Andrew Bolt: Race warriors demonising our past in a way that helps no one

Victoria’s Aboriginal “Yoorrook Commission” has dragged in some token white people to confess to white guilt but why are we yet again wallowing in a past that’s 200 years stale?

The rest of Australia should look at a circus of guilt in Victoria on Wednesday and be warned: this is what race-war warriors have in mind for you, too.

Victoria’s Labor government has foolishly set up an Aboriginal “Yoorrook Commission” that’s now chewing through $44m. If only it just ate the money. Tragically, it’s used some of it to create a “truth-telling” process, and on Wednesday dragged in some token white people to confess to white guilt.

Who on earth would have their lives improved by this latest farce of the taxpayer-funded Aboriginal industry, conducted here by more people identifying as Aborigines despite plainly also having many non-Aboriginal ancestors?

The session opened with Prof Eleanor Bourke, a Yoorrook commissioner, announcing it would focus on the “colonial past”. But why wallow yet again in a past that’s 200 years stale?

Then another commissioner, Sue-Ann Hunter, welcomed Victorians to what she insisted was actually her Wurundjeri land. Hunter, who identifies as Aboriginal through her father’s mother, finished with a neo-pagan prayer: “May Bunjil look after us as we conduct Aboriginal business.”

Eleanor Bourke, a Yoorrook commissioner, says it will focus on the ‘colonial past’.

Pardon? Bunjil is the wedge-tailed eagle that the Wurundjeri – we’re told – thought was the creator, but who believes that today? Most Aborigines are Christian, so the Lord’s Prayer would have been a far more representative way to start the meeting. Then came a white commissioner, Tony North KC, to start this “truth telling process” with hair-raising tales of “the horror of Victoria’s history” that I’ve found in no authoritative history.

Whites had not just “stolen” the land from Aborigines “but “massacred” 20 per cent of the Aborigines (really?), before deciding to “concentrate First Nations people into reserves” under laws “designed to assist the elimination of First Nations people”.

Is that what passes for “truth-telling” for this government-funded revolutionary tribunal? Concentration camps? Tribes with no towns, constitution or even written language as “First Nations”? Even claiming reserves, designed as safe spaces, were part of a plan to “eliminate” Aborigines?

Then followed the first of the three token whites to confess to white guilt – a woman who’d researched a local massacre in the 19th century and led campaigns to remove memorials to white colonialists. All this sludge, of no help to anyone. Just demonising our past in a way that can only encourage hopelessness, hatred, resentment and we-are-owed.

Look at Victoria and beware.