Courthouses across the Western world commonly feature a statue of a blindfolded woman in a flowing dress, holding a pair of scales in one hand and a sword in the other. These statues of ‘Lady Justice’ are blindfolded for a very good reason: it represents the ideal of an impartial and unbiased legal system, where decisions are made based solely on the evidence and applicable laws, without outside influences like personal bias or social status. Being an ideal, it’s not something that’s always or 100 per cent true, but it’s something we universally recognise that our justice system should strive for.
Or at least, we used to.
Now, the same woke activists who’re forcing law students to recite a Welcome to Country – and convince examiners they really mean it – or fail, are pushing the same oogabooga nonsense on the courts.
Judges in the nation’s largest criminal jurisdiction should consider allowing cases involving Aboriginal Australians to be heard in a closed court or before a female judicial officer in order to enhance “cultural safety”, according to provisions inserted into a NSW bench book.
And they have the nerve to call this racial separatist nonsense ‘Equality Before the Law’. In fact, it’s the literal opposite of equality.
But then, whoever wrote this garbage clearly doesn’t have much of a grip on reality:
The April amendments to the NSW Equality Before the Law bench book also include a “more extensive explanation of the Islamic teaching of jihad” in order to “provide greater understanding of the Muslim tradition of anti-violence”.
Did they actually write that with a straight face?
It recalls nothing so much as Theodore Dalrymple’s condemnation of Soviet propaganda: the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better.
When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is... in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A variety of emasculated liars is easy to control – Theodore Dalrymple.
The demand for ‘female judicial officers’ seems curious, given traditional Aboriginal culture’s less-than-enlightened attitudes to women. We could be forgiven that it’s more about fishing for judicial lenience, given women’s well-demonstrated tendency to swallow wholesale the woke nostrums of the loony left.
And of course you know it’s going to bang on about ‘colonisation’.
“The impacts of historic actions disrupting First Nations culture and resultant intergenerational trauma have been conceptualised as ‘cultural wounds’, which are best treated with ‘cultural medicines’,” the bench book says.
You mean, like a good, old cultural spear in the jacksie?
Excuse me if I loudly scoff BOLLOCKS! to this crap about ‘intergenerational trauma’.
If it really is the catch-all excuse these race-panderers are bleating about, do I get to claim a special dispensation, because my ancestors were not just dispossessed of their lands, but driven to the other side of the world from their home and culture, at the very same time Aborigines were being ‘colonised’? If this ‘intergenerational trauma’ argument is true, then why aren’t the most intergenerationally traumatised people of all, Jewish Australians, sitting around drinking themselves into a violent haze? Where are the gangs of feral Jewish Australian children running amok every night in regional cities?
Like all leftist garbage arguments, it relies almost entirely on vague, undefined terms: cultural humility, cultural safety and debunked garbage like unconscious bias.
In the case of whichever activists churned out this garbage, their bias is clear. They infantilise Aboriginal Australians because, at heart, the left are deeply, deeply racist.
Just as the best way to get rid of discrimination is to stop discriminating against people, the only way to avoid entrenching division and inequality is by adhering to equality under the law for everyone.
When even Keir Starmer’s Labour government in the UK disagrees with you, you know you’ve fallen too far into the woke abyss.
Much like here, the UK Sentencing Council, a body dominated by judges and ex-judges, released guidelines advising courts to order pre-sentence reports for offenders from “an ethnic minority, cultural minority, and/or faith minority community” and for transgender, young or females.
[Justice Secretary] Shabana Mahmood was rightly outraged, saying “these guidelines create a justice system where outcomes could be influenced by race, culture or religion. This differential treatment is unacceptable – equality before the law is the backbone of public confidence in our justice system.”
Not only did Mahmood institute a review into the remit of the Sentencing Council but she almost immediately introduced emergency legislation which said that sentencing guidelines “may not include provision framed by reference to different personal characteristics of an offender” and went on to give a list of “personal characteristics”, including race, religion or belief and cultural background, which had to be ignored.
(Emphasis added.)
When you’re too woke for UK Labour, you really are a lost cause.
