You can always trust the taxpayer-funded upper-class Marxist collective ‘national broadcaster’ to take the most bizarre, non-sequitur spin on any given topic. In this case, equating robotics to Antebellum slavery. That probably makes sense if you’re collecting a lazy few hundred grand on the taxpayer’s dime, while enjoying the Harbour views from Ultimo. To the rest of us in the real world, it just more of the same bullshit we’re forced to pay for, from the same idiots who think ‘some women have penises’ and ‘communism will work this time’.
It’s not for nothing that Kerry Packer dubbed a former ABC chair, “the most educated fuckwit I ever met”.
Maybe it’s just because, firstly, the idea of an Australian company doing what everyone else is outsourcing to China is just so offensive to the ABC far-left luvvies. Or, secondly, because the existence of aged-care robots is a direct refute of the mass immigration addicts’ favourite argument: ‘But without mass immigration, who will wipe your bum when you get old?
I’ll take the cute humanoid robots over some low-IQ African scammer or a Muslim who’d murder me if they thought I was Jewish any day.
A South Melbourne startup called Andromeda is selling an AI robot called Abi to aged care facilities around the world. The website says: “We’re building robots with heart – empathetic companions that create genuine connections, turning isolation into moments of joy and meaning.”
But an Australian robotics company is a rarity: China is leading the world in making and using them.
The ABC, naturally, can’t celebrate actual Australian innovation without dragging in some reflexive kowtowing to China, and a side order of historical revisionism.
By the way, the current price of these machines is roughly equivalent, in today’s money, to that of an African slave in the American South in the late 18th century.
The 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence offers better reflection than ABC hand-wringing. “All men are created equal” launched a republic that ended legal slavery and spread the ideal globally. Flawed founders, yes. But their experiment produced more human flourishing than any slave-trading caliphate or tribal kleptocracy. Robots don’t negate that legacy; they extend it: freeing people from drudgery so they can pursue higher ends.
Then there’s doozie of an ABC-ism.
The ownership of humans was finally abolished in most places during the 19th century.
“Most places”, notably not including Africa. Nor the Muslim world. Legal slavery persisted there well into the 20th century, and unofficial slave markets thrive today in places the ABC would rather not notice. Open-air auctions, sex trafficking, child soldiers: the real continuities of human bondage get a pass while a Melbourne robotics firm cops the sermon.
Now it’s back, except with the addition of three letters – the suffix “oid” which eliminates the moral problems and turns them into a very acceptable, large-scale industrial and consumer product.
This is peak ABC: calling a machine a ‘humanoid’ somehow revives chattel slavery. Except that it doesn’t. Not remotely. A snowman isn’t a man, and a robot isn’t human. Equating silicon and code to the horrors of the Middle Passage is grotesque moral illiteracy. These devices don’t suffer, don’t breed and don’t dream of freedom. They’re tools: sophisticated ones that promise to ease the burden on real humans in aged care without flooding the country with incompatible migrants who strain welfare, housing and social cohesion.
China leads in production, churning out units for factories, warehouses and service roles. Good for them on industrial scale. Australia’s Andromeda focuses on empathy and companionship: exactly the sort of niche innovation that should thrill anyone not wedded to open borders as the only answer to demographic decline.
The regulatory challenges are real: how human-like should they look? Safety standards, data privacy, job displacement... Legitimate questions. But the ABC leaps straight to Jefferson’s slaves and implies we’re resurrecting the plantation. It’s the same reflexive anti-Western twitch that equates border control with racism and nuclear power with Armageddon.
Meanwhile, practical robotics could solve the very problems mass immigration was supposed to fix, without importing parallel societies, grooming gangs, or welfare dependents. Elderly Aussies get companionship from a machine that doesn’t lecture them about privilege, deliberately botch the IV needle if the patient is Jewish or demand prayer rooms. Win-win, unless your ideology demands demographic replacement as sacrament.
The ABC’s spin reveals more about them than the tech. They’d rather moralise about 18th-century sins than cheer Australian enterprise or admit that technology, not endless immigration, might keep the aged cared for. Humanoids aren’t humans. Slavery isn’t returning. And the real scandal remains the public broadcaster’s endless capacity to twist progress into penance for the West.
We pay for this drivel. Time to pull the plug.
