View from the Street: why are our nation's enemies laughing at Jacqui Lambie?

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View from the Street: why are our nation's enemies laughing at Jacqui Lambie?

By Andrew P Street

Our enemies: always with the laughing

Palmer United senator Jacqui Lambie can hear our enemies out there, laughing away every time parliament doesn't ratify her unconstitutional bans on items of clothing. Of course, one reason Lambie might be hearing laughter all the time is because so much of what she says is objectively hilarious.

"Here is my list of approved clothing for Australians: shirt, pants, short pants, sombrero, suit of armour, back half of pantomime horse…"

"Here is my list of approved clothing for Australians: shirt, pants, short pants, sombrero, suit of armour, back half of pantomime horse…"Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

For example: yesterday she decided that there was nothing important going on in the Senate and that she absolutely had time to release some draft legislation. Not to her party, of course, or to the Senate in which she's supposedly representing the people of Tasmania, but on her Facebook wall.

Now, you can post draft legislation on your Facebook wall too if you like (here's mine, featuring my proposal to replace the national anthem with John Farnham's 'Pressure Down') and the best bit is that it will be exactly as legally binding and constitutionally sound as Lambie's! Today, we are all Senators!

See, her ban on identity-concealing garments almost certainly couldn't be passed in the unlikely event that Lambie actually attempted to introduce it. And she seems to know it, since her statement adds that "Once again, our enemies will laugh at us." Man, those enemies sure sound like a happy bunch!

The issue is that the proposed law would appear to breach section 116 of the Constitution - which reads "The Commonwealth shall not make any law for establishing any religion, or for imposing any religious observance, or for prohibiting the free exercise of any religion, and no religious test shall be required as a qualification for any office or public trust under the Commonwealth."

Ah, but Lambie knows that burqas aren't religious!

"If you're talking about wearing the burqa it's not a religious item. If you read the Koran, it's not in the Koran," she argued to journalists, because as we all know every other religious text gives strict fashion guidelines in the back, just before the classified ads. After all, that's how we know Jesus wore a clerical collar and a big pointy Pope hat.

Nothing to see here

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It's a good thing that Lambie was assiduously scribbling away in her impossible legislation journal because there was really nothing much else going on to which she might want to pay attention - aside, of course, from the rushed-through-parliament "Foreign Fighters" bill, which was being not-quite-debated in the senate today and has been described by parliament's Human Rights committee as "likely to be incompatible with human rights". Which is a ringing endorsement in anyone's language!

Luckily the bill still passed the Senate regardless, with only the Greens, David Leyonhjelm and Nick Xenophon voting against it. For which they will presumably be prosecuted under the terms of the Foreign Fighters legislation.

Lock it down!

On a more positive note, let's give a bit of a shoutout to the students currently chaining themselves to things and protesting peacefully on uni campuses today. While Christopher "but I've already had my free education" Pyne was bleating that everyone wants university fees deregulated in Parliament today, folks who absolutely did not were making their voices heard. And it's not been getting the sort of traction that it deserves, so jump on Twitter and view the #freeeducation hastag.

In fact, at the time of writing, Melbourne Uni students Joshua Tynan and Maggie Dunleavy had locked themselves in the Future Students Info Centre. If you've ever complained that the young people today don't care enough to fight for important things, this oughtta do your heart good.

What does Scott Morrison not care about today?

Your immigration minister is a busy man, with so many things on his plate at any one time urgently demanding that he ignore them.

Take today for example. How much does he care about the news that a group of refugee children released into the community on Nauru (you know, that can't be released in Australia, obviously, because freedom) were beaten up by locals telling them to get out of their country and warned that they would be killed?

"This incident is wholly a matter for Nauru," he compassionately responded, because kids being killed isn't something with which he has an issue. And why would he? Get a real job, kids.

Or maybe he's not caring about Zainullah Naseri, an Afghan asylum seeker we refused a refugee visa to despite his claims that he'd be killed by the Taliban if he was returned. Funnily enough, within weeks of being shipped back he was kidnapped by the Taliban and held for ransom (he had an Australian driver's licence so they assumed he was Australian) before he escaped.

"They beat me, they said 'this boy is from Australia, that country is full of infidels'," Naseri told the ABC's Lateline.

But it's OK: Morrison's not caring deeply about that too.

"I am advised that at this stage, the reports suggest that any kidnapping was opportunistic and is not therefore related to a fear of persecution that would have otherwise given rise to a protection obligation," he said in a statement. And again, how could he be expected to think that the exact thing Naseri said would happen would somehow happen?

Heck of a guy, your immigration minister. Heck of a guy.

God update: fine, science is right

The Pope, meanwhile, has had a new p-mail from God and wanted to pass on a message: evolution is real.

More specifically, there's no reason for Christians to see evolution as being incompatible with the story of creation as laid down in Genesis.

"When we read about creation in Genesis, we run the risk of imagining God was a magician, with a magic wand able to do everything. But that is not so," Francis said during his address to the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. "Evolution in nature is not inconsistent with the notion of creation, because evolution requires the creation of beings that evolve."

So, God used to be able to rend the very heavens and punish you for daring to think about other people's genitals; now He apparently got as far as making single-celled organisms and went "eh, that oughtta do it - off you go, Life, and I'll pop back in about 3.8 billion years when you've gotten to the cathedral building stage. Oh, and watch out for meteo… actually, I'll let it be a fun surprise!"

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