Cory Bernardi Has Won A Senate Inquiry Into Halal Food And Goshdarnit, People Still Aren’t Taking Him Seriously

By Meg Watson, 14/5/2015 7 4350

Okay, folks. The budget is old news. We’ve heard enough about the deregulation of higher education and an underfunded domestic violence epidemic; it’s time to get down to the serious issues.

Yesterday afternoon, South Australian Liberal Senator and real-life Chicken Little Cory Bernardi was granted a senate inquiry into the certification of halal, kosher, organic and genetically-modified food. The motion was passed with a senate vote of 34-30, and as a result Bernardi will soon be leading a six-month investigation into the financial records of these organisations.

Anyone familiar with the jacked-up swamp fight that is conservative politics in this country can tell you that this has been a long time coming. Bernardi himself has been consistently outspoken about his suspicions about halal certification in particular, publicly labelling it a “racket” and questioning who exactly is getting the profits from these specialty products. Though he hasn’t explicitly made any accusations, the view propagated by other reasoned intellectuals such as Pauline Hanson and Jacqui Lambie is that the money is somehow funnelled towards terrorist organisations.

“There seems to be a number of concerns about [these schemes],” Bernardi told The Guardian. “I keep getting told any number of things … and I don’t know what’s true and what’s not true, so I want to establish the facts.”

And yet despite this show of political support for his controversial thoughts, which have in the past seen him quite literally banished from government, he’s still suffering a considerable public backlash.

Whether it’s because the inquiry sounds a little like an idea your racist granddad once had when awaking from a fever dream, or because people like ABC Fact Check have already looked into halal certification and said there’s nothing to be concerned about, people are being weirdly dismissive of this whole thing.

Like, a lot of people:

Just file this under Reasons Not To Listen Cory Bernardi/Pay Attention To Politics At All, thanks. As you were.

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Feature image via Cory Bernardi/YouTube.

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  • Terry Wrist

    Bout time, halal bottled water and halal toothpaste? What a racket…

  • 3 Cool Worlds

    Didn’t the Heart Foundation sell its ticks of approval? I wouldn’t be surprised if similar stuff is going on in other areas, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be looked into.

    • Kay Ritson

      but they aren’t looking in to the Heart tick or vegan or gluten free or vegetarian certification

  • Ayn Rancid

    there are GMO labels? I haven’t come across any.

    • Shaun

      They’re only required to be labelled if it alters the food in some way. The vast majority of GM food is crops designed to be resistant to pesticides (in the case of Roundup-Ready crop), or to create their own insecticide (in the case of Bt crop). Neither of those things affect the end-product in any meaningful way. An example of a semi-common GM ingredient that has to be labelled is some soy beans – which are modified to have increased oleic acid content.