Apartheid Australia

A travesty of justice and a precedent of woe to come. And the world thought that with the end of Apartheid in South Africa, race divisions were defeated!

I should hastily point out that Wesley Aird is Aboriginal, which should give him more social licence to argue the same case, and to point out some hypocrisy:

In my experience politically active Aboriginal people are experts when it comes to dishing out abuse. Fighting hard and dirty has been turned into quite an art form by indigenous people across the country trying to protect their slice of the $3.5 billion that the government spends each year on indigenous affairs.

Instead of actually overcoming disadvantage, indigenous affairs has sunk to a transactional arrangement in which the government hands over billions of dollars each year for “dismally poor returns”, to quote the federal Department of Finance.
Yet try to threaten a person’s funding and you will experience firsthand what it feels like to be offended, insulted, humiliated and intimidated; and unlike the Bolt case, this will be the desired intent. The real professionals in race-based intimidation are Aboriginal people whose vocation is to divest the commonwealth of funds.
I know of communities where the government directly finances invented tribes, fabricated history, waste, petty corruption and the occasional threat of violence or death. There are no lawyers to contrive affront; there is no judge; just more government money going to the usual suspects for no benefit.
In court last week, Bolt’s loss was unfortunately a victory for indigenous exceptionalism. The result sends a message to the rest of Australia that any non-indigenous person who dares to comment on the indigenous industry had better watch out.
I can’t help but form the view that the court case was intended to use the Racial Discrimination Act to intimidate non-indigenous Australians.
The result in court (for now at least) has most likely severely damaged Australian race relations for some time to come.

Tim Blair reminds the gloating David Marr what a real mistake looks like in writing about race:

So Bolt was out by one generation. Not exactly spectacular. Probably not even as spectacular as Marr’s own identification blunder, back in the days when he was opposed to the same sort of anti-vilification laws that have ensnared his ideological rival.

 

“Anti-vilification laws aren’t the answer,” Marr wrote in 2005.

“In Victoria, two hellfire Christian preachers, Danny Nalliah and Daniel Scot, are facing jail after preaching against Islam in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Ever since, they’ve been fighting an action brought by the Islamic Council of Victoria under the state’s new Racial and Religious Tolerance Act.

“That’s the pesky thing about these laws that show almost zero tolerance for religious and racial intolerance: they can be turned against decent white folk.”

One small problem with Marr’s piece: he assumed that because Nalliah and Scot were “hellfire Christians”, they were also white. Nope. Wrong. They’re black. The ABC’s Media Watch characterised this as a mere “stumble”, but perhaps they weren’t reading hard enough between the lines, which is the approach advocated by Justice Bromberg.

In his findings against Bolt, Bromberg took issue with words Bolt didn’t actually use: “It is language which invites the readers not only to read the lines, but to read between the lines.” This is remarkable.

Reading between the lines of Bromberg’s ruling, Bolt seems to have been condemned for a form of thought crime.

We’ve now witnessed a legal procedure about race involving racial differences nobody could see and words nobody could read.