Hacker News Reader

Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

It's ironic that a country founded by England with prison convicts who pushed out the indigenous people would eventually choose to create a police state.

Edit: Fixed for people who knew what I meant but want to bust my...

View on HN

Maybe it isn't ironic at all. This is the conclusion by Waleed Aly (quite a prominent journalist in Aus) that I read a while ago:

> The British arrived with Governors, ready to assume the role of governing. [...] Then, these governments set about building infrastructure in a way they never did in Britain. They were not managing a society that existed. They simply crushed the Indigenous ones that did, then proceeded as though no society was here in the first place. That set in motion a peculiarly Australian logic that government created society, not the other way around.

> All these traits are invaluable weapons against COVID. They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre, pass expansive counter-terrorism legislation without anything like the scrutiny of a serious public debate, and maintain a brutal policy on asylum seekers. [...]

> Perhaps America cannot control its guns for the same reason it can have a spectacular civil rights movement. And if that’s true, perhaps we stopped COVID for the same reason we stopped the boats.

https://www.smh.com.au/national/carefree-larrikin-is-a-myth-...

> They’re also what makes it possible for us to legislate gun control after an isolated massacre,

This statement alone should call the writer's knowledge into question. Whilst it was after a particular mass shooting, it was because of the increasing regularity of mass shootings that the laws were drafted.

I remember riding the Melbourne Eye, which has a narrator explaining that "before Melbourne, there was nothing here" and then later mentions the Aboriginals used to live in pretty much the same places.

Let alone the wildlife/flora too that is summed up as “nothing”

Australia was initially populated with Aboriginals, from who the land was stolen by convict settlers.

There's a difference between "country founded by", and "land occupied by". Yes, the aboriginals, like native tribes all over the world, were displaced by modernity. One can debate the good vs. bad of it all, but the country of Australia was founded as a penal colony (after displacing the aboriginals).

"Displaced by modernity" is such a wonderfully Orwellian description for what the colonisers did to Aboriginal Australians.

Not just convicts but also the prison guards.

And Tasmania (the Australian island state right at the South) was the prison island for the worst convicts. It is now probably the most conservative state in Australia. It's like the phenomenon where the bullied becomes the bully, but on a societal level.

Tasmania (where I live, and am right now) is definitely _not_ the most conservative state. While this may have been true in the 90s, it's not now, and while we do have a Liberal (the right-most of the big Australian parties) State Government, they are the most left-leaning of the State Liberal governments.

See https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-13/election-2019-vote-co... amongst others.

It was not only founded by the captives, but also by the captors.

GTFOH

Prison convicts were not the first people of Australia.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com