Emotive public relations wars, tokenistic gestures deliver no real change

The political battle to statutorily install a body advocating for any particular group of Australians based on race is morally repugnant, writes Piers Akerman.

State responses to the Wuhan flu have undermined national unity and the Constitution but the demands to enshrine a special place for some based solely on claims to belong to a racial group would smash the concept entirely.

“I am, you are, we are Australians,” the Seekers’ Bruce Woodley and Dobe Newton wrote over 25 years ago and as the lyrics went “we are one but we are many”.

Through an emotionally fraught propaganda campaign an influential group drawn from the “many” is now seeking to pressure parliament to have a single group — “one” — to be have an advisory group to the federal government on all legislation that may in any way affect its members as a forerunner to constitutional change.

This group wants politicians and the public to overlook the reality that its members are one of the smaller minorities within the nation and that the whole question of who is actually a member is not only based on self-identification currently the subject of intense examination but that any racial identification is itself undeniably and inherently racist.

Professor Marcia Langton at home. Picture: David Geraghty/The Australian.

The Aboriginal advisory body would be, as one of its foremost advocates, Professor Marcia Langton, admits, as a stepping stone towards constitutional recognition and the full implementation of the Uluru Statement from the Heart.

The political battle to statutorily install an extra body advocating for any particular group of Australians based on race is morally repugnant as would be the desperately desired constitutional change.

The emotive public relations war to soften the attitudes of the wider public to providing more privileges to Aboriginals inaccessible to other Australians has now been running for years and has most recently seen corporate bodies embrace such tokenistic gestures as the recently invented Welcome to Country statements and Reconciliation Action Plans.

State after state has incorporated absolutely baseless, if not nonsensical, claims about pre-colonial history and pre-colonial Aboriginal society in their curricula after the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) ill-advisedly unquestioningly accepted input from an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander advisory group which included members who believed maths instruction was racist and that the boomerang inspired the invention of the propeller and even unmanned drones patrolling for sharks.

Jacinta Price is the CLP’s number one candidate for the senate at the next federal election. Picture: SUPPLIED

As the prominent indigenous leader and future Northern Territory senator Jacinta Price told The Daily Telegraph recently: “This is ideology, not fact”.

The same hard-left ideologues also embraced the false narrative authored by the self-proclaimed Aboriginal Bruce Pascoe through his book Dark Emu (which the ABC is still intending to use as the basis for a television work) because Dark Emu’s totally discredited claims about Aboriginal society – had they contained a scintilla of truth – would have supported the push for constitutional recognition.

Pascoe’s untruths were shredded by the respected credentialed anthropologist Professor Peter Sutton and his collaborator archaeologist Professor Keryn Walshe.

Bruce Pascoe’s best-selling book.

Such is the political propaganda value of Pascoe’s book however, that fact that it has no validity in scholarship has not been recognised by Professor Langton, or even, more shamefully, the Minister for indigenous Australians, Ken Wyatt, who forced an Aboriginal woman, Josephine Cashman, to resign from his advisory committee when she questioned Pascoe’s claim to Aboriginal heritage.

Professor Augusto Zimmerman, professor and head of law at Sheridan College, in Perth, recently noted that advocates of constitutional recognition claim that it would go a long way to closing the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians.

However, he said the evidence suggests otherwise. According to the Productivity Commission, governments have spent more than double per person on services for Aboriginal citizens than on others.

The ratio of indigenous to non-indigenous expenditure per head of population is 3:1 in school education, 5:1 in public and community health services, and 5:1 in housing. Woke folk are following Marie Antoinette’s lead and metaphorically dressing as milkmaids while Aboriginal women suffer from horrendous levels of violence and their children remain unschooled.

And none of this would change if the nation was divided by race.