Lefties to blame for a boy on murder charge

WE have had the Redfern Speech, the National Sorry Days, Reconciliation, and the National Apology and the ­annual, sad, Closing the Gap report but just to prove how dismally misguided all of these triumphant symbols of the great and the good’s intentions have been we now have an ­11-year-old Aboriginal boy charged with murder.

A child who should have been removed from his dysfunctional home years ago and given a chance to lead a better life in another family, if only the state agencies charged with caring for children were not transfixed by the politically correct response to the flawed Bringing Them Home inquiry and equally loaded Deaths in Custody study. That the 11-year-old boy was on the streets of Perth in the company of eight males at 3.30am on January 27 should have been of interest to the authorities, and may well have been if he were not Aboriginal. His case demonstrates the concept of Aboriginality has, however, now been so twisted as to become both a protection from normal laws and regulations. The actual act of claiming to be Aboriginal is itself so arbitrary that some people who have claimed Aborigin-ality are rejected by others who have claimed Aboriginality, because of old family feuds. This minefield has been constructed by individuals who claimed to know what was best for Aborigines and some self-serving Aborigines, as well, and has led some Aborigines to ­enforce a quasi-apartheid. The current Federal Court case involving an employee of the Queensland University of Technology indigenous unit who barred three students who attempted to use a computer lab in an area set aside for indigenous students demonstrates how separatist some Aborigines can be. Cindy Prior is seeking a ­little under $250,000 in damages under Australia’s aggressive racial discrimination laws claiming she suffered “offence, embarrassment, humiliation and psychiatric injury” ­because of comments made by several other members of the staff and a handful of students in person and on social media. Prior, according to The Australian, offered to drop the cases against several students in return for $5000. Arguing about computer time is a First World issue, were it not for the racist element introduced by the fact some institutions set aside areas for Aboriginal-only usage. The 11-year-old charged with murder is in quite a different category. An 11-year-old roaming the streets at 3.30am is a Third World issue created by first world do-gooders. In much of the past century, children, be they black, white or brindle, were removed from parents who either could not or would not raise them in line with society’s then customary standards of health and educational requirements. They were taken from ­unsafe and unstable homes (if they could be called homes) and those of Aboriginal des-cent the individuals popularly labelled The Stolen Generation by revisionists who have attempted to colour missionaries, charities and state institutions as paternalistic neo-colonialist tools of oppression. In the vast majority of cases, they were saviours. Unfortunately for the hand-wringers and those who would prefer to cling to the notion that anyone with the slightest claim to some Aboriginal heritage must be a victim of white oppression, there has yet to be a single court-authenticated instance which proves the existence of a single verifiable case which would support The Stolen Generation thesis. Yet, as the tragic case of the 11-year-old boy now facing a murder charge in Perth would indicate, there are very good reasons why authorities should not bow to the Aboriginal ­industry and political correctness and should act to ensure the best interests of children are put before the ever-changing fashions of social activism. The young accused murderer was among a gang of eight males who allegedly ­attacked Patrick Slater, 26, a member of another Aboriginal family, with star pickets, rocks, screwdrivers, wooden stakes, glass bottles and “sockets” in a shopping centre at 3.30am on January 27. It has been revealed the youngster skipped school more than 75 per cent of the time, and that his father, who routinely viciously humiliated his children, was frequently jailed. The boy was known to every state agency — schools, police, child protection — but just as in other states, the agencies kowtowed to the fashionable sensitivities and left him trapped in a social detritus, destined almost inevitably to be become a statistic in the ­nation’s swelling prison ­population. On every occasion child protection officers had been in contact with his family, the trigger incident was not enough to compel them to take him into care or work intensively with his family. The reasons why they failed to act in the best interests of this boy and in thousands of other similar cases across Australia are easy to determine. After Labor prime minister Paul Keating’s 1992 Redfern address in which in a speech written by Don Watson, he said “we took the children from their mothers” it became virtually impossible for children of any colour to be removed from families and placed in safe havens. It was well-intentioned enough; such gestures ­always are, no matter how ill-founded they may be, and there are plenty of passionate people who wished to demonstrate publicly their profound empathy for the people who have been labelled The Stolen ­Generation. In 2008, another Labor prime minister, Kevin Rudd, gave a teary apology and in 2016, an 11-year-old is charged with murder because no one did the right thing by him and took him into care.