Racist!: The despicable slurring of Flannery

Tim Flannery may be an alarmist and he may be wrong. But to call him a racist for holding an evidence-based opinion on the impact of Aboriginal settlement on the environment is a despicable slur:

ABORIGINAL academic Marcia Langton has accused former Australian of the year Tim Flannery of holding a racist belief that indigenous Australians are ''enemies of nature''. In her fourth Boyer lecture, an extract of which is published in today's Saturday Age, Professor Langton attacked Professor Flannery - a distinguished scientist, explorer and conservationist - for comments in his recent Quarterly Essay, After the Future: Australia's New Extinction Crisis, which she said suggested he believed land was not ''safe'' if it was owned by Aboriginal people. ''Even under Labor governments with a strong green bent, national parks are not always safe. In 2010, the Queensland Bligh government began the process of degazetting a large part of Mungkan Kaanju National Park on Cape York Peninsula with a view to giving the land back to its traditional Aboriginal owners,'' Professor Flannery wrote in the essay. Professor Langton, the foundation chair of Australian indigenous studies at the University of Melbourne, suggested Professor Flannery had succumbed to the ''environmental campaign ideology that Australia's first people are the enemies of nature''... ''They are not wilderness areas. They are Aboriginal homelands, shaped over millennia by Aboriginal people. The presumption by conservationists that these areas need to be rescued from Aboriginal people - as made clear by Tim Flannery and in the Wild Rivers saga in Queensland - is a strange twist on the racist fiction of terra nullius overturned by the Mabo case,'' Professor Langton argued.

This is not argument but name-calling. (Thanks to reader drw.)