Andrew Bolt: Selfish race-baiting last thing we need in a pandemic

A single Aboriginal death from Covid among 1000 others has given race baiters another excuse to push the toxic claim that Australia hates Indigenous people.

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe. Picture: Sean Davey

Not even this pandemic will stop our professional race baiters from spreading their poison. Dear God, let them please, finally, shut up.

Last week, Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe complained that sending our soldiers to help the vaccine rollout in Aboriginal communities like Wilcannia was proof of “systemic racism”.

Which Aborigines would trust this “militarised response”?

Yet this week Thorpe, who identifies as Aboriginal, complained that one Aborigine in Wilcannia had now died of the virus and “our communities are not getting the help they so urgently need.”

The Morrison government was “completely failing Aboriginal people”.

“People are dying out there,” she raged. “Do black lives matter?”

To that, I’d ask Thorpe not just whether she’s a monstrous hypocrite who sees racism everywhere, even, she’s said, in her white father.

I’d also ask her whether white, Asian and Arab lives also matter? Of the 1000 Australians killed by Covid-19, just one is known to be Aboriginal.

I have not heard Thorpe cry for the rest.

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe. Picture: Sean Davey

But that single Aboriginal death among 1000 others has given this nation’s race baiters another excuse to again push their toxic claim that this country hates Aborigines.

Since that death, the ABC has run story after story about the low vaccination rates in Aboriginal communities, and Labor has exploited this to damn the Morrison government as evil and anti-Aboriginal.

“It’s been one of the greatest acts of trickery and treachery, in my view, that Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, and even the Minister for Aboriginal (sic) Affairs have perpetrated upon Aboriginal people,” raged Labor Senator Pat Dodson, who identifies as Aboriginal.

This smear is grotesquely unfair to both Morrison and his Indigenous Affairs Minister, Ken Wyatt, who also identifies as Aboriginal and would hardly plan treachery against other Aborigines.

It is also false, but who cares about truth or fairness when they can have the preening pleasure of vilifying enemies as racist?

But this selfish game is the last thing we need, especially in this pandemic.

What the likes of Thorpe and Dodson ignore is not just that our governments have a responsibility to protect all Australians, regardless of race.

Our politicians therefore rushed our first supplies of vaccines to those most likely to be killed by the virus – not Aborigines, but people of all races who are in nursing homes or very old.

It worked. They cut the death rate in known infections from 4.2 per cent in Victoria’s outbreak last year to just 0.45 per cent in the NSW outbreak this year. Is that “treachery”?

That done, our governments put Aborigines among the next in line for vaccines, above all other races. But there was a problem, and it wasn’t just the remoteness of many communities.

In Arnhem Land, Bobby Nunggumajbarr says it is ‘really hard to communicate with our people’.

Few groups have been harder to convince to take the vaccines. Dawn Casey, deputy head of National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation, warned in June that Aborigines were less likely to take this vaccine than even the flu jab.

In Arnhem Land, Bobby Nunggumajbarr, chairman of Yugul Mangi, admitted “it was really hard to communicate with our people”.

This wasn’t just because of the same kind of language barriers and suspicions – especially of the AstraZeneca vaccine – that have crippled the vaccine rollout in heavily migrant areas of Sydney and Melbourne.

Ironically, there was one more conspiracy theory sweeping through Aboriginal communities, and precisely because the Morrison government put Aborigines ahead of others in the queue for vaccines, and not behind.

This conspiracy theory ran so wild that the “Mythbuster” unit set up by the West Australian government had to tackle it in a handout to Aboriginal communities: the myth that “Aboriginal people are being used as guinea pigs for the vaccine” which was now “killing Aboriginal people or making them sick”.

You might ask why so many Aborigines have this dangerously paranoid idea that their politicians are so racist that they’d make them guinea pigs for an allegedly deadly drug.

One possible answer: because race baiters like Senator Thorpe keep insisting this is exactly that kind of murderously racist country.

Thorpe hasn’t simply suggested Aborigines can’t trust our defence forces in the vaccine rollout.

She’s insisted Australia is so racist that Aborigines are “being genocided out”, with guards “killing us in the prison system”.

“When will the killing stop?” she cried. “When will the destruction of our land and our people stop?”

Hate-preaching like that has consequences. The tragedy is that low vaccination rates in Aboriginal communities is just one of them. The growing race hate is another.