevant.
Now, seems to me that there are three possibilities as to why this occured:
1. Anderton’s expressed views hold sway in the contemporary vic libs;
2. Absolutely no one at the libs did any background check on Anderton; or…
3. I’m super intelligent with the capacity to spot fools that noone else can see.
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Flashman, but isn’t Anderton part aboriginal? Didn’t he say that he has an aboriginal brother and sister? He certainly does not look caucasian on the pic….if you have seen him in person, is he or is he not from a culturally diverse background ( to use a poltically correct term!)??
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Frances,
it is clear that, despite his mixed heritage, Anderton thinks of himself as white. When talking about the supposed genetically determined weaknesses of aboriginals, he’s not talking about himself.
And he can do that, too. Ethnicity consists of more than a simple genetic make-up and its physical expression; it’s culture as well. If Anderton was raised in a white Anglo-Saxon environment, then he is free to consider himself as such. What he cannot do is pick and choose his ethnicity as it suits the situation.
In other words, he can’t put on his white hat, bag out aboriginals, get caught out, then put on his black hat and say “Nah – it’s cool. Look, I’m black too. I can say this stuff”.
Still no one has addressed my main point: how did this pissant get preselection?
Yours in anticipation of an answer,
flashman
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I was once on the Liberal pre-selection panel for a dead red seat. Despite some prior arm twisting there were only a couple of candidates. We chose the least worst as they appeared (I had never heard of either of them before). In a non-contested or weakly contested pre-selection there is little or no lobbying of pre-selectors and the dirt is not flying. As Anderton appears to have cleaned up his website long ago, unless you happened to know him you would have no reason to think he was a bad bet – at least he doesn’t break the camera.
Most of the people selected for winnable state seats on either side aren’t too flash (I once complained about the low quality of Liberal MLCs to a Labor friend, and he replied ‘Mate, at least all yours speak English’), so you can imagine what the people standing for unwinnable seats are typically like. This close to nominations closing, there would be little or no chance of replacing Anderton with someone better.
Apart from this thread, the issue seems to have gone away. And if ethnic minorities have such thin skins, then surely the problem is The Age printing Anderton’s remarks several hundred thousand times, and not long deleted remarks on an obscure blog?
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I understand your point, Andrew, but still think this situation reflects a fundamental lack of effort from the libs in vetting their candidate. And the defence of this character from some of the posters (including yourself) is more than a bit worrying.
Ted’s reaction to the Anderton Incident – where he simply shrugged off the issue – smacked of weak leadership, too. In an unwinnable seat, surely his party would have benefitted from denoucing Gaz and giving him the flick as candidate. Drag a small positive out of negative situation, in a sense, and showcase a bit of leadership.
Martin Flanagan wrote a great piece in the Saturday Age, where he said that in our liberal democracy we don’t have to agree on everything, but we do have to agree on the main points. Racial equality is one of those main points. And where racism pops up in a major party, the leader has an obligation to the Australian people to shout it down.
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Whoops – accidently hit “submit comment”
Just one more thing, though. My feeling (again, I have no evidence) is that most ethnic communities would have recognised Anderton as a ignorant fool; an idiot with aspirations beyond his capacities. Christ, for someone with a journalism degree (I think) his grammar is appalling.
And to my knowledge, The Age published the one article, an editorial plus a scattering of letters over the next few days. Hardly blanket coverage of the issue. Nonetheless, the Age is obligated to report on incidents such as this and provide us with the information we need to act as responsible citizens, so kudos to them. The Herald Sun didn’t see the need to print a story on this (or at least I haven’t been able to find one), which is a bit disappointing.
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It was a journalism degree from Victoria University, which is easy to get into. But whether or not schools are run by Maoists, they are doing a very bad job teaching English, so the problem is in the school rather than the unviersity.
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Another thing we should “all agree on” in a “liberal democracy” is that religious fundamentalism has no place in politics, and that pandering to religious fundamentalists is morally equal to pandering to the KKK. Naturally, this doesn’t stop the ALP preselecting people like Khalil Eideh; nor does it mean The Age and other moral worthies feel any need to speak up in such circumstances. How come?
PS – Gough Whitlam, “f—— Vietnamese Balts”, etc. Just in case anyone forgot.
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I almost forgot! Anti-semitism. Sheikh al-Hilaly, a notorious anti-semite who believes that the Jews “control the world” by promoting sexual deviancy, was stove-piped into Australian citizenship thanks to the lobbying efforts of the ALP (primarily Paul Keating).
I haven’t heard much about THAT one from the sanctimonious Age. What gives?
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Steve – ease up my son.
Who mentioned Jews and Muslims? It wasn’t me, that’s for sure.
And religious fundamentalism has no place in politics? Oh mate, we can certainly agree on this issue. You give the perfect example of the KKK. I concur, and would love to add Tony Abbott as a fundamentalist figure who deserves to be given the arse from our political landscape. And Costello. Have you seen him sucking the giant poisoned cock of Hillsong Church? Is this the future of our proud country?
Regarding al-Hilaly – I will need to research this issue further because I have no idea who he is (although a mercy dash to Iraq to save whats-his-name springs to mind). Apologies for the ignorance; will remedy it straight away.
Seriously though Steve, keep reading the Herald Sun. You’ll learn something one day, my boy.
Yours faithfully (ableit a bit drunker than usual),
flashman
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Your last contribution, Flashman, shows why no one should take the least bit of notice of anything you say.
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In vino veritas, Frances.
Yep, but no doubt more aggressive and smart arse in tone than I would have liked. And so ‘pologies to Steve for the lack of civility.
But your contributions to this blog, Frances, have been nothing more than shifty attempts at excusing Anderton’s inexcusable past.
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Better an inexcusable past than an inexcusable present, Flashman.
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I think I will close comments on this one.
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