Andrew Bolt: Jesse Gardiner attack on Daniel Ierardo, metaphor for Voice to parliament

If what followed after Jesse Gardiner’s attack on Daniel Ierardo with a didgeridoo is a metaphor for Labor’s Voice campaign, then reality might one day smack you in the head, too.

Daniel Ierardo went along with this “reconciliation” movement – right until Jesse Gardiner broke his skull with a didgeridoo.

Welcome to a story which seems a metaphor for where we’re heading with Labor’s Voice to parliament.

Ierardo, a Richmond fan, went to the AFL’s Dreamtime at the ‘G match last year, and sat through those rituals meant to convince us the best way to come together is to separate by race.

So there was yet another “welcome to country” ceremony and the paying of respects to elders past, present and emerging, whether they deserved it or not.

Aboriginal dancers did their thing, and some waved wooden clubs in a mock war challenge. Richmond players knelt in supplication.

The AFL could hardly have done more to make Aboriginal viewers feel appreciated, even hiring Jesse Gardiner, who also identifies as Aboriginal, to play his didgeridoo for fans outside the MCG.

Sure, Gardiner’s Facebook picture showed him giving the middle digit, but he’d performed in other “reconciliation” events, including a Dandenong Council one for children.

Jesse Gardiner was sentenced to 300 days’ jail. Image: Facebook. Image: Facebook

But it seems reconciliation has a limit, and Gardiner reached his own at game’s end.

He was among about 10 people who swarmed Ierardo outside the MCG in what police called an unprovoked attack.

Gardiner then smashed Ierardo’s head with a swing of his didgeridoo, causing the 25-year-old to collapse face first onto the path.

It could have been fatal. Ierardo’s skull was fractured in two places, his nose and eye socket were broken, and he suffered bleeding on the brain. It took him six months to recover, and he hasn’t worked since.

What’s more, Gardiner jabbed another person that night in the face with his didgeridoo, and in January, on bail, hit a drinker at a Dandenong hotel over the head with a baton from behind.

It won’t surprise you, then, that magistrate Michael King last Friday said Gardiner had a “disturbing” history of violence.

But you might be surprised by the sentence – just 300 days’ jail, of which Gardiner had already served 218.

Ierardo’s grandfather said it seemed light, and other details might make you think it’s no wonder it was.

You might even think “reconciliation” is delivering the opposite, with apartheid justice already … and soon apartheid politics.

Gardiner appeared at Victoria’s “Koori Court”, just for Aborigines.

We’ve been assured it wouldn’t offer softer sentences, but it’s hard to avoid the impression it’s set up to encourage just that.

Read on its website how it works: “Everyone is encouraged to take part in a sentencing conversation by having a yarn and avoid using legal language. Aboriginal elders or respected persons may give cultural advice to help the magistrate make a judgment that is culturally appropriate.”

Pardon? What’s so different about Gardiner’s culture in Dandenong that his sentencing might be different to that of a local of Anglo or Indian ancestry?

In this case, an indigenous elder whose LinkedIn profile says is “skilled in facilitating Therapeutic Mens (sic) Groups”, was there to tell Gardiner he’d “let himself down” on “a day of ceremony, a day to be proud”.

Gardiner’s lawyer also pointed out Gardiner was an Aboriginal artist.

Indeed, this man who’s whacked three people in the head with a weapon, has been a “cultural adviser” in jail. God spare us.

Gardiner may have been fortunate to be not just in the Koori Court, but before magistrate Michael King, who studied at the Maharishi University of Management, founded by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, inventor of Transcendental Meditation and a spiritual adviser to the Beatles from the year they released All You Need is Love.

Indeed, King lectures on Vedic concepts of law and “therapeutic jurisprudence and other non-adversarial justice modalities”, which he once described like this: “The judicial officer will greet the participant and inquire as to the participant’s wellbeing. The judicial officer may ask how the participant’s sick parent is progressing …

“Here the judicial officer demonstrates an ethic of care towards the participant … This is a co-operative and facilitative, rather than an adversarial and control-based, approach to court processes.”

Er, and where does the man with the smashed head fit in?

Must I join the dots to this campaign for the Voice – a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament?

To a campaign that suggests if only we just showed more love, then so much Aboriginal dysfunction, including endemic violence in some communities, would go away? If we only separated by race, we’d be united?

If you really think that, then reality might one day smack you in the head, too.