How the politics of sheer populism led to racial riots - smh.com.au - January 16, 2006 - The Cronulla debacle is a sad indictment of the Labor Party, writes Paul Sheehan.
... Some of these political debts incurred by the NSW Labor Right among the Muslims in the Lakemba-Punchbowl-Bankstown area have been well documented, especially the lurid branch-stacking operations. The antecedants of this particular strand of racial politics can be traced back to one of the bad habits of the last federal Labor government.
By way of example, a former high-ranking police officer described to me the political strings pulled on behalf of Sheik Taj el-Din al Hilaly, now a prominent religious leader in Lakemba: "The Immigration Department wanted to deport him, and we had more than enough to get rid of him. But he stayed because of interference by [Paul] Keating. "
Even the Labor immigration minister of that time, Chris Hurford, would later complain to the Herald: "It was sheer populism. Voting power got in the way of good policy."
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