Labor pulls social media post featuring controversial t-shirt
The slogan bears a striking resemblance to a racist T-shirt that has circulated in Australia for over a decade
The Australian Labor Party (ALP) has been forced to remove a controversial social media post after it was revealed the image closely mimicked a T-shirt associated with white supremacists.
According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Labor’s Facebook account shared an image of a shirt reading “This is Australia. We eat meat, we drink beer and we love Medicare”. However, the slogan bears a striking resemblance to a racist T-shirt that has circulated in Australia for over a decade.
The original shirt reads: “This is Australia. We eat meat, we drink beer and we speak f—in’ English”, a slogan Museums Victoria describes as deliberately excluding “the other” and targeting specific communities.
The shirt has been worn by Michael Shayne Halcrow, a Neo-Nazi with a documented history of antisemitic and racist behaviour.
According to The Courier Mail in 2019, Halcrow was charged with multiple offences after allegedly holding his housemate hostage over an antisemitic T-shirt.
It said court documents showed Halcrow and two other men reportedly broke into a bedroom, threatened the victim, and demanded the location of a neo-Nazi T-shirt they believed had been stolen. During the alleged five-hour ordeal, the men threatened to “crack [the victim’s] skull” while searching for the shirt.
Halcrow, who has the word “damaged” tattooed across his forehead, was refused bail and is known to have connections to white supremacist groups including Brothers in Arms and Combat 18.
A Labor spokesman acknowledged the social media misstep, stating they were “seeking to reach everyone with our message that Australians value Medicare”, but admitted the post “missed the mark” and was subsequently deleted.
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