Russell Brand has targeted Prime Minister Tony Abbott and media mogal Rubert Murdoch in his latest Trews video tirade labelled Are Refugees Australia’s & Our Collective Responsibility?
The British comedian and self-style political commentator focuses his venom on the Australian government’s ’Stop The Boats’ asylum seeker policy, not-so-subtly comparing it to Nazi Germany.
“Anything where people are sent into camps makes me nervous … the whole mentality of anti-immigration really seems to me like an old-fashioned one and not in tune with our progressive, globalised times,” Brand said in the video apparently filmed in his bedroom and posted on YouTube (above).
Reading from an online news report from January 2014, Brand recounts how Tony Abbott says he wants to “stop people that are travelling in rickety vessels, telling them that they would not receive a one-way ticket to a good life”.
“I don’t reckon he’s ever been on an immigration vessel,” Brand says, condescendingly, “Because I don’t reckon there’s an atmosphere of ‘We’re on our way to the good life’. It’s a one-way ticket! Oh no, my cousin just died in the cargo bay!”
Brand does credit Abbott with a sense of poetry in his comment that “he could accept the yearning for a better life, that beats in the heart of every human being” but goes on to accuse the prime minister of smashing that yearning to silence with his fist.
Brand goes on to condemn the prime minister as treating immigration like a quiz show, musing that a great many Australians came to the continent by boat.
“Tony, why are there even white people in Australia? How did white people get to Australia?” Brand asks. The got there “on boats!” Brand exclaims.
Australia’s asylum seeker policy is based on race, not economics, Brand argues.
He then turns his ire on Rupert Murdoch.
“Rupert Murdoch is a refugee of the world. Rupert Murdoch can be a refugee in the Virgin Islands, a refugee in Mauritius … and not pay tax in Britain and not pay tax in Australia and not pay tax in the United States,” Brand says.
“But actual refugees; they can’t get no traction, they can’t get no satisfaction or opportunities, for them the gates are closed.
“Global corporations treat it as a borderless world where they can go where they want and do what they want.
“But if the poor people of the world, similarly [do so], in search of a better life … then those doors are slammed for them.
“We should be closing the doors for corporations who already have wealth and affluence and opening the doors to the needy.”