If you knew nothing about Australia, you might think that this process of reflection, accountability and protest would begin here as well, since it is this society that produced and exported the killer, incubated his prejudices, and then subjected its national neighbours to them. But that naive hope would fundamentally misunderstand where we are and what we are doing. There was no unity in grief – the trans-Tasman contrast became more pronounced than ever. Where New Zealand chose maturity, Australia chose malign idiocy. Everything was permissible, as long as it was irrelevant.
Before the bodies had cooled, the “national discussion” had explored the optics of censure motions, the question of whether or not egging someone was political violence, the ethics of undercover journalism, the hurt feelings of journalists, the hurt feelings of Pauline Hanson, whether or not David Koch should be fired for hurting her feelings (thousands on social media thought so), and the regulation of unrelated media platforms like Twitter. Wasn’t it really about social media? Weren’t the Greens really as extreme as – wait, more extreme than – One Nation? The Murdoch media said so with an almost unified voice. The Greens politician Mehreen Faruqi was really the same as the neo-Nazi senator Fraser Anning, said the minister for home affairs. Both-siderism, long an incurable disease, became a terminal one.
Australian conservatives seemed most concerned that someone might take their racism away. In The Sydney Morning Herald, the former Howard government minister Amanda Vanstone wrote a piece headlined “It’s not wrong to worry about immigration in the wake of terror”, as though there was some danger that a multimillion-dollar, multi-channel, multi-title media apparatus dedicated to this worry might be switched off overnight. The prime minister’s office threatened to sue our most prominent Muslim broadcaster. Pauline Hanson was invited onto ABC radio’s flagship Breakfast program to discuss One Nation’s preferences and Australian immigration rates.
Andrew Bolt drew an equivalence between Christchurch and “left-wing terrorism”, by which he meant the time someone threw glitter at him. Chris Kenny drew an equivalence between the fostering of bigotry and someone on the ABC joking about conservatives being murdered: it turned out he had mistaken a discussion about a murder mystery featuring art conservators for a Maoist insurgency. In two sad little articles in The Australian, Judith Sloan and someone called “The Mocker” decided to criticise Jacinda Ardern, as though offended by her dignity.
As one, they repudiated the idea that either the mainstream Australian media, the most openly and pervasively Islamophobic in the English-speaking world, or the country’s wider culture of unfettered racism had anything to do with this Islamophobic Australian murderer. He was instead inspired by the “ancient racisms of Europe and the fanaticism of medieval Christians”, according to a hastily written 300-word article by The Australian’s defence and national security editor, Paul Maley. “With Australia’s political class poised for a national bout of cultural self-loathing … it is worth noting there is zero evidence the man paid any attention to anything said or done in this country since 2014.” In fact, it was quickly revealed, the killer had posted many times on Australian far-right Facebook groups as late as 2016, and made a cash donation to an Australian anti-Muslim group, but this cheap attempt at exoneration was never amended or corrected. If there was no culpability, then why lie about it?
), actually resigned 44ing over an accidental Canadian citizenship and had to be re-shoehorned into the Senate.
