The reason Shorten is unfit for office

SHORTEN’S rant about Aboriginal children shows the shallowness of his compassion, writes Miranda Devine. Nobody should question the removal of kids from dangerous homes.

BILL Shorten might be trying to soften his image by appearing on The Project with wife

Chloe, cooing about what a great grocery shopper he is, and how he texts “Minion” gifs

(which look a bit like him) to his six-year daughter.

But his weekend rant claiming too many Aboriginal children are being removed from their families just shows how shallow his compassion is and how captured the Labor Party is by gesture politics.

Children are only ever removed as a last resort from dangerous environments where they are abused and neglected.

Bill and Chloe Shorten at the Victorian ALP Conference in Melbourne last month. (Pic: Stuart McEvoy/The Australian)

A two-year-old was raped in Tenant Creek in February, for crying out loud. That’s precisely because she wasn’t removed from her hopeless family. If it’s not institutionalised racism to leave a child in a family that has been the subject of 52 notifications to child protection services, what is it? Institutionalised cowardice? Criminal negligence?

A report found the little girl faced “foreseeable risk of harm [that] could have been managed or mitigated”. Should have been. But authorities are too gutless to step in for fear of being called racists or of creating another “stolen generation”.

Or, as Shorten put it last week: “know-it-all whitefellas” who “come in ­paternalistic”.

How can any responsible leader ever question the removal of children from unsafe environments which, frankly, don’t deserve to be called “homes” or “families”.

Nothing else better demonstrates Shorten’s unfitness for office.