Andrew Bolt: Marcia Langton was never going to be able to unite Australia around the Voice

Marcia Langton has a long history of branding arguments she doesn’t like as racist — it was always insane to think she could sell the Voice which is curiously meant to bring us “reconciliation”.

Marcia Langton says the media has lied about her.

No, she hadn’t said Australians against the Voice were “racists” and “stupid” – well, apart from all the ones who are. Got it?

I hope so, because this is now the scandal that’s suddenly galvanised depressed Yes campaigners, the ABC and the Albanese government, whose Voice is headed for a catastrophic defeat on October 14.

Finally! An excuse for their failure: the lies of the wicked Murdoch media!

In fact, Langton is threatening to call in the lawyers after The Australian newspaper on Tuesday reported comments she made at a meeting on the weekend, under this devastating headline, since rewritten: “No voters branded racist, stupid by prominent Voice campaigner Marcia Langton.”

But let’s fact-check this huffery.

Marcia Langton was never going to be able to unite the nation around the Voice. Picture: Martin Ollman

I always thought it insane to appoint an angry race-monger like Professor Langton, a member of the Albanese government’s Referendum Working Group, to co-design and then sell the Voice – this Aboriginal-only advisory parliament – that’s curiously meant to bring us “reconciliation”.

Reconciliation from Langton? From a woman notorious for calling many people racist for making arguments she didn’t like?

Boy, does Langton have form, not just for abusing conservatives such as former prime minister John Howard, historian Geoffrey Partington and me.

She’s also attacked Leftists. Environmentalist Tim Flannery, racist. Feminist Germaine Greer, racist. Professor and green Boris Frankel, racist.

Who hasn’t she abused as racist? She’s claimed Northern Australia had once had “Ku Klux Klan” groups that “wanted Aboriginal people wiped off the face of the Earth”.

Heavens, three years ago she even attacked social workers, who she said “by and large are white and racist”. We had racist police, too.

So Langton has a dirty record of playing the racism card – playing it so baselessly that the ABC was even forced to publicly apologise to me through gritted teeth for letting her falsely accuse me of racially abusing an academic friend.

But not this time, she says. She’s innocent! She never said No voters were racist and stupid. “I don’t believe that most Australians are racists,” she protested.

Tim Flannery looking at the skull of Nototherium, an extinct member of the Pleistocene megafauna.

27/06/22 Professor Germaine Greer, pictured in her home on the Mornington Peninsula after being released from aged care.. Aaron Francis / The Australian

And true, what she was actually recorded saying was that it was the arguments of No campaigners that were racist and stupid, not the voters themselves: “Every time the No cases raise their arguments, if you start pulling it apart, you get down to base racism – I’m sorry to say that’s where it lands – or sheer stupidity.”

So, yes, The Australian’s headline was not quite accurate. Bad!

But not so fast. We are talking about Langton here, and the problem for the Yes campaign is that even when she was defending herself on ABC Radio on Wednesday, she still managed to suggest that, actually, many No voters were indeed racist, or stupid to believe the No campaign’s arguments.

It wasn’t just the No campaigners who were racist, you see.

Media outlets were racist, too, she said: “It reminds me very much of the kind of racism we are getting from the media.”

No voters she’d spoken to were racist: “A lot of people don’t understand how what they’re saying is racist.”

Others were too stupid to know they’d been conned by racist arguments: “I thought it important to explain to her how she was duped … People are now so confused that they don’t know what they’re voting on.”

Racist and stupid, then. Like the headline said.

These No voters must be, because Langton argues the No campaigners are turning their heads with racist messages – messages that “appeal to the long-held tropes of discrimination”, she said last week – so clearly voters must be racist or at least stupid enough to believe them. In Langton’s world.

Sorry, perhaps you think I’m playing word games just to paint an innocent, loving professor as a terrible race-monger.

In fact, Langton was much more explicit – you might even say honest – about what she really thinks of No voters a couple of months ago, before the Yes campaign realised in a panic that this kind of abuse wasn’t working and switched to preaching love.

In July, Langton told a University of Queensland gathering that maybe “20 per cent” of voters were “the ones spewing the racism”, and the Liberals and Nationals were also “appealing to their racist base”. Racists, racists everywhere, in Langton’s angry gaze.

Racists and stupid people, however much she now protests we’ve got her wrong – that, no, “I don’t believe that most Australians are racists”.

Let’s see if Langton still says that when the Voice is defeated. Any bets?