Andrew Bolt: Australia disintegrating into hate-fuelled tribes

There is a sickness in Australian culture, as the country disintegrates into tribes where hate rules and debate is dead.

There’s a sickness in our culture. More Australians claiming to be good are acting like the monsters they say they’re fighting.

Example one: campaigners for Labor’s Voice to parliament.

They claim to be fighting haters, and – as Voice campaigner Noel Pearson told the ABC last week – must “meet hate with love”.

But all the hate I’m hearing in the media is going the other way, especially since the Liberals under Peter Dutton respectfully said no to the Voice.

There was no love from Pearson, who smeared Dutton as an “undertaker” who “doesn’t mind chucking Indigenous Australians ... under the bus” with his “Judas betrayal”.

Last November, Pearson similarly abused Nationals leader David Littleproud as “Littlepride”, and called him a “boy” and “kindergarten child” leading a “squalid” party that “couldn’t give a stuff” about Aborigines.

Australia is disintegrating into a society of tribes.

He also abused Nationals senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, an eloquent Voice opponent, as a careerist controlled by racist “string pullers” wanting “a blackfella to punch down on other blackfellas”.

Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews predictably joined the hate-fest last week by vilifying the Liberals as “a mean, nasty outfit”.

Voice architect Marcia Langton called Dutton a liar; former Liberal minister Ken Wyatt accused his old party of looking racist, and Greens senator Dorinda Cox accused it of “catering to racist ideologies”.

Where was the love?

Example 2: transgender activists. They claim to fight for tolerance, or, as Tasmanian Greens leader Casey O’Connor put it, to demonstrate “love and support” against “vile, transphobic” feminists such as Kellie-Jay Kean, who held rallies last month around Australia.

But these “loving” protesters in Hobart and Melbourne screamed abuse at Kean and shouted her down, attacking police and once grabbing Kean’s microphone.

Andrews called Kean “nasty” and “hateful” and falsely accused her of standing with Nazis.

In Auckland, Kean was hit, pelted with liquid and doused with tomato juice, and a 72-year-old female supporter was punched repeatedly in the head by a man protesting for tolerance.

What’s happening to us?

It seems a certain kind of bully is looking for a moral cause not because it’s particularly good, but because it’s a licence to hate with a pack.

That’s why there’s so little interest in debate, and so much in using these causes to smash people instead.

We’re disintegrating into tribes, where hate rules and reason is dead.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Australia disintegrating into hate-fuelled tribes