This week’s Lack of Self-Awareness Award goes to a Victorian vaxhole publican. The white, South African-born hotelier rails against vaccine passports being compared to apartheid — by reminiscing about the Apartheid system in his native land in terms which sound almost identical to what he’s promoting in Australia.
Ian Urquhart was born in South Africa in the late 1950s and saw up close the discrimination and denial of rights that people of colour suffered in his birthplace.
So Mr Urquhart, a white man born in Port Elizabeth, is particularly insulted by the barrage of comments accusing him of joining an “apartheid” regime simply for volunteering for the COVID-19 vaccine passport trial.
First off, let’s get our terms sorted: According to the dictionary, there’s capital-A “Apartheid” and “apartheid”. The former, as a proper noun, refers strictly to the former South African system. The latter, as an adjective, has become a more general term and refers to: a system of keeping groups of people separate and treating them differently, especially when this results in disadvantage for one group.
Hmm. So, what would you call Victoria’s vaccine passport system, which, well, divides people into separate groups and treats them differently, resulting in disadvantage for one group?
“People who use those terms in this context are complete idiots,” he said. “All we were trying to do was uphold the law and do our part to get the state opened up earlier.”
Apartheid was law in South Africa, too.
Mr Urquhart is co-owner of the Avoca Hotel, about an hour north-west of Ballarat, and among a group of regional Victorian business owners in the trial, which requires patrons to prove they are double-vaccinated to gain entry […]
In a regional Victorian Facebook group, one user posted a picture of the Avoca Hotel and exclaimed “medical segregation has arrived in the Pyrenees Shire”.
If the shiny boots fit…
But, comprehend, if you can, the level of cognitive dissonance needed to make the following statement, while championing vaccine passports:
Mr Urquhart moved to Tasmania when he was 10 but remembers segregation clearly in South Africa and wondered as a child why people whom he lived alongside were not granted the same rights.
“Apartheid was very much part of your daily life,” he said. “Everything was segregated. It certainly had an impact on me. I became aware we were being treated differently, and I didn’t understand why,” he said.
The Age
(Emphasis added.)
The only difference is that now you don’t have the threadbare excuse of pretending to not know why you’re running a segregated establishment.
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