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Meanwhile in Sweden...

By Russell Grenning - posted Tuesday, 19 June 2018


What do we know about Sweden?

Yes, the home of the Nobel Prize, the Volvo, IKEA and Abba. For the more mature among us who can remember the 1960s and 1970s, it was the favoured bolt hole for young American men seeking to avoid the military draft for the Vietnam war.

Sweden has been largely dominated politically in modern times by the left-wing Social Democrats since 2014 which have led a minority government with the support of The Greens. The country has the highest taxes in the world and the most generous social security system with the welfare state consuming more than 50 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product.

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Today there is a population of about ten million of which an estimated 8.1 per cent are Muslims – significantly higher than the 3.5 per cent total as recently as 2000.

The children and grandchildren of the left-wing so-called progressives who ran the country thirty and forty years ago have continued that noble tradition although many in Sweden are beginning to question this orthodoxy. Latest opinion polls show that support for the Social Democrats has crashed to 21.7 per cent while support for the right-wing anti-mass immigration Sweden Democrats surged to 26.1%. If that poll is reflected in the next general election in September, the Sweden Democrats will be the largest parliamentary group.

Polls are showing that mass Muslim immigration and law and order are the key concerns in the minds of most voters and there is a growing feeling that the current government, gripped in an unbreakable vice of political correctness, can't or won't do anything to address these concerns.

Social experiments imposed by the current government and its political allies in local authorities have resulted in some entirely predictable and even laughable outcomes.

One program introduced on the first Monday of each month at a public swimming pool in the city of Malmo eliminated gender-separate areas such as change-rooms and toilets in an attempt to encourage transgender people to come along and not feel threatened. As it happens, Malmo is a heavily migrant populated city.

Guess what happened?

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The organisers found that while very few transgender people were making use of the program, the pool was invaded by men and boys taking the opportunity to perv on naked women. One advocate for the initiative, a University lecturer in diversity issues, Ms Jeanette Larsson, was shocked by this male invasion.

"They were in the showers, in the restrooms, in the locker rooms and on the bathing bridges. The place was invaded by men, not by transgenders from what I could see. Everything felt incredibly unpleasant," she said.

Malmo City Councillors Hannah Thome of the Left Party and Linda Hiltmann of the Feminist Initiative Party who introduced the whole idea were also terribly shocked. Ms Thome said this unforeseen outcome was "an expression of the patriarchal world we live in."

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About the Author

Russell Grenning is a retired political adviser and journalist who began his career at the ABC in 1968 and subsequently worked for the then Brisbane afternoon daily, The Telegraph and later as a columnist for The Courier Mail and The Australian.

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Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

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