Andrew Bolt: The truth is the last thing race activists want

AFLW player Daisy Pearce and Greens senator Lidia Thorpe are spreading equally false and destructive claims about our nation’s history.

It was actually nice Daisy Pearce – not hate-preacher Lidia Thorpe – who scared me last week by refusing to mourn Queen Elizabeth.

Thorpe, the Greens Senator, is a professional race-baiter: she was always going to call the Queen a “coloniser” responsible for Australians having a competition to kick off the heads of Aboriginal children.

But not Pearce.

Pearce, the AFL women’s league star and Channel 7 commentator, never struck me as someone out to spread falsehoods and division.

She’s more a team person, a former Australian captain, happy to just go with the cultural flow.

So what she said on SEN radio to defend the cancellation of a minute’s silence for the Queen at the AFL’s women’s games was more disturbing than Thorpe’s rant, given almost every “fact” Pearce cited was equally false and destructive.

Pearce protested that Aboriginal players couldn’t be asked to honour this “figurehead of colonialism” and “ongoing oppression”.

AFLW Melbourne skipper Daisy Pearce. Picture: Michael Klein

“It represents the genocide of their people, the theft of their land, the erasure of their culture and way of life, the loss of their wealth, their basic human rights – and their children.”

Where did Pearce learn such a string of falsehoods and exaggerations? In school? And how many other young Australians have been coached into such hatred of our past and institutions?

In fact, there was no “genocide”, and while land was “stolen”, Aborigines today have some form of control over 49.3 per cent of Australia.

Nor has the Aboriginal culture and way of life been “erased” so much as adapted or abandoned.

Western civilisation is more attractive and makes for an easier life than foraging for yams and grass seeds. It’s also given Aboriginal women more rights than male-dominated tribes ever did.

As for the “stolen generations”, the courts are yet to find a single person “stolen” from their family just because they were Aboriginal, and not abandoned or in perceived danger.

If these truths sound too shocking, it’s because truth is now dangerously rare. Which brings me to the hypocrisy of Lidia Thorpe.

Thorpe, writing in the Guardian Australia last week, said: “Breaking the cycle of colonial oppression starts with truth-telling.”

But truth seems the last thing Thorpe or other race activists want. Take this line in her article: “The ‘British Empire’ declared a war on these shores, against this country’s First Nations peoples.”

False. The British declared no such war, and hanged whites convicted of murdering Aborigines. Nor were Aboriginal tribes organised into political “nations”.

Thorpe also claims the “symptoms of an ongoing war” include “deaths in custody” and “child removals”.

Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe.

False again. Aboriginal prisoners are actually less likely that white prisoners to die in jail, and saving children in danger of being bashed, raped or neglected is not an act of war.

Or take this Thorpe claim: “Our young people are turning to suicide, because they don’t see a future for themselves in the systems the monarchy created.”

The truth: suicide rates among Aboriginal children are nearly twice as bad in regional and remote areas – where Aboriginal culture tends to be strongest.

What’s more, evidence suggests most were tragically driven to suicide by other Aborigines, not the Queen or colonialism. The Nat­ional Critical Response Trauma Recovery Project found a third of ­Aboriginal children who committed suicide were victims of sexual abuse.

But what does Thorpe care about truth? In a tweet last week, she gave this reason for not respecting the Queen: “They buried our kids in the sand and kicked off their heads … This isn’t about an individual, it’s about the institution she represents and the genocide that they’re responsible for.”

That head-kicking seems an urban myth, recounted in a book by an amateur historian quoting someone claiming her Queensland mother had told stories of white men burying babies up to their heads in sand and holding “tests to see who could kick the babies’ head off the furthest”.

Let’s not be delicate here: do you think it even possible to kick off a child’s head, and that we had people so depraved as to make a competition of it?

And how can anyone claim Queen Elizabeth would be responsible for such a demonic crime, long before her reign?

For Thorpe to spread this intrinsically unlikely story as not just true, but typical of the Queen and her empire tells you everything about her inflammatory disregard for truth.

I guess most of us knew that already. But Daisy Pearce shocked me by innocently revealing just how far such poison has spread.