Bill Leak’s truth for all beats sensitivity of a few

How have the protesters squealing after Bill Leak’s death missed the seachange in discussion of Aboriginal affairs?

How have all the pious race protesters squealing in the wake of Bill Leak’s death missed the seachange in discussion of Aboriginal affairs these past three decades towards a balance between rights and responsibilities and away from victimhood?

One answer might be that they are too young to have seen the debate morph under the inspiration of the nation’s most senior traditional elder, Galarrwuy Yunu­pingu, its greatest Aboriginal intellect Noel Pearson and its most popular political and media advocate Warren Mundine.

After all, last Monday’s stand-in Q&A host, Tom Ballard, born in 1989, was not alive when Yunu­pingu kicked off the debate about welfare dependency in speeches he made in 1978, when he was named Australian of the Year. Ballard was too young for kindy when Galarrwuy started labelling the problem “sit-down money”.

All the outraged moral posturers on Twitter calling racism on Bill Leak’s cartoon in the wake of the Four Corners’ Don Dale ­detention centre program last August seem to have missed the point entirely. Twitter is a world in which the feelings of self-­identifying urban Aboriginal university students and their friends trump the rights of outback Aboriginal children to grow up safely under the care of their parents, including their fathers.

And remember the boy in the spit hood and restraint chair, Dylan Voller: his mum and siblings were deserted by his father when he was three in Adelaide, scene of last Monday’s Q&A artsy love-in.

Ballard opened discussion of Leak with an admission he had signed a letter to the editors of The Australian complaining about the cartoon in which an ­Aboriginal policeman accompanying an Aboriginal boy is asked by the boy’s father: “What’s his name then?”

Warren Mundine said last Tuesday that the protesters who interrupted the program to defame Leak as a racist were “idiotic morons” who should “grow up and confront the real issues in our community”. Exactly.

And yet David Marr had a point in The Guardian on Wednesday when he said campaigners for free speech and the rewriting of section 18C of the ­Racial Discrimination Act could not really complain when Leak’s opponents exercised their own rights to free speech. Marr accepts 18C needs changing, and would likely concede Leak himself would have been robust in his response had he been alive to hear the program.

The Aboriginal cartoon issue raises many questions about the modern Left.

Why do progressives who insist white fathers need to play a bigger role in the raising of their children not agree the same applies to black fathers? It has been clear since this paper’s Rosemary Neill won a Walkley Award for a piece in 1994 detailing at length how crime rates against Aboriginal women and children were almost all due to Aboriginal fathers that this is a serious issue.

Can we, 25 years later, really place the feelings of offended Aboriginals from good homes ahead of the wellbeing and physical ­safety of Aboriginal women and children in danger?

Of course there are many good Aboriginal dads and Leak knew plenty. Yet that does not diminish Bill’s point, as Mundine argued cogently in this paper on Friday.

The Australian has dominated coverage of Aboriginal affairs for three decades, something acknowledged widely by Aboriginal leaders. If you doubt it, read my piece published last August 15 in defence of Leak’s cartoon for a potted history of the awards this paper has received for stories broken in Aboriginal affairs. It is also a paper that made Eddie Mabo its Australian of the Year at a time many feared Mabo would destroy regional Australia.

For the past 30 years the paper has been largely alone among the media in this reporting. Why?

It goes to the racist culture of low expectations that dominates left-wing thinking about Aboriginal life, even in journalism. Noel Pearson was greeted with outrage when he spoke about this culture within the ABC at the launch of Troy Bramston’s book, Paul ­Keating: The Big-Picture Leader, late last year.

Noel was right and the Leak cartoon is at the heart of why. People who think the cartoon is racist — like those on the Q&A panel and its youthful host — are implying black fathers should not be held to the same standards as white fathers. In my book Making Headlines, released last October, I write at length of this culture of low expectations and the unchallenged racism behind it.

As an ambassador for the ­Australian Indigenous Education Foundation and a close friend of its founders, Andrew and ­Michelle Penfold, I cannot tell you how often I have confronted wealthy, left-wing parents who sent their own children to prestigious GPS schools but think there is something wrong with scholarships to such schools for bright Aboriginal kids. They see it as destroying Aboriginal communities and families rather than lifting those communities and families.

This is the Left’s unconscious but real racism. The racism that says Aboriginal people should not aspire to the same things white people do. They should be happy with their collectivist, primitivist conditions, as if their lives were part of some academic experiment by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau about the noble savage.

People who have read the Northern Territory’s “Little Children are Sacred” report, the one that prompted John Howard’s 2007 NT intervention, understand there is not a lot of nobility for many in these traditional communities, racked as they are by poverty, homelessness, drugs, alcohol, pornography and child abuse.

Into this feeds the new Left’s post-materialist abandonment of economic empowerment in favour of the identity politics that now dominates tertiary education in the US and Australia. Paul Kelly wrote a brilliant piece last Wednesday linking this to the Leak matter and 18C.

Aboriginal thought leaders have for decades understood the perverse racism in the Left’s elevation of feelings over material wellbeing. I first published Pearson on the perils of what he called “ethnic essentialism” in The Courier-Mail in the late 1990s.

So where does this culture of offence — typified by the reaction to Leak’s death — take our society?

As Media Watch pointed out last Monday week, it has already generated self-censorship in the progressive media. Host Paul Barry outed Fairfax and the ABC for failing to report stories about the radicalisation of Islamic school students in Sydney. This is journalism surrendering truth in the name of not offending racial minorities.

Anecdotal it may be, but ask any senior teacher about classroom discussion in secondary schools today and he or she will tell you the dialogue with modern year 11 and 12 students is dominated by what cannot be said.

“You can’t say that sir. It’s offensive. You can’t ask that miss. It’s racist.”

Who is standing up for the role of truth in education, the media and public discussion?

This is where the rubber hits the road for modern Western democracies. Voters will not cop laws and governments that elevate this politically correct offence culture.

Voters will react with the sort of blowback we saw in favour of Donald Trump, Brexit and Pauline Hanson. The Left cannot fool all of the people all of the time, even if it is fooling many politicians and the deluded business leaders at the forefront of some of the most stultifyingly PC campaigns in modern Australia that seem to have zero to do with their fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders.

Here’s the thing. So what if Bill Leak occasionally drew things some people found offensive. Some Aboriginal dads do have disproportionate numbers of interactions with the criminal justice system for offences against their families. Islamic terrorism is real. The radicalisation of young Muslims in the West does need to be confronted honestly. Leak risked his life to do so.

And portraying a young Muslim woman in full covering asking “Does my bomb look big in this?’’ is surely an amusing way to handle a serious point.

Did Bill desperately want legal changes so he could be more offensive? Of course not.

Bill was the sweetest man I knew. But he understood the damage being done to Western civilisation by the amalgam of postmodern Marxist thought and the politics of identity. In the Middle Ages and later, academics used to risk death at the stake to speak the truth. Now many seek to suppress it in the mad assumption the feelings of a section of society are more important than truths for the whole society.