Cronulla Board Game

N

This is my first time posting a topic, apologies for any mistakes!

Last night (Monday the 17th of October) The Age Online had a 'front page' link to the Cronulla Board Game which has been released online. This board game ("game" is hardly a term I feel should be used) is being hosted by the angelfire server and, although I'm not going to download it or provide a link, here are some excerpts from how The Age described it:

Dubbed Cronulla 2230, the game resembles the iconic Monopoly board game, and is designed to be printed out, then be played offline.

The game is nationalistic in tone and incites players to "Win Back Australia!" It also includes racist slogans such as "We grew here! You flew here", accompanied by photographs from the Cronulla race riot, that occurred on December 11, last year.

In a statement released last night, NSW Premier Morris Iemma condemned Cronulla 2230, and labelled it an extremist board game that seeks to glorify the riot at Cronulla.

"This type of divisive material insults everyone in the community. It is garbage and it belongs in the bin," he said.

The layout of the board is very similar to that of the popular Monopoly board game in which you buy and build on land. One then charges other players rent when they land on the square, although I am unsure if the latter rule applies for this perversion of Monopoly.

My questions from this are:
Is this monopoly styled board game about land/wealth ownership tied into a racist undercurrent in Australia or a product of something more complex to do with extreme nationalism akin to Germany pre WW2? How does this reflect on us as Australian residents and citizens when a game like this is available online to anyone, anywhere in the world? Is racism in Australia merely a token board game or something deeper that is yet to be addressed in society?

The full article from The Age is available here:
http://www.theage.com.au/news/web/authorities-powerless-to-ban-cronulla-board-game/2006/10/17/1160850910458.html[/quote]

Anonymous

I am not sure this is a case for “Racial Discrimination Act" necessarily, this is an attack against common sense and civility. The problem is that Australia is generating and promoting such stupidity and ignorance - this is shocking and embarrassing.

Anonymous

This is very interesting. It may not be a bunch of racist youth who created the game, but a racist party... who knows!
I found this information in Wikipedia.org:

The object of the game is to "become the wealthiest person in the Sutherland Shire through the buying, renting, and selling of property" in order to fund far-right organisations such as the Australia First Party and the Patriotic Youth League "so they can get into parliament and Win Back Australia!"

The Australia First Party denies any role in creating Cronulla 2230, despite promoting the game on their website and stating that the game "seems to have emerged as a response to the problems of the multiculti (sic) sickness that has gripped Australia." [here for the article in the Australian]

N

Thanks for the replies.

A racist party is one thing, but I suppose it's another to outwardly promote a game which the first reply aptly called "shocking" and "embarrassing". So if I may take the liberty to take those adjectives and apply them to the Australia First Party they are shocking and embarrassing in their tactics.

Back in the day of ICQ I remember talking to someone who was a friend's friend who lived in the country. I believe he was unaware of my ethnic background and I asked him why he felt Pauline Hanson was a good leader. He was not outwardly agressive at all, which made his reply and his reasoning more shocking than I had expected. The tactics are simple, their ideas are not revolutionary in terms of politics or foreign policy, instead they target what is most relevant to the group to which they target. AFP (Australia First Party...not Agence France Presse) claims to have these agendas:

Taken from wikipedia:

* Ensure Australia Retains Full Independence.
* Rebuild Australian Manufacturing Industries.
* Control Foreign Ownership.
* Reduce and Limit Immigration.
* Abolish Multiculturalism
* Introduce Citizen's Initiated Referenda.
* Strengthen the Family
* Strive To Rebuild A United Australia.

The Patriotic Youth League?

In 2006, The Australian newspaper carried a story on the group by Dan Box, who spent some time in the party without revealing that he was a reporter. The story claims that an Australia First member told him that "we leaned out of the window and shouted 'Sieg heil! Sieg heil!" at a rabbi [11]. Members of the associated Patriotic Youth League have claimed to be the Australian branch of the openly neo-Nazi American-based group Volksfront.[12]

If their outward proclaimation of connection to a neo-Nazi group wasn't enough,

The Patriotic Youth League (PYL) is a neo-Nazi youth organization in Australia whose members describe themselves as 'radical nationalists' [1].

The PYL was founded in late 2002 by Stuart McBeth, a student at the University of Newcastle who was previously involved with the One Nation Party. The current president is Lachlan Black, a former One Nation candidate. It acts as the youth wing of the Australia First Party, under the mentorship of former National Socialist Party of Australia member and National Action leader Dr. James Saleam. In the 1980s, Dr. Saleam ordered a shotgun attack on the home of African National Congress representative Eddie Funde. [2] He has also been charged for arson and fraud.

I'm no conspiracy theorist or raging activist (could be bad, could be good)
and I still believe in freedom of speech, but there is a big difference between freedom of speech among people of like minded beliefs, and it's another thing to disseminate things like board games to unsuspecting people online who, for God knows what reasons, are interested and i think that's where the poison of this game starts.

It's poison to minds who may not be able to see things objectively or rationally, its poison to a society to even disseminate these ideas...fishing for the one bite to start a network of hate.

I suppose that's why I find this game so insidious.
Thanks for the background links btw!