SHORTY TAKES THE LOW ROAD

Bill Shorten now jumps on the self-abnegating bandwagon familiar to left-wing, 'self-identifying white colonialists' all over the West, and in doing so he doubles down by embracing lies that weaponize other destructive lies:

"The Labor leader was speaking about new figures showing our massive spending on Aborigines just isn’t making enough difference. Too many Aboriginal children are still not going to school or learning to read. Too many parents aren’t working.

To help explain that failure Shorten in Parliament accused “we” whites of committing atrocities.

“It’s time for truth-telling,” he said.

“We poisoned the water holes; we distributed blankets infested with diseases we knew would kill.

This is not truth telling at all. For a start, “we” didn’t do any of this, since none of us was born then. But I challenge Shorten to back up his other claims. We poisoned the waterholes? We distributed blankets infested with deadly diseases?

When, Mr Shorten? Where? Name a single example.

In fact, Shorten has zero proof.

Activists and far-Left historians cite only one single case where they say blankets might have been poisoned, claiming rogue soldiers or convicts in Sydney in 1789 might have used smallpox scabs kept for inoculation to cause an epidemic among local Aborigines,

But that theory has been debunked. First, not even the conspiracy mongers have any proof of a crime so at odds with how Governor Arthur Phillip dealt with Aborigines. Second, as Dr Jack Carmody from Sydney University’s School of Medical Sciences says, the smallpox scabs would have been inactive and unable to infect anyone after being kept in Sydney for so long.

The poisoned blankets myth is actually an import. Infamously, a British general, Jeffrey Amherst, in 1763 discussed spreading smallpox among American Indians using blankets. That fact was wildly exaggerated by US historian Ward Churchill, a radical activist, who then claimed US soldiers had also handed Indians smallpox-infected blankets.

Not even the conspiracy mongers have any proof of blanket poisoning, a crime so at odds with how Governor Arthur Phillip dealt with Aborigines. But Churchill was dismissed by his university after it was shown he’d simply made up his evidence. His claim was fake.

Yet Shorten now repeats an Australian version of that myth.

He also accuses “we” whites of poisoning waterholes, as if settlers dragged around huge drums of cyanide. Stan Grant, the journalist now making fiery speeches as an Aboriginal “elder”, claims just such a thing happened at Poisoned Waterholes Creek, near Narrandera — the only alleged case on the record.

Grant has written that he takes his son there to tell him of the (never-identified) land owner who “grew tired of the black people on his property” and poisoned their water, causing “many” to die “agonising deaths”. But in 1951 local man George Gow rejected the story in a long article in the Narandera (sic) Argus.

Gow had lived in the area for 57 years and had known people born there 100 years before, but none, he said, not even the local historian, thought the poisoning story true.

Gow said John Bean, a rabbit inspector who’d worked on the station containing Poisoned Waterholes Creek in the 1880s, said the name came from the baits left for dingoes, although an old drover once said he’d lost cattle there when they ate toxic weed.

Gow blamed a local, poet Dame Mary Gilmore, for spreading the poisoning myth in an article in the Sydney Morning Herald, in which she claimed a magistrate had investigated and “ordered that the holes be filled in up to a height of 12 feet above the surface”. Gilmore claimed her uncle did that filling in, but as Gow noted, the holes are still there. Gilmore’s claims were “rubbish”.

The real poison here is Shorten’s myths. Yes, Aborigines — on average — are too poor, too unschooled and too jobless, but that’s not because “we” handed out poison blankets.

Instead we hand out $30 billion a year in welfare and other aid to only 550,000 Aborigines. And if that makes too little difference it is not because whites are racist.

Whites aren’t making Aboriginal children twice more likely to wag school. Whites aren’t making Aboriginal women 34 times more likely to be hospitalised by their men.

Whites aren’t making Aboriginal children 10 times more likely to need rescuing from parents who bash or neglect them.

And whites aren’t making many Aborigines out bush choose to live where there are no jobs.

Shorten smearing whites is just diverting attention from the real issue: what to do now.

It’s also dangerous because he’s warning Aboriginal children “we” are murderously racist — too hostile to trust or join. Don’t even try.

Worse, this atrocity-mongering tells Aboriginal parents to blame racists and not themselves for the decisions they make.

The children will pay for that, too." [AB]