In the 1980s, ‘Rick’ of The Young Ones was a comic pastiche of a student leftist. Most notable was his childish, uninformed habit of flinging around epithets he clearly didn’t understand, at anyone who even mildly offended his leftist sensibilities: “Nazi! Fascist”. In the same way the modern left have read Orwell, not as a warning but an instruction manual, they’ve apparently adopted Rick as a role model, not a satire.
And they wonder why we don’t take them seriously.
Former Labor senator Patrick Dodson has condemned the country’s Aboriginal youth incarceration rates and child removals as an ongoing genocide against First Peoples and an “embarrassing sore” on the nation.
“It’s an assault on the Aboriginal people. I don’t say that lightly.”
Yes you do. Far, far too lightly. So lightly that you don’t even realise when you’re be-clowning yourself as ridiculously as the Pallywankers.
Because, when everything’s a ‘genocide’, nothing is.
But, hey, anything to avoid facing up to your people’s self-inflicted failings.
Indigenous families are over-represented in child removal statistics. In 2024, more than 44 per cent of all children in out-of-home care were Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. In Dodson’s home state of Western Australia, Aboriginal children make up more than 60 per cent of all children in care. First Nations children are also 27 times more likely to be in detention than non-indigenous children and young people.
That’s because they’re so vastly more likely to break the law. You don’t get put in detention for going to school and staying home at night. The reason so many hundreds, if not thousands, of Aboriginal kids are roaming the streets of towns like Alice Springs and Townsville in feral gangs, rather than staying home tucked up in bed, is because home is one of the least safe places they can be.
That’s why Aboriginal children are over-represented in child removal statistics: because so many Aboriginal parents are so shamefully derelict. They’re over-represented in child removals because they’re so horrifically over-represented in violent and sexual abuse statistics.
So, when is Dodson going to take his fellow Aboriginal Australians to task for their egregious failures?
Never.
Instead, like most of his fellow activists, Dodson finds it so much easier to peddle a whining, ‘poor-fellow-me’ Jeremiad. And a whole lot of race-baiting nonsense.
Those three priorities – a voice to parliament, national truth-telling, and a Makaratta [sic] commission to oversee treaty-making – were outlined in the Uluru statement from the heart in 2017.
And they were rightly rejected at the ballot box. Australians just aren’t buying Dodson’s race-baiting rhetoric and endless division.
He said a national truth-telling process would allow the nation to move away from culture wars and grapple with the history of the land and its contested foundations.
Except that the last thing he really wants is actual truth telling.
Truth telling such as that, far from a policy of ‘genocide’, Australia was founded on explicit instructions to establish amicable relations with Aborigines. That most (although, shamefully, not all) so-called ‘massacres’ are either fabricated or were retaliatory actions against massacres perpetrated by Aborigines.
Nor is he clearly willing to countenance such uncomfortable truths as that ‘traditional culture’ was steeped in violence, especially against women and children. That Aboriginal men frequently traded women, like cattle, in return for stuff they wanted from the whites. That most Aborigines willingly gravitated to missions because of the opportunities they offered.
And especially not that the so-called ‘Stolen Generations’ were removed because of parental neglect. Was it a wise policy? With the moral superiority of hindsight, we can admit that it probably wasn’t: it was paternalistic and authoritarian. But so was the removal of white children from, almost always, single mothers. Indeed, more white children were forcibly adopted during the same period than Aboriginal. I’ve known many of them, including in my own extended family.
Many of those removed white children are parents and grandparents today. Some are still trying to find their biological families. If ‘inter-generational trauma’ was the catch-all excuse activists like Dodson want to use to hand wave away today’s problems, then why aren’t there even more gangs of feral white children running amok?
Indeed, many of my ancestors, Scots and Irish, were not only dispossessed of their lands, they were driven half a world away from them. Alienated from their homelands, their cultures, their families at almost exactly the same time as the Aboriginal Australians. Yet, they managed to thrive. We don’t go around blaming the ‘inter-generational trauma’ of our grandfathers’ horrific experiences in WWI for our problems today. Jewish-Australian families who migrated here after the war had endured unbelievable suffering, including a genuine (and very nearly successful) genocide.
Where are the gangs of Jewish kids roaming the streets with machetes?
You can’t help people who won’t help themselves. Admitting that you’ve got a problem is the first step to resolving it.
