Andrew Bolt: Premier Jacinta Allan’s apology was fuelled by destructive white guilt
Jacinta Allan’s apology to Indigenous Victorians adds to the destruction of pride in Australia and its western culture and fuels, rather than heals, division.
The destruction of pride in Australia and its western culture continues. On Wednesday, Victoria’s Labor government apologised for the horrors of colonialism supposedly committed on Aboriginals.
Premier Jacinta Allan dug deep into her sorry bag: “For the tears shed in the dark, for the stolen generations, for the violence committed under the banner of the state, we say sorry.”
But wait. Allan is now even apologising for stolen generations? But there never was one — most certainly not in Victoria.
In 2003, a Stolen Generations Taskforce, led by Aboriginal activist Jim Berg and appointed by a state Labor government, concluded in its report there had in fact been “no formal policy for removing children” from Aboriginal parents in Victoria. None.
Even more startling, the Taskforce found 36 organisations were supposedly helping the state’s “stolen generations”, yet it failed to identify one truly stolen child.
By that, I mean “stolen” in the plain meaning of that word, and under the classic definition of Professor Robert Manne, a leading stolen generations ideologue, who said “stolen” children were rescued “not from harm … but from their Aboriginality” to “help keep White Australia pure” in a horror that for Aboriginals resembled what the “Holocaust was for the Jews”.
Instead, the Stolen Generations Taskforce found only children who’d actually been saved after being abandoned or bashed by their parents; people complaining that their grandparents had raised them “white”; and one even moaning that his parents sent him to a boarding school.
These are what the Taskforce deceitfully called “stolen” children. That’s now a standard trick, but they’re not stolen in my book, or, I suspect, in yours.
The only people who could plausibly apologise to such children are their own parents. Yet politicians now flaunt such a bizarrely fashionable shame of their Western culture that they’re horrified when even Aboriginal children with white grandparents are contaminated with it.
Can’t they see what a sick circus this is?
Premier Allan is just wallowing in a destructive white guilt — while those to whom she apologises wallow in white cash. Asian cash, too.
That’s why these “sorries” never end in warm hugs and a “you’re forgiven”. A fresh start, together.
As if. For Aboriginal activists, there’s a huge benefit in staying angry, and the angrier the better, which is why nearly half a century of “reconciliation” has just left us more divided than ever, and paying ever more.
Already the Victorian government, having also signed a treaty, has handed another $100m to two Aboriginal groups, with more to come.
But look at the Aboriginal leaders listening to the Premier’s apology or getting her “compensation”.
I’m puzzled. Should they get compensation — or pay it, since no doubt some have the blood of colonisers as well as of Aboriginal ancestors?
Yet half of us paying them this compensation have no colonisers in our ancestry, having both parents born overseas, or being born there ourselves.
How dangerous for our politicians to make Australia seem so shameful to so many people so new to this country. I mean, who’d boast of belonging to a country of racist child-stealers?
No wonder I’ve never seen Australians so divided. See how many people now qualify just how Australian they are. They are hyphenated Australians, or actually Muslim, or Chinese, or cheering for India in the cricket, or marching for Palestine in the streets, or flying Turkish flags at festivals.
Politicians regularly refer to these new tribes as “communities” with “community leaders”, as if we’re a nation of tribes sharing nothing but real estate.
And how is this compensation worked out? Is there a discount for the gifts from colonisation and this brilliant western civilisation — for the democracy, medicine, science, literacy, rule of law and modern farming techniques that ensure no Aboriginal need ever again starve in a famine?
Because here’s the curious thing. Allan may deplore “colonisation”, yet I’ve never seen an Aboriginal choosing to live without what colonisation has brought. Not one has given it all up — from supermarket food to mobile phones and cars — to live instead in the traditional way, hunting and gathering.
It’s all a performance — the anger and the sorries. Even some supposed sins of whites — the stolen generations! — are invented to feed the guilt on one side and demands for yet more money on the other.
Only politicians ashamed of their culture could agree to this thankless self-abasement, and prostrate themselves before the tribal that threatens us all.
Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Premier Jacinta Allan’s apology was fuelled by destructive white guilt
