Squeers here is another except from the previously quoted ABC report

>>The Lebanese Muslim Association, which has a lot of its members living in Blaxland, says Labor should not take the Muslim vote for granted. Association president Samier Dandan says the first wave of arrivals from Lebanon voted Labor due to their working class background.
He says the community has evolved and become more educated.
"What we see today, as opposed to what used to be in the '70s or '80s, there's a shift taking place within the Muslim community," he said.<<

Well the Lebanese Muslim Association seems to think the community votes labor. In this edict prior to the last election they are putting the blow torch to Labor because they are a voting block that has traditionally delivered to Labor.

Here is the link; if you have issues with the validity take it up with the ABC.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/08/14/2982939.htm

And finally Squeers refrain from suggesting that I am vilifying a race because I identify them as a keystone to the issue i am discussing.

THE Prime Minister first raised the prospect of a flood levy 10 days ago. Her government wants taxpayers to believe the levy is an unavoidable consequence of the natural disaster in Queensland - imposing a special tax is regrettable, but out of the government's hands.

Yet the day she signalled the flood levy also happened to be a day when her minister Kim Carr quietly announced the start of the government's Automotive Transformation Scheme. This scheme packages up $3.4 billion of taxpayers' money and wires it directly to the dilapidated (but very well connected) car industry.

This is a prime example of one of Labor's Holy pork barrels to her union buddies in Adelaide. $1.8bn trimmed off this will still allow $1.6bn of pork for the AWU.

canny Labor politicians induced so many Muslims to settle in Blaxland?
Squeers,
That is a rather ignorant & unintelligent statement. It has been a well known fact for millennia that groups of people simply feel more at ease by living in their own enclave/community. As far as I am aware only dogs & cats are the only animals which prefer the company of another specie i.e. humans but only after realising which side the bread is buttered on.
Deny the food & they'll soon be wandering off the premises. I wonder if people would act in a similar way if suddenly social security were much less generous here or on par with countries where there is none & the corrupt leaders collect all the foreign aid money.

sonofgloin,

you have not answered my questions (which is fine. I doubt you could to your own satisfaction, let alone mine) and you certainly haven't validated your "social engineering" thesis. Muslims have as much right to organise and vote as blocks (though there's no evidence that they do) as any other group in Australia. It's easy to establish voting trends based on gender, sexuality, belief systems, regions, age-groups, education etc. etc. In fact there is no such thing as an individual vote or an amorphous Australian identity (thank God!).
According to Terry Eagleton:
"no cultural belief is ever extended to sizeable groups of newcomers without being transformed in the process. It is this that some simple-minded philosophy of intergration fails to recognize. There is no assumption in the White House, Downing Street, or the Elysee Palace that their own beliefs might be challenged or changed in the act of being extended to others. A common culture on this view is one that incorporates outsiders into an already established, unquestionable framework of values, while leaving them free to engage in whichever of their quaint customs poses no threat to the preordained harmony. Such a policy appropriates newcomers in one sense, while leaving them well alone in another. It is at once too possessive and too hands off. A common culture in the more radical sense of the term is not one in which everyone believes the same thing, but one in which everyone has equal status in cooperatively determining a way of life in common".

Even without Muslim sensibilities in the mix, our culture is and has always been vibrant with the seeds of change. It makes for a perpetually uncertain future, but for me that's better than a stultified, self-satisfied and incredibly naive conservatism.

You can't shield yourself from a prevailing wind of change.

self-satisfied and incredibly naive conservatism.
Squeers,
Well, isn't that the way Islam operates ?

Squeers did you not read the ABC report? The gist of it is that the Lebanese Muslim Association is telling the Labor party that the community is upwardly mobile economically and that Labor may not be the automatic first choice as it was historically. They are telling Labor that they will have to do more for the electorate to win the vote in future. That is like the wife in the marriage telling the husband to shape up or ship out.

Squeers give up the "social engineering" definition; it's a descriptive sidebar, whatever your definition of "social engineering" is, so is mine, so we are agreed.