Andrew Bolt: Let Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd pay for making hatred for our country fashionable

Joining the haters hasn’t been enough to save Kevin Rudd or Paul Keating from the mob, with both their statues decapitated. But this is the price of a hateful nation which they helped create.

At least Paul Keating and Kevin Rudd were taught a lesson by the haters who ran amok in the worst protests yet against Australia Day.

Karma, I thought when even their own statues in Ballarat were beheaded.

Let them pay them pay for stoking this suicidal hatred of our country, after protesters on the Australia Day weekend also destroyed a statue of Melbourne founder John Batman, painted “land back” on a statue in Melbourne to our fallen soldiers, vandalised a statue in Sydney of Captain Cook and joined pro-Palestinians to demand the “colony” fall.

In 1982, Keating helped make this hatred of Australia fashionable with his infamous Redfern Park speech, speaking with more contempt for this country than any prime minister before.

Dividing Australians by race, he vilified the non-Aboriginal “we”: “We took the traditional lands … We brought the disasters. The alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.”

Former prime minister Paul Keating made hating Australian fashionable. Picture: Getty Images

Keating’s speech grotesquely misrepresented our past, yet listeners of the ABC’s Radio National voted it as their third most unforgettable speech, behind only Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Christ’s Sermon on the Mount.

The ABC today still shows it on its education website for schools.

But joining the haters still hasn’t saved Keating, being white. His statue in the Ballarat Botanical Gardens was decapitated by protesters on Thursday who also defaced statues of another 18 former prime ministers, spraying: “The Commonwealth will fall.”

Same karma with Rudd, another former Labor prime minister.

Rudd was wildly praised for apologising in parliament in 2008 to the so-called “stolen generations” he claims were stolen from their parents just because they were Aboriginal: “We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you.”

In fact, our courts haven’t identified even one such child, yet journalists and politicians cheered Rudd’s fake history, not realising the danger of coaching generations of children and millions of immigrants that Australia is a genocidal nation.

Even Rudd must now pay the price. His statue in Ballarat was also decapitated, as he and Keating reap the hate they helped sow.

The John Batman memorial statue is removed from the Queen Victoria Market after being vandalised. Picture: Brendan Beckett

And the fraud is now over. These annual “Invasion Day” protests are not just against the date of Australia Day, January 26, the anniversary of the landing of the first British convicts.

No, these haters hate Australia itself, and would hate it on whatever day we tried to celebrate it for being one of the richest, safest and most free in history.

But this weekend that hatred had an extra menace.

Two examples. First, Queensland’s University of Technology marked “Invasion Day” with a symposium starring three speakers who link their hatred of “colonial” Australia with their hatred of “colonial” Israel.

One was race-baiting Senator Lidia Thorpe, who has posed in a “joke” headband in the colours of the Hamas terrorists, and at an “Invasion Day” rally two years ago claimed Aboriginals were at “war” with white Australia.

Another was Monash University academic Randa Abdel-Fattah, who has posted that she’s inspired by a female Palestinian who murdered 38 people on a bus in Israel, 13 of them children, and last week promoted Melbourne’s “Invasion Day Rally”.

The third was pro-Palestinian activist Sarah Saleh, who has reposted praise of Hamas as “an effective political player in the struggle against apartheid, oppression and colonisation”, and said: “We hate the settler colonial project of Australia.”

Kevin Rudd was widely praised for apologising to the “stolen generation”: NCA NewsWire

This joining of radical Palestinian activists with Aboriginal ones and Marxists came together in Melbourne on Sunday, again with the help of a taxpayer-funded body.

That’s the second example. Victoria’s version of the Voice, the taxpayer-funded First Peoples Assembly, promoted “Invasion Day protests”, linking to details for the Melbourne rally including a sign: “Death to Australia.”

Sure enough, this protest merged with a pro-Palestine one, one speaker yelling: “The Zionist state will fall and the colony (Australia) will fall… There are people in this colony who will only accept force.”

How threatening.

No wonder Prime Minister Anthony Albanese is belatedly freaking.

Seven years ago, his Australia Day speech included all the usual shame-Australia cant about how “Europeans disrupted the longest continuous civilisation on Earth” and caused “dispossession, violence, disease and trauma”.

But on Saturday Albanese didn’t dare. This time his Australia Day statement pleaded with Australians to celebrate their national day with pride, and said not a word about Australia’s supposed past sins.

Even three-flags Albanese is now scared by the haters of Australia. But is it all too late?

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Let Paul Keating, Kevin Rudd pay for making hatred for our country fashionable