Bolt critic changes tune on race

A photographer who took Andrew Bolt to court over articles he wrote about skin colour has changed her political stance.

Photographer Bindi Cole Chocka.

A Melbourne photographer who was among the nine indigenous artists who took columnist Andrew Bolt to court over two articles he wrote discussing their identity and skin colour has said she “probably wouldn’t” follow the same course of action if she had the time again.

In a video posted to YouTube, Bindi Cole Chocka, whose grandmother had Aboriginal heritage, said her exposure to conservative views during and after the matter changed her political stance and identity.

She said she was no longer a left-wing “social justice warrior and ­virtue signaller” and now identified as a conservative Christian with mixed heritage.

Speaking on his Sky News segment on Thursday night, Bolt said the discrimination case was a low point in his career and that it was a “sinister overreach of state power” for the Federal Court to have stopped publication of his two articles.

His articles criticised fair-skinned indigenous artists who he said used their Aboriginal identity for career progression.

In 2011, judge Mordecai Bromberg found that the way Bolt’s articles were written had contravened section 18 (c) of the Racial Discrimination Act and were reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate some fair-skinned ­Aboriginal people.

He also ruled the articles “contained errors of fact, distortions of the truth and inflammatory and provocative language”.

On Thursday, Bolt said Chocka’s change of heart was proof “that race was in this case, at least, a question of choice”.

“One of my key arguments in those pieces was that these nine Aborigines had a choice of how to identify themselves: Aboriginal, white, both or whatever,” he said.

In Chocka’s YouTube video, she said identifying as “a victim” meant she did not have to take ­responsibility for her behaviour. “I could constantly blame everything and everyone else,” she said.

“What I was was a social justice warrior and a virtue signaller.”

She told The Weekend Australian yesterday that she had always believed she was of mixed racial identity. “I realised there is a problem with identity politics and intersectionality,” Chocka said.

“When you do identify in these ways, you are so often buying into a victim identity.”

Chocka said she had ­become a Christian and had shifted her political views from the Left to the Right. She said she “probably wouldn’t” use the Racial Discrimination Act to sue if she had her time again.

“When I went through the ­Andrew Bolt case I genuinely ­believed those things I was doing, now I realise I had the wrong mentality about a lot of things,” she said.

“I still think the things Andrew Bolt wrote about me were not good; he tore down my character and was not fair; he didn’t know me. But I wouldn’t want to limit free speech.”

Chocka said she no longer ­entered her work for indigenous awards but her art was still sometimes chosen to run alongside that of other indigenous artists.