Andrew Bolt: Lidia Thorpe’s dangerous, deceitful speech contained one truth

“No more shying away from the brutal past,” declared Lidia Thorpe in her press club address, but fear of telling the truth is why a demagogue like Thorpe gets so much support.

I agree with one thing in the dangerous and deceitful speech Senator Lidia Thorpe gave to applauding journalists at the National Press Club on Wednesday.

“No more shying away from the brutal past,” she declared.

“Truth is a sign of maturity.”

Yes, time for truth at last, because fear of telling it is why a racist demagogue like Thorpe gets so much support that she’s even a senator, leading a movement for “Blak sovereignty”.

The story Thorpe told was that Aborigines lived in harmony until wicked whites came and kept up a war that makes them rich.

“My grandmother’s clan … lived in peace and harmony pre-colonisation,” she claimed.

In fact, Aboriginal warfare was so horrific that historian Geoffrey Blainey estimates a death rate in many areas to nearly six times the death rate in the US in World War Two.

Lidia Thorpe addresses The National Press Club in Canberra. Picture: David Beach

Runaway convict William Buckley, who lived with Aborigines for three decades, described repeated warfare between tribes, including cannibalism.

Thorpe claimed “our people are still rounded up” and put in “cages”, and Aboriginal children still stolen in a “continuing cultural genocide”.

This is Thorpe at her most dangerous. Many Aboriginal men are jailed because there’s so much violence in some Aboriginal communities that the Albanese government on Wednesday released a new plan to tackle it.

Indigenous women are 34 times more likely to be hospitalised because of violence, and children more likely to be removed because they’re more likely to be abused or neglected.

It was even worse in the “peace and harmony” of traditional Aboriginal culture.

Nineteenth-century observers such as Reverend George Taplin estimated a third of Aboriginal children were killed because they were a burden.

Thorpe then accused white Australians of getting rich by robbing Aborigines: “Think about your inheritance; where did it come from? From our blood and our misery.”

In fact, it came largely from Western ingenuity and sweat. Iron ore and coal was always in this earth. It only got turned into wealth after the British came.

Then Thorpe’s fantasy solution: more land, more self-government, and more money: “There is a lot of money owed to First Peoples. Look at the resources extracted over 200 years.”

But look at the massive royalties already. Look at the land already handed over.

That doesn’t end poverty. Only study and hard work will do that.