Jeff Sparrow asks in The Guardian (12.1.16) whether we should care about a stupid meat commercial:
‘No, not especially. In fact, Lee Lin Chin’s participation in the lamb campaign illustrates the limits of the left’s increasing preoccupation with symbolism and representation. Meat and Livestock Australia didn’t create the new nationalism and neither did Chin. A country consistently engaged in armed conflict for close to 15 years will inevitably develop a belligerently jingoistic culture – and there’s no necessary incompatibility between that and the kind of official multiculturalism championed by SBS.
‘To put it another way, you don’t end militarised nationalism by getting different people on TV. You end it by stopping the wars.’