“Our House of House of Representatives does not represent anyone”

See, the sad fact is that Abdel-Magied isn’t actually that bright. Let me go through her latest speech – more malice than analysis:

Muslim activist Yassmin Abdel-Magied … appeared on a panel at an Australian National University leadership forum in Canberra on Wednesday night.

Why was she invited? She is no leader and has no record of delivering insightful analysis. I can only conclude it’s because she is the token Muslim that makes the organisers feel wonderful broadminded.

Ms Abdel-Magied took a swipe at the media for taking the “easy option” and painting her as an “other” who poses a “threat”.

No, it is Abdel-Magied who takes the easy option by deliberately presenting herself as the “other”:

I spent all my life in this country building this narrative of this chick who’s like a Muslim revhead who works on rigs who digs with the boys and blah blah blah.

And she takes the easy option of the shock-jock – posing as the threat and throwing verbal bombs at exactly what has made us free and safe:

She also had a heated exchange with ANU Chancellor and former Labor foreign minister Gareth Evans, over the future of parliamentary democracy. “If you just play the GetUp! game or the social media game and don’t do the serious parliamentary game as well, if you don’t do that as well you’re missing a very important vehicle for actually getting decent policy,” Professor Evans said.

Ms Abdel-Magied said change was inevitable. “The traditional parliamentary system, I mean look at the photo of the House of Representatives,” she said. “It does not represent anyone.”

Update:

THE IDENTITY POLITICS OF YASSMIN THE VICTIM

This is the authentic idiocy of a representative of identity politics.

In fact, a politician does represent the citizens who voted for them, of whatever color or creed. Abdel-Magied completely misunderstands the meaning of “represent”.

Abdel-Magied mistakenly thinks “represent” means “look like” – and, specifically, look like her.

Parliament actually includes people who are women, Aboriginal, Chinese, Muslim, Christians, Jews, athiests and so much else, but apparently all such people are nobodies to Abdel-Magied.

See, that diversity is never enough for the diversity extremist, who won’t be satisfied until Parliament includes them personally – the ultimate identity group of themselves. Until then, Parliament does not “represent” them – or anyone.

But will Abdel-Magied then run for Parliament herself?

When Evans challenged her to run for office, Ms Abdel-Magied replied sarcastically: “You know how to get to office, I have to go to preselection, which works really well, and I have to go through all these other systems which for women and for people of colour are actually biased.”

And here we come across another example of Abdel-Magied’s invincible ignorance. On the very day she says Parliament “does not represent anyone”, being biased against women and “people of colour”, look who was making their maiden speech in the Senate:

But on Abdel-Magied ploughed, trashing the country that welcomed her family and trashing the institutions that made it a safer home than the one they left:

Opening her talk, Ms Abdel-Magied acknowledged the Ngunnawal people. “We don’t know how to have a conversation about the fact that we’re on contested land, on stolen land,” she said.

False. We have those conversations endlessly. It’s just that millions of Australians have figured that the issue is long settled, in the past and of no practical benefit to keep revisiting. Unlike the identity warriors, most Australians believe that we’re more likely to advance if we consider ourselves now as Australians together, regardless of race or past history.

Then she whinges how she’s been picked on – by which she means how people criticised her for saying stupid and offensive things, not least in a post attacking Anzac Day:

One social media post ruined that, and that’s out of my hands. That’s at the hands of ­people who owns our media, who runs our country and has those conversations in our parliamentary chambers.

Those sorts of power, those institutions of power are geared against people like me because they see votes in it and because fear is so much easier to sell.

Actually, the “institutions of power” have been astonishingly generous to Abdel-Magied, seeing in her the “moderate Muslim” it would be useful to patronise. The Gillard government put her on the ANZAC Centenary Youth Working Group. Foreign Minister Julie Bishop promoted Abdel-Magied, with her department subsidising her book tour in the Middle East and appointing her to the Council for Australian-Arab Relations. The ABC made her a regular guest and TV host. She is a regular speaker at writers festivals and cultural events. Here she is now speaking at this ANU forum:

The engineer and writer … was the only non-academic on a panel dominated by professors and heads of school.

If this is a system “geared against” Abdel-Magied, what precisely does she consider are her just desserts?

Then this:

Being born in Sudan and having grown up in a family where the view that western democracy has been exported by countries who have decided that western democracy is the only way that you can govern in a good manner, and that being challenged now, I think there are lots of Arab leaders now who are quite happy that Trump’s in power because they’re like, ‘look America always said that democracy was the greatest, look where it got them now,’ and that’s actually been a way that they’ve talked to their people and said, ‘this is why we won’t have democracy, because this is where democracy gets you’.

A word to Abdel-Magied. Democracy is not a system you support only when your candidate wins. That’s tribalism. Democracy is a system of peacefully chosing between rival candidates, by a vote of the people.

If you really don’t like this system, may I respectfully suggest you have alternatives to live under?