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Real ‘dog act’ is police minister trying to save Labor’s political hide by dismissing claims of children raped under her watch

Labor MPs and the ABC have lined up to trash Petter Dutton and save their Voice from looking exactly what it is – a radical power grab and substitute for real help for Aborigines.

Dutton could be 'seen as a spoiler’ if Voice to Parliament prevails

How low can Yes campaigners go? What we saw last week – even pushing aside raped children – was one of the most disgusting things I’ve seen in Australian politics.

How dare they?

How DARE they?

They’ve just exposed the big lie told about the Voice, a kind of Aboriginal-only parliament that Prime Minister Anthony Albanese sells as just “a vehicle for … improving lives”.

Bull. It’s about power. Race power.

That’s why Opposition Leader Peter Dutton was pack-attacked last week when he again went to Alice Springs to demand more action to save Aboriginal children there from neglect and sexual abuse.

Peter Dutton and Jacinta Price in Alice Springs. Picture: Liam Mendes
Peter Dutton and Jacinta Price in Alice Springs. Picture: Liam Mendes

If Voice activists were truly desperate to improve Aboriginal lives they’d have done as Dutton said.

Instead, look: hands over their eyes, saying they can’t see these children. Fingers in their ears, saying they can’t hear their screams.

The worst was the Northern Territory’s Police Minister, Labor’s Kate Worden, who accused Dutton of a “dog act”, saying the former policeman was exploiting children for “absolutely opportunistic, political game-playing”.

I was stunned. For a “dog act”, how about a police minister trying to save Labor’s political hide by dismissing claims of children raped under her watch?

Tragically, Worden was part of a pack. Labor MPs and the ABC lined up to trash Dutton and save their Voice from looking exactly what it is – a radical power grab and substitute for real help for Aborigines.

Northern Territory’s Police Minister, Labor’s Kate Worden.
Northern Territory’s Police Minister, Labor’s Kate Worden.

Labor senator Malarndirri McCarthy likewise accused Dutton of “irresponsible accusations”, and the NT’s treasurer, Eva Lawler, even suggested – to my astonishment – the sexual abuse of Aboriginal children was nothing unusual.

“Children have been sexually abused in Australia since, bloody, the place was probably settled,” she declared, snarking: “We can talk about the Catholic Church”.

The left-hijacked ABC also rushed to defend the Voice from the broken children who now threatened it.

An ABC reporter in Alice Springs, spectacularly uninformed, asked Dutton for his evidence of those abused children, and radio host Patricia Karvelas even implied Aboriginal children in the NT were no more abused than any others.

“There’s abuse going on everywhere,” she insisted, echoing Labor, and then turned on Liberal senator Kerrynne Liddle, an Aboriginal woman trying to tell her there was indeed a problem: “Do you encourage your leader to temper his language given we haven’t yet seen evidence to say that there is a widespread phenomenon of this?”

I beg your pardon, Patricia? “We haven’t yet seen evidence”?

Peter Dutton has been pack-attacked after demanding more action to save Aboriginal children there from neglect and sexual abuse. Picture: Liam Mendes
Peter Dutton has been pack-attacked after demanding more action to save Aboriginal children there from neglect and sexual abuse. Picture: Liam Mendes

How could any of them – Labor MPs or ABC journalists – be so blind and deaf?

I’ve reported on this social catastrophe for more than 30 years, since even before Professor Boni Robertson’s Aboriginal women’s task force brought me to tears in 2000 with its ghastly findings on the rape and abuse of so many Aboriginal children.

Since then, the alarm has sounded again and again, but again and again the left ignored it to protect its vision of an Edenic Aboriginal culture – and now to protect its Voice.

Remember the Little Children are Sacred Report, which in 2007 said “Aboriginal child sexual abuse in the Northern Territory … is serious, widespread and often unreported”?

That prompted the Howard government’s intervention that the left attacked as “neo-colonialism” and “paternalism”.

Yet in 2013, NT chief magistrate Hilary Hannam protested the NT’s child protection bureaucracy still had such an “idealistic” view of Aboriginal culture that it treated the dangers Aboriginal children faced as “normal” and made their “right to survival” a second-order issue.

So on it went. In 2018, Tors Clothier, a pediatrician who’d worked for more than 20 years at Alice Springs Hospital, said child abuse was so rife in remote communities he thought few Aboriginal girls made it to puberty without unwanted sexual ­attention.

He added: “I thought vividly yesterday of the case of a seven-month-old child who was badly raped years ago and died from her injuries.”

Don’t think it’s suddenly all got better. The latest Australian Institute of Health and Welfare data says NT children are three times more likely than children of other states to be victims of proven neglect or abuse. The vast majority of them are Aboriginal.

How could ABC journalists not know all this? How dare Labor politicians accuse Dutton of a “dog act” for telling this truth?

How? Because that truth threatens their Voice, which isn’t for those children at all.

It’s a palace for Labor and its tribe of race activists, who’ll then have one more excuse to ignore them.

Originally published as Real ‘dog act’ is police minister trying to save Labor’s political hide by dismissing claims of children raped under her watch

Andrew Bolt
Andrew BoltColumnist

With a proven track record of driving the news cycle, Andrew Bolt steers discussion, encourages debate and offers his perspective on national affairs. A leading journalist and commentator, Andrew’s columns are published in the Herald Sun, Daily Telegraph and Advertiser. He writes Australia's most-read political blog and hosts The Bolt Report on Sky News Australia at 7.00pm Monday to Thursday.

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Original URL: https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/opinion/andrew-bolt/andrew-bolt-the-real-dog-act-is-a-police-minister-trying-to-save-labors-political-hide-by-dismissing-claims-of-children-raped-under-her-watch/news-story/dd8a61df7f6b8ccc6087fa45c843ed2a