“At this stage we have merely suspended the screenings until we can actually get a debrief from all staff involved. I’m standing with one now and I’m looking at his swollen jaw.”
Greater Union’s general manager of operations, Robert Flynn, explaining why the chain decided to stop screening the Aussie movie The Combination after a security guard was assaulted by a patron. The movie addresses the subject of Lebanese-Australian gangs and had been screening to sell-out audiences in Western Sydney.
“There’s a black man in the White House and the good news is this one’s not breaking in!”
A joke repeated by Adelaide real estate agent Jo Lemmer in her column. Mind you, she does quite fancy him, describing him as a ”glam tanned man” with “6 fab abs” who is “smokin’ in his boardies”.
“Let’s just say there’s a sweatshop full of illegal immigrants working on them right now.”
Sonia Kruger, commenting on her Melbourne Cup Carnival wardrobe to Chong Kim, the Malaysian-born musical director of Dancing with the Stars. Seven network apologised for Kruger’s comments after several complaints were received.
“A mother and son have been ordered to pay $23,100 in damages to a gay couple they harassed and vilified during a bitter neighbourhood dispute that was sparked by barking dogs.
Queensland woman Jean Lawson and her son Paul Lawson must also publish a 140-word apology in local and state newspapers after calling their one-time neighbours, Timothy Wilson and Shane McCollum, “faggots”, “poofs” and “princesses”.”
Report in the Sydney Morning Herald. Paul Lawson claimed that Wilson and McCollum called his mother a “Scottish slut”, a “Jewish whore”, a “mole” and a “bitch”.
“Racism, like homophobia, is one of those outdated ideologies. When I hear someone use the word “wog”, I feel my innards sink to my boots and I feel like asking, “What rock did you crawl out from under?”"
Devi Neronha describes her disgust after a gay friend was bashed in Darlinghurst.
“If they can prove to me that Edward Coon was a famous cheesemaker, I will drop my campaign.
“If they can’t do it, I’m going to fight them all the way, just like I did with Nigger Brown.”
Anti-racism campaigner and Toowoomba academic Stephen Hagan, who is not convinced that Coon Cheese was really named for a man who revolutionised the cheese-making process.
Filed under: Ethnic Insults, Politicians | Tags: Kevin Foley, Martin Hamilton-Smith
“When you want to make an opportunity, when you want to get into the headlines, you will kick a black.”
South Australia Treasurer Kevin Foley, to State Opposition leader Martin Hamilton-Smith, whom he accuses of indulging in ‘racism politics”.
Filed under: Aussie Aussie Aussie, Ethnic Insults, Religion | Tags: Camden
“Why is that racist? Why is it discriminatory? It’s very simple: people like some things but don’t like other things. Some of us like blondes, some of us like brunettes. Some of us like Fords, some of us like Holdens. Why is it xenophobic just because I want to make a choice? If I want to like some people and not like other people, that’s the nature of the beast.”
Emil Sremchevich, president of the Camden/Macarthur Residents’ Group, which notoriously rejected a proposal by the Quranic Society to build a school in the area. The Residents’ Group has subsequently welcomed a Catholic organisation’s plans to build a 1000-student high school nearby.
“Ignorant rednecks are the kind of employees RailCorp adores. It hires them in droves but anyone with a bit of intelligence, integrity and guts, they take them out and shoot them.”
Sacked train guard Bruce Thompson, who says RailCorp failed to act on his complaints about his fellow workers, who targeted him by scrawling homophobic and anti-Semitic graffiti on the toilets used by staff at Central Station in Sydney.
“If an Aborigine had a baby with an Asian it would be an Abrasion.”
Chicklit author and academic Anita Heiss (whose father and mother are Austrian and Aboriginal respectively), as quoted by Catherine Keenan in the Sun-Herald, August 10 2008. Reflecting on the perils of dating politically incompatible men, Heiss comments:
“I don’t want to go on six dates with someone and then realise their politics is completely fucked.”
To illustrate her point, she relates an anecdote of how she met a man at a black fund-raiser. When he told her he was a cop, she realised there was no future in the relationship:
“And I thought: “Well, that’s not going to work. That’s like a Jew dating a Nazi” and I walked off.”
