Latte Leftie – 242

Latte Leftie tackles the troubling conundrum of how many refugees should be allowed into the Inner West. (Answer? Hardly any!)

Dear LL – Needless, to say I’m pro-refugee and thus see myself much like those Jewish college student Freedom Riders who used to get killed registering African-American voters in Mississippi in the 1960s (given I’m forced to live in a nation where 95 per cent of the population are reffo-despising bogans). Not that I actually have anything to do with refugees, you understand, but I did change my vote from ALP to Green to protest Rudd’s ridiculous PNG solution. Anyhoo, when I heard that Inner West councils were falling over themselves to become ‘Refugee Welcome Zones’ my initial reaction was one of smug pride at how enlightened this part of Australia is. But then I began to brood about the impact of an open borders policy. I dropped 850K buying my worker’s cottage and another 200K renovating it – what if an influx of dusky hued Zimbabweans causes property values to drop? Or what if a bunch of homosexual-hating, women-oppressing, theocracy-advocating swarthy Middle Easterners move in and ruin the boho vibe of the place? Surely we Inner West residents should decide who comes into the area and the circumstances in which they come?
Frightened, Marrickville

LL replies: I’m sure all Inner Westies secretly share your concerns but you can rest easy that those ‘Refugees Welcome Here’ signs erected above council chambers will have about as much impact attracting povo displaced persons as the ‘Nuclear-Free Zone’ banners of the 1970s would have had repelling a shower of Soviet nuclear missiles. Local politicians have assured me that each Inner West council area will have precisely one, carefully vetted, totemic refugee involved in a good-publicity-generating make-work program. And they will be encouraged to swiftly return to their own kind in the OuterWest as soon as they clock off.

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