Sorry I am a little late on this topic but I was off the air this week. There has been a lot of discussion on FB in regard to the Adam Goodes incident last week and I thought I would offer my own analysis from my point of view about it. From the outset let me say that Goodes is a great sportsman and could be considered a role model to ALL sport loving Australians (even if it is AFL) but to me this feels like a real media beat up, hell I don’t even think the original comment from the girl was racist anyway and if that is the worst thing Goodes has been called I would be surprised. That in no way excuses the girl’s poor behaviour but for god’s sake she is a 13 year old girl.
In my opinion Australia is in danger of losing its sense of perspective on this issue thanks to the media portraying Australia as a county full of racists. It seems to me that racism is very selective for the media who have pushed this story hard this week but has double standards on it. As a result of this lopsided media beat-up some people may come to the conclusion that they are in fact different and expect the rest of us to treat them differently from everyone else and this may in fact already be happening.
As someone who has travelled around the world a bit it’s my opinion that Australia as a country is not a racist country by any stretch of the imagination, there are certainly racists among us that’s true but as a whole the laws of this country allow anybody to come to this country and make a go of it no matter their background and they are equal under the law. That however can’t be said for many other countries. Try and buy a home or land in some of our Asian neighbour’s countries or get citizenship they actually have laws against it to stop you. Try and practise religious freedom in any Islamic country, on the whole nobody can say Australia is not a tolerant country by comparison.
There was actually an example on TV recently of this double standard from the media on this topic with a Scotsman selling a new Ute in an ad, you may have seen it. In the ad he tells us that we should trust a Scotsman when looking for a deal on a new Ute. What are they suggesting to us, that Scottish people are penny-pinchers and tight with their money? Let me give you an alternative for that ad that you will never see. Imagine if the Scotsman was replaced by a Jew in the same ad. I can tell you now the ad would never see the light of day and if it did it would be a news story. Why? It’s just a joke right? Why is it not offensive for a Scotsman to be in the ad but we would all feel that the ad was a little off if he told us he was a Jew and we should trust him to find a great deal the inference being that Jews are also tight with their money. I can’t help feeling that there are different standards of racism from a media who beat us up over the issue on one hand but are happy to use a Scottish person and the inference that it carries to sell a Ute but would probably never use a Jewish person to do the same job. We are being played on this issue by the media in my opinion and the real issues of addressing racism are not being helped by this sort of fake indignation from the media for the sake of ratings. Anyway that’s what I think and I may well be wrong but that’s just how this whole story for the last week has felt to me just a big media game.
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