Andrew Bolt: Race politics in Australia has gone completely mad

New Bachelorette Brooke Blurton is one of three people last week who proved race politics in Australia has gone completely mad.

Brooke Blurton, new star of Channel 10’s The Bacherlorette, is one of three people last week who proved race politics in Australia has gone completely mad.

Blurton got even the ABC excited about 10’s meat-market, where the star picks a mate from a pack of attention-seekers. It trilled: “Blurton makes television history as the show’s first Indigenous, bisexual star.”

Except that’s not exactly true.

Three years ago, Blurton confessed she’d also had relationships with women and did not want to be labelled.

“I’m a big person of who you are inside, obviously not face value and what you look like,” she said.

“I looked beyond what they were as female. I’m not bisexual or a lesbian or anything like that ... I don’t really want to be judged on this.”

But wait. Blurton is determined to be non-binary about sexual identity, but when it comes to race she is extremely binary.

On Instagram she identifies herself solely as Aboriginal: “A proud Noongar-Yamatji woman.” She has also backed an Aboriginal-only advisory parliament in our constitution, claiming it “will help my people have a seat at the table”.

“We invite you to walk with us.”

Brooke Blurton

So now we’re divided by Blurton into “you” and “us”. Non-Aboriginals and Aboriginals.

That is strangely binary when Blurton is in fact the daughter of an English man, and of a mother who was of both Malaysian and Aboriginal ancestry.

Which brings me to Nathan Sentance.

Sentance looks almost as white as me, but identifies as Aboriginal and works in the Museum of Australia, which last weekend opened an exhibition that makes false or unsubstantiated claims about how wicked whites were to Aborigines.

A former colleague wrote to the museum last week noting I’d listed several of its wild claims: about the “stolen generations”, the naming of “Poisoned Waterholes Creek” and Bruce Pascoe, the so-called “Aboriginal historian”.

In its defence, the museum said it was telling history from “a First Nations perspective”, as curated by its “First Nations team”. Truth is what race activists say it is.

I checked what “perspective” the museum’s “First Nations” team might have, and found the tweets of Sentance, who works to make the museum’s “cultural collections … more accessible to First Nations communities”.

Sentance last week tweeted a picture of himself wearing an Aboriginal-design face mask, boasting: “We did a museum tour last year that was it was (sic) 2099 and if colonizers left the planet and First Nations ecological/social relationships were restored and we had participants wear these masks because the grass tree now shoots spores to kill colonizers.”

What a lovely dream! Racist trees that kill white colonisers.

Sentance also retweeted a call to “burn down all settler colonies till our people are free”. Will he start with the homes of his white relatives?

That’s the thing with this absurd binary black-or-white identity politics. Instead of acknowledging we’re basically all mongrels now, it insists on crude divisions – and pits one “race” against the other.

Take Professor Mick Dodson.

Professor Mick Dodson.

Dodson, like brother Pat, identifies as Aboriginal and has long been a race warrior raging against “colonisers”, even though his father was an Irish Australian, Snowy Dodson, who sent both sons to a Catholic private school, with the help of scholarships.

Dodson has preached that whites are what made some Aboriginals bad, telling the National Press Club in 2003: “Most of the violence, if not all, that Aboriginal communities are experiencing today are not part of Aboriginal tradition or culture.

“We have no cultural traditions based on humiliation, degradation and violation.”

That ignores overwhelming evidence of incredible brutality towards women in traditional Aboriginal societies.

But I wonder if Dodson, a former Australian of the Year, will again use that excuse now that he’s had to quit as the Northern Territory’s Treaty Commissioner after complaints by Aboriginal women that he’d abused and threatened them, allegedly telling one she was a “slut” and he’d “knock her f--king lights out”.

Dodson says he has no memory of that because of a disorder caused by some trauma in his youth.

Of course, he could still blame whites, perhaps his Irish ancestors, for his supposedly non-Aboriginal aggression.

But I hope he’ll instead take responsibility as an individual. Whatever his failings, they are not the fault of whites, or even blacks. They are his own.

As Blurton babbled, in a moment of clarity: “I’m a big person of who you are inside.”

Let the Bachelorette say it for us all, while we still have sanity to save.