Andrew Bolt: Racism scandal shows Phillip Adams the real joke

Fresh off a racism scandal, it’s clear ABC star Phillip Adams is a prototype of the modern moralist — condemning others for the sins they themselves display.

Phillip Adams copped criticism for calling signer Kamahl an “honorary white”.

ABC star Phillip Adams claimed two weeks ago he couldn’t be a racist bigot because his white-complexioned wife, former model Patrice Newell, had turned out – surprise! – to be Aboriginal.

There are plenty of reasons to laugh at Adams’ excuse, not least because neither he nor the adopted Newell had any idea when they married that Newell had an Aboriginal ancestor.

But I’ve now found one more reason not to buy the old fraud’s defence to the deserved criticism he got for telling Malaysian-born signer Kamahl that cricket legend Sir Donald Bradman treated him as a friend only because he was an “honorary white”.

It’s The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes, which he and Newell put together in 1994, when Newell was still a white and Adams was the Labor-appointed chairman of the National Australia Day Council.

I’m shocked. It includes the most disgustingly racist anti-Aboriginal “jokes” I’ve ever heard.

A typical one starts: “Jacky was sitting on the stoop …”

Yes, his and Newell’s “jokes” refer to Aborigines as “Jacky”.

Another “joke” has an Aboriginal walking into a pub with one thong: “The barman asks, Did ya lose a thong, mate?” “Nah, I found one.”

The worst, which I won’t repeat, involves a “Jacky” found injured after falling from a car with “dents in every panel” and “nine black fellows in the back, all drinking warm sherry”, plus “six dogs on the front seat”.

Adams put together The Penguin Book of Australian Jokes in 1994.

How does Adam still have a job at the ABC? How did he get to be a foundation member of the Australia Council and chairman of the Film, Radio and Television Board, awarded no fewer than four honorary doctorates and an Order of Australia?

Adams in his preface admits the jokes are racist but pompously claims he included them “because it’s important to understand what mainstream Australia regards as funny in the 1990s”.

These “jokes”, he insists, “are the most honest indicators about (sic) what we are really feeling.”

Speak for yourself, Phillip. The mainstream Australia I knew never thought this crap funny, and shame on you and Newell, now calling herself a “proud Gundijtmara woman”, for having published such sick stuff for cash.

I mention this book because Adams is a perfect prototype of the modern moralist, who condemns others for the sins they themselves display.

Think of global warmists such as Leonardo DiCaprio who fly on private jets. Think of Prince Harry, selling his royal family’s secrets for squillions while complaining about intrusions on his privacy.

Or think of supporters of the Voice – Labor’s plan for a kind of Aboriginal-only advisory parliament – who claim they’re fighting racism while pushing for apartheid.

Adams’ reply to Malaysian-born signer Kamahl caused controversy.

Patrice Newell co-authored the joke book with her husband.

Those supporters predictably include Adams, once a lion of our cultural elite, who hitched himself to every popular Left-wing cause from Gough Whitlam to global warming, including the anti-Catholicism that has him now re-tweeting jeering abuse of George Pell after the Cardinal’s death last Tuesday.

Yes, Adams is a type. Like many of that purulent collective that controls the ABC and many other cultural institutions, his posturings seem driven more by tribalism than morality.

For instance, Adams recently boasted he’d “made it mandatory” at the National Australia Day Council to choose as Australian of the Year someone who’d make conservative broadcaster Alan Jones “apoplectic”.

A joke, you say? If so, it’s one he repeated for two decades – claiming back then his aim was to “discompose calcified conservatives”, which makes me wonder how many worthy Australians Adams refused to honour just out of partisan spite.

In much the same way, his support for illegal immigrants seemed driven more by a tribal contempt for the millions of Liberal voters who’d kept his Labor mates out of office.

Adams, a long-time Labor Party member, denounced the “mass of Australians” who backed the Howard Government’s tough border policies as “little people” with “the racism of nice people who live in nice houses”, voting for a Prime Minister who “speaks at the deep, dark depths of our mediocrity”.

Behold the voice of a colossal snob, a multi-millionaire hurling abuse at “little” Australians from his 3500 hectare organic farm.

Yes, abusing the same Australians he’d once sold books with racist jokes about “Jacky” that he and his wife selected in the revealing belief they reflected “what we are really feeling”.

In Adams’ case, I don’t doubt it. From Jacky jokes to the Voice – for Aborigines deemed too different by our elite to handle our democracy – isn’t really such a big step.