The new Labor Prime Minister reprimands the Pharisaical Julian Burnside

For many of us exasperated conservatives, Julian Burnside, 'human rights advocate', ranks as the nation's foremost stomach purgative. We have to be careful not to expose ourselves to this rationalist John the Baptist, this holy man of the PC-class, on an empty stomach. Care is all the more necessary because his anathemas and fulminations against our society's ignorance and redneck mentality are increasing in their scope and frequency - his latest target being the ignorant people of Sydney's western suburbs. No doubt this is partly due to the urging of members of his class who are unable to articulate the ideology with the same degree of scornful sanctimony and arrogance.

What this class-appointed human rights advocate does not tell the public is that his puffed-up intellectual arrogance rests on the assumption of a particular analysis of human rights. Like most of the Left, his analysis of social and political problems rests on the assumption that materialism is true, which inevitably leads to a rationalist analysis of rights - abstract rights dominating and disconnected from the particular circumstances.

Burnside's rights are abstract individual subjective rights that leave out consideration of the manifold facets of the particular social and political circumstances. Thus refugees have rights that no circumstances can speak against, and no interest in the Australian community can speak against. And to firm up an unassailable case he and his rationalist lawyer mates have conned the UN into accepting their rights analysis which means that the appeal to such instruments as the UN Convention on Refugees is merely an appeal to themselves. Burnside is forever waving that fraudulent scrap of paper in the face of dissenters. This is the great trick of the PC-class in the West: fixing the game to disqualify opposition.

I have often harboured the unseemly wish that someone would abruptly appear to pull Burnside's Pharisaical nose during one of his pious performances on television or radio. Little hope of that happening amid the fawning unquestioning admirers who hang around him. But I had not in my wildest dreams thought that a Labor Prime Minister would reprimand one of their own in such a humiliating way, clearly inferring that his discourse on asylum seekers is at bottom abuse - which it is. A job well done, Prime Minister, which goes to show that everyone has some redeeming qualities. Of course, Burnside will merely sniff at that pitiful incomprehension and see as his further task the disabusing of the Prime Minister of her misapprehension.

Julian Burnside QC, human rights advocate, is a prime representative of his class. That class dismisses those who do not fall in with their ideological position as ignorant and morally corrupt. In another context, Burnside would be full of rights rhetoric on behalf of the Western suburbs. But that is merely a sham intellectual posturing. The asylum seeker issue shows what he and his mates think about the people of the lower social economic layers of society: they should shut up and only speak when they are given the lead in what to say.

See my previous comment on Burnside

Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com