Another week, another migrant drowns in Australia. They didn’t name him so it’s definitely an immigrant:
“A man in his 20s has died after being pulled unresponsive from a popular swimming hole in NSW’s Royal National Park, as a campaign designed to prevent drownings is set to expand nationally.
It comes as Governor-General Sam Mostyn has thrown her support behind the Float to Survive campaign of Bondi’s Bruce “Hoppo” Hopkins, saying it typified the kindness and care she had pledged to foster in her term.
Mostyn’s backing coincided with the announcement that Float to Survive’s message will go national with $300,000 in new total financial support over three years from Shark Island Productions and The Pool film.”
Attending a demonstration at Bondi Beach on Friday, Mostyn said she was part of a generation where every child learnt to swim, competed in school swimming carnivals and spent their holidays near the water.”
“There are now millions of Australians who were born elsewhere who have never had that experience,” she said.
A quarter of the 323 people who fatally drowned between July 1, 2023, and June 30, 2024, were born overseas. The National Drowning Report 2024 estimated those born overseas represented 34 per cent of total deaths in recent years.”
The annual drowning report said swimming skills were going backwards to a point at which Australia was no longer a nation of swimmers.”
Pretty obvious why that is.
This is yet another cost of Australia’s open border with extra steps program. The maxim of privatising the gains and socialising the losses applies again – Australians are now expected to wear the physical and economic risk of saving people from other countries who can’t and won’t learn how to swim and put themselves at risk.
Remember when Cronulla happened and then the NSW Government launched a program for Lebanese teenagers to become lifesavers and none of them finished the training? Look how that turned out.
Cue the awareness campaign – vintage Australia. Print some nice glossy brochures with non-Whites smiling near the water, put some fluff about commitment to diversity and problem solved.
This issue is a bit close to my heart as someone who did a spell as a surf lifesaver in my teens, but those were the days of a homogenous, high trust society where the average person in the water could swim and would only get into trouble on rare occasion. They’d also know generally know what to do and wouldn’t try to drag you in with them – saving a drowning person who can’t swim is one of the most dangerous things you can do.
Now we have Indian families drowning in hotel swimming pools on the Gold Coast, being swept off rocks in Philip Island because they ignored and couldn’t read warnings, or turning up on Swan Island (an ASIO facility) on a surfboard because they ignored surf conditions.
We’ve allowed in millions of people who can’t swim and the results speak for themselves.
We could literally cut the drowning rate by a third by closing the border, but how else are we going to achieve an epic 0.3% growth a quarter?
It can be solved with deportations and at least having the bronze medallion on the citizenship test.
Header image credit: Float to Survive
