Michael Keenan (Stirling, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am sure that almost all Australians have taken offence at the latest outrage from one of Australia’s least favourite exports, Germaine Greer. She has published a tasteless diatribe attacking Steve Irwin in the Guardian newspaper. Sadly, this is exactly what Australians have come to expect from Greer. However, this is unforgivable, even for her, and all for the sake of giving her another 15 minutes of media attention. Her comments about Steve Irwin, whose passing on Monday has been widely mourned around the country, deserve to be condemned by everyone in this chamber. To attack a man who has so recently died in a tragic accident is grossly disrespectful to his surviving wife, two children and other family and friends.

Greer is not a wildlife or nature conservationist, or a leading environmentalist, and her remarks have merely added to the many pointless rants she has made over the years. She seems determined to continually increase the sheer lunacy of her public behaviour. She strikes me as being very similar to the naughty child who acts out when craving attention—the more they are ignored the worse their behaviour gets. Her comments attacking Steve Irwin are the latest in a long line of such curious behaviour. Her courting of controversy appears to be compulsive and, like an addict, she needs a bigger and better controversy to satisfy her growing appetite. This leads her to be more outlandish and more outspoken and to act with increasing stupidity over time.

She recently attacked Monica Ali, the author of the critically acclaimed Brick Lane, which deals with the Bangladeshi community in London. She supported the protesters who had threatened to use violence to stop the film adaptation of Ali’s book. Salman Rushdie, the distinguished author, characterised this as ‘philistine, sanctimonious and disgraceful’ but ‘not unexpected’. Greer had previously attacked him at the height of the controversy over his book The Satanic Verses as a megalomaniac and an Englishman with dark skin. She suggested to him that it was not so bad for him to end up in jail because at least there he could write.

She savaged reality TV as being ‘about as dignified as looking through the keyhole in your teenage child’s bedroom door’ and said getting hooked on it was ‘downright depraved’. In the same article she said that those who appeared on celebrity TV ‘risked the wreck of their pampered egos by humiliation’. Yet, lo and behold, last year in what was certainly the most cringe-worthy television you will ever witness, Greer became a housemate on Celebrity Big Brother, joining an underwear model, a teenage musician, a drug-loving dancer and the ex-wife of Sylvester Stallone. She tried to convince the other housemates to stage a naked sit-in protest before storming out of the house after four days, after repeatedly clashing with all the other housemates.

Greer belongs to that strange group of self-styled expatriate intellectuals who appear to have nothing but distaste for their homeland and spend a lot of their time patronising us with their wisdom about our shortcomings. It is difficult for these elitists to hide their contempt for ordinary Australians that they claim to understand and interpret.

I normally would not consider it to be particularly good practice to single out a particular individual for criticism in this House, and it is not something that I would normally do. Neither would I normally be concerned about just another Greer outrage, as they occur with monotonous regularity. But I think that her comments yesterday, which have generated many complaints to me from my constituents who share my concerns, deserve to be repudiated for the rubbish they are. Germaine Greer once said that Australians are ‘too relaxed to give a damn’. But I can say that, from the correspondence I have received today on her editorial attacking Steve Irwin, this is definitely not the case. They do care when the feelings of a grieving family are so wilfully disrespected so a second-rate expatriate can insert herself, yet again, into the media spotlight.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

(Hon. IR Causley)—Order! It being 8 pm, the debate is interrupted.