Andrew Bolt: Dean Martin claiming to be Aboriginal is last straw

The public is being taken by a ride after our dangerously gullible government dropped plans to deport former Rebels bikie boss Dean Martin back to New Zealand.

AFL star Dusty Martin’s uncle is the last straw. A week after the Albanese government banned a gold mine because of dodgy claims of Aboriginal secret business, up pops Dean Martin, insisting he’s also Aboriginal.

And our dangerously gullible government bought that, too.

In fact, it last week dropped plans to deport this former Rebels outlaw bikie boss back to New Zealand, the country of his birth and citizenship, blaming a racist 2020 High Court ruling that even foreign-born crooks can’t be deported if they have a drop of Aboriginal blood.

Let me be clear, Dean Martin does not have a criminal record, but his brother Shane Martin, Dusty’s father, did and was himself deported in 2016 as a foreigner of bad reputation.

But Dean can now stay, despite odd parts of his story that should have been challenged in court or at least explained to a public now realising it’s too often been taken for a ride as the number of people claiming to be Aboriginal has exploded by 33 per cent over a decade.

Even the Australian Bureau of Statistics admits more than half that increase can’t be explained by new births, and Aboriginal leaders warn of widespread fakery and race-shifting.

Now this case.

There are odd parts to Dean Martin’s story that should be challenged in court.

AFL fans will know Dusty Martin, Dean’s nephew, has a big neck tattoo which reads “Ngati Maru”, which Dusty explained is father Shane’s Maori tribe in New Zealand. Shane had the same tattoo and was nicknamed “Kiwi”.

But then Shane, who’d also been a Rebels official, heard that Peter Dutton, then Immigration Minister, planned to throw him out of the country as the kind of Kiwi we didn’t want.

Wait! A miracle! Brother Dean found a last-minute lifeline. The brothers had an Aboriginal ancestor! A great-grandmother in Tasmania whose son married into the Maori.

Even better, they found an Aboriginal elder who’d say he accepted them as Aboriginal, a key part of an official proof of Aboriginality.

Bizarrely, this person was Moogy Sumner, a Ngarrindjeri activist and former Greens candidate then with the Aboriginal Sobriety Group, based in Adelaide.

It seems odd to me that South Australia’s Ngarrindjeri tribe can swear the Martins are of Tasmania’s Manegin. I’ve understood no tribe can speak for another.

Indeed, Dutton dismissed Shane Martin’s claims to be Aboriginal as “spurious”. The Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania also denied Martin was Aboriginal, and the Aboriginal Sobriety Group cancelled its recognition of the brothers the following year. Shane Martin died in New Zealand three years ago.

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe with Dean Martin. Picture: Facebook

But now Dean Martin says he’s found more information to prove he’s Aboriginal, including a Manegin elder who backs him. This is the evidence Immigration Minister Tony Burke has now accepted, dropping his bid to deport Martin.

Hmm. Has Burke, who also defends giving 3000 Palestinians from terrorist-run Gaza tourism visas without even an interview, again been too naïve or political?

Shane Martin’s original certificate of Aboriginality lists as the brothers’ Aboriginal ancestors two “great grandparents” – Frances Mary Kehoe and George Henry Gregory.

In fact, Gregory was Kehoe’s son, and the family’s online genealogical tree shows all Kehoe’s ancestors were descended from Irish and English convicts or immigrants, apart from one unnamed great-great-great-great grandfather, who could have been Aboriginal. Or not.

At best, then, judging from this family tree, just one of Martin’s 64 great-great-great-great grandparents was Aboriginal – something which, if true, he never knew until just a few years ago.

Is that 1/64th – or less – really enough now to claim you’re Aboriginal? Enough for this government to agree you can’t be deported?

Dean Martin insists he is Aboriginal. Picture: David Crosling

Can someone even be indigenous to two continents, with extra political rights in each?

True, I haven’t seen all the documents Martin gave the government. But even if all he says is true, surely we need a more meaningful definition of Aboriginality as we continue to intermarry, and the consequences of claiming Aboriginality become more serious.

Take federal Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek’s decision to now effectively cancel a $1 billion gold mine in NSW.

She ignored the local Orange Local Aboriginal Land Council which said there was nothing particularly sacred about the site, and listened instead to some dissidents, the most prominent of whom is Nyree Reynolds, an artist who says she’s a “very light-skinned descendant” of an Aboriginal woman born “in the 1820s”, and who originally identified as Gamilaraay before saying she was a “Wiradjuri elder”.

She’s entitled to call herself whatever she likes, but why must we pay any notice? Why does the Albanese Government pay too much?

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Dean Martin claiming to be Aboriginal is last straw