Jack Charles was a friend of mine on Facebook, and a lovely man, too.

I am reminded of John Howard, when he tried to walk back from comments that he made in 1988, in 1995, when he achieved his Lazarus with a triple bypass moment. When I went to vote, in 1996, I saw Asian guys distributing Liberal Party HTV Cards.

I was disgusted when I went to vote last year and there was an Asian guy handing out HTV Cards for One Nation and I told him the same thing I told some elderly white people in 2017, and an elderly white man in 2019, "When Hell Freezes Over." The white people said nothing, but the Asian guy said, "That's your democratic right." I am not going to fall for the delusion that One Nation is not racist, and one of the things that I have found most telling is, yes, the majority of One Nation supporters I have seen have been men, but of those who are Asian or non-European, they have been predominantly men. Hanson claims that the party is not racist and some of the men have Asian wives, and to that, I say, "I know John Kingston had an Asian wife, but he left the party to sit as an Independent, in 1999, and left Parliament, in 2001. He met his wife while he was working in South-East Asia. That's fine, and yes, there are plenty of men and some women, who have gone to work in Asia, and being one of the only Westerners in the town, nature took its course. My paternal grandfather was stationed in Darwin during the war, and he said that as there were more Aboriginal women than Western women in the Northern Territory, some Western men married Aboriginal women. And the butcher in Katherine, "Cowboy" Collins, met a Malaysian Chinese woman who had come over here to work, and they fell in love. When it was time for her to return to Malaysia, she didn't want to, and he didn't want her to, so they married and had a little girl. That little girl was my father's friend. There are, however, Western men who believe the stereotype that Asian women are more submissive and traditional. And some of those men don't treat their wives well." I have however, been heartened when I've been out shopping, to find mixed couples (one Asian, one Western or one Black, one Western) but what is most heartening is not that it is the old trope of the stereotype of the older Western man with a poor dress sense and a combover, but that the couples have been same sex. One night, I saw two Asian women, one of whom was wearing a pride flag t-shirt, holding hands, and later, I saw an Asian woman and a Western woman walking along holding hands and a Western Guy and a guy who was, I think, Papua New Guinean or Fijian, holding hands.

I saw a ridiculous article by a ridiculous doctor who doesn't believe that men and women can be platonic friends, who mentioned secret men's business and secret women's business, but what he forgot to say is that the Aborigines were and are also much more accepting of the trans community, with Brutha Boys attending to Secret Men's Business and Sista Girls attending women's business.

Sadly, Australia is not as mature a nation as some people hope it is. I hope that the Yes vote succeeds, and I hope that people can see that it is a justice issue.