Piers Akerman: Andrew Thorburn’s resignation puts the spotlight on an even greater injustice
Those calling for more tolerance have been shown to be viciously intolerant and Christian males are baring the brunt of it, writes Piers Akerman.
Opinion
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The anti-discrimination racket promotes a vicious and discriminatory agenda fostered by human relations departments and virtue-signalling executives in public and private organisations.
They are bullying in the name of righteousness, discriminating in the name of diversity. Those calling for more tolerance have been shown to be viciously intolerant.
It’s not about justice, it’s about prejudice. Prejudice against one religion in particular – Christianity – and prejudice against older white males.
To be a Christian in government circles and in major corporations these days is almost as dangerous as being a Christian in a Roman arena full of lions. On the other hand, a person who identifies as Indigenous, or a woman or Muslim, is given special care and treatment – that’s why almost every form today asks you to identify yourself in gender and racial terms.
It flies in the face of the wisdom of US civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr who dreamt “that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character”.
The brouhaha over the sacking of Essendon Football Club chief executive Andrew Thorburn has highlighted the anti-Christian hysteria that exists and it has been revealed by what has long been the wokest of the AFL clubs.
Essendon is a boastful organisation. It boasted of its tolerance toward homosexuals, its support for same-sex marriage. Eight years ago it called for a gay pride round to endorse the gay and lesbian community to cheers from its HR department, ironically pushing the same woke agenda as NAB had under Thorburn.
Unfortunately that HR department failed to do due diligence before Thorburn’s brief appointment.
Just three years ago, banking royal commissioner Kenneth Hayne slammed Thorburn and the NAB chairman, former treasury secretary Ken Henry, for what he described as a culture of greed at the bank when listing the organisation’s egregious failures. It was a dysfunctional outfit that stooped to steal from dead people’s accounts.
Hayne said the bank had not learnt any lessons from the past and clearly the HR team didn’t either.
Thorburn, who should never have been appointed, quit a day later when he was asked to reject his church over remarks made during sermons nine years ago about abortion and homosexuality. Those sermons were made in an era when Labor figures Julia Gillard and Penny Wong were also opposed to same-sex marriage.
The Essendon matter has brought the spotlight to one example of discrimination but the media has largely ignored an even greater injustice, the sacking of former major Bernard Gaynor in 2014 by then-chief of defence David Hurley for a series of what have proved to be prescient posts about the failure of the war in Afghanistan and his formal protest against the decision by the army to allow service personnel to march, in uniform, in the Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. He argued that army personnel are barred from participating in political activities while in uniform and that the Mardi Gras is a political event as defined by its own articles of association.
Gaynor, a committed Christian, was then pursued by activist Gary Burns and courts and anti-discrimination bodies in Queensland, NSW, Victoria, Tasmania and Western Australia. Just over a week ago, the NSW Local Court dismissed all remaining complaints lodged against him by Burns under the Anti-Discrimination Act 1977 (NSW).
Burns has never once been ordered to pay the costs of his failed complaints and the NSW magistrate did not address this in her judgment.
Governments and corporations have no right to demand their employees toe particular political lines in the name of diversity and inclusion. The repression of opposing views on each of these issues carries the stench of the hysteria surrounding the Salem witch trials of the 17th century.
Today, the federal government and all the state governments are equally guilty in embracing the activist cancel culture and creating a disastrously unequal clash of rights.
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