Politics

Malcolm Roberts Tried To Prove He’s Not Indian With An Insanely Racist Joke

He was even accidentally extra racist while trying to be racist.

by Osman Faruqi  18 July 2017
Malcolm Roberts

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As if Australian politics wasn’t weird enough today, One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts has helpfully popped up and made it even worse.

The story actually starts with the shock resignation of Greens senator Larissa Waters this afternoon. Waters announced she was stepping down from the Senate after discovering she was in fact a Canadian dual-citizen, which rendered her ineligible to serve in federal parliament. Greens senator Scott Ludlam resigned last Friday for the same reason.

The sudden departure of two high-profile parliamentarians got everyone wondering what other federal politicians might get undone by the dual-citizenship rule. Turns out there are 24 federal MPs who were born overseas, including One Nation senator Malcolm Roberts who was born in India to English parents.

A notoriously anti-immigration politician who himself is a migrant, and was born to migrant parents? Say it isn’t so!

In response to speculation that Roberts may be ineligible, the senator issued a statement declaring he was a citizen “only of Australia” and had contacted the “Indian authorities” in 2014 to confirm that he wasn’t an Indian citizen.

Ok, fair enough. That’s the end of that, right? Wrong.

For some reason, almost an hour later, Roberts decided to tweet “On another note, I do not own, nor have I ever owned, a 7-11. I’m not even a chucker,” along with the hashtag #NotIndian.

As plenty of people pointed out, this is just some straight-up racist bullshit.

But what makes Roberts’ statement even more stupid is that he’s accidentally being even more racist while trying to be racist. It’s like racist Inception.

The line about not being a “chucker” is a cricket reference, most likely about the bowler Muttiah Muralitharan, who was famously called out for throwing (or ‘chucking’) during a tour of Australia.

But Muralitharan isn’t Indian. He’s Sri Lankan.

BWAAAM.

Let the roasting commence:

I get that this is One Nation, and maybe we shouldn’t expect better. But given Pauline Hanson’s strenuous denials that her party isn’t racist, it seems worthwhile to point out when it is, in fact, quite racist.