Andrew Bolt: Qantas preaching patronising race politics

Who does Qantas’ race-genuflecting help? I know who it hurts, and it’s not just the Australians who identify as Aboriginal.

Next week as my plane lands at Amsterdam’s airport, I guarantee I will not hear the kind of thing that drives me nuts with Qantas.

No steward will welcome me on the PA to the lands of the traditional owners – in this case, the Frisii people – and pay tribute to elders past and present.

To elders like, er, me.

Same thing with flying to London last year. There was no message of respect for the traditional owners of Caer Lundein, and tributes to Celtic elders part, present and emerging and their ownership of the land, water and even sky.

Qantas pays tributes to elders past and present.

Of course not. That would be too – what did we used to call this stuff? – yes, racist.

It would be too inflammatory to all the immigrants there, and insulting to descendants of all those foreigners who made Britain great, including Angles, Saxons, Danes, Romans, Jews, Normans, Huguenots, Indians, West Indians and the rest.

And in The Netherlands, I’d look quite mad railing at all those foreigners who’ve done us Frisii wrong, pushing our ancestors to the far north, Friesland, where they lived poor, with my grandfather born in a hovel later used as a pigsty.

Those damn Batavi. Those rotten Romans. Those Franks. Those Spanish invaders. The French. The Germans.

Start thinking like that, and you’ll feel endless resentments you’d never thought of before. Endless reasons to blame people long dead for things you could fix today if you got off your backside.

So I wonder why Qantas preaches this race politics, which I’ve heard from no other airline in any other country.

Try that in Northern Ireland: “We’ve now landed in Belfast. We pay our respects to the traditional owners, the Gaels.” There’d be a riot.

Who does this race-genuflecting help?

I know who it hurts, and it’s not just the Australians who identify as Aboriginal and would feel almost powerless from all this preaching of victimhood.

It also hurts every Australian not made noble by some Aboriginal ancestor, the young especially.

What country can we now call ours, where we’re not patronised by being welcomed but are the welcomers? Not the intruders but the Indigenous?

Which country, in this newly racist world, can we call our own, without qualification or apology?

Yes, to think in this way could sound almost racist, and certainly dangerous. But I sure didn’t start it, with this retribalising of Australia. I just want it to stop.

Originally published as Andrew Bolt: Qantas preaching patronising race politics