In a PC world, don’t dare criticise what you can’t understand

Police in Victoria, led by Daniel Andrews, play down the dangers posed by violent Sudanese criminals, while Sydney Lord Mayor Clover Moore, right, was quick to dismiss Man Haron Monis as a terrorist.

When Bob Dylan sang “Come gather ’round people wherever you roam and admit that the ­waters around you have grown”, he wasn’t singing about global warming and rising sea levels. He was alerting the world to an ­unstoppable civil rights movement aimed at achieving for African Americans equal access to, and opportunities for, the basic privileges and rights afforded to all other citizens. It was a grassroots movement determined to rectify a self-evident injustice.

Dylan advised his followers to get on board. “You better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone, for the times they are a-changin’,” he intoned.

Now, 50 years on, the tide has turned. The noble principles ­behind the civil rights movement are in retreat. Masquerading as minority oppression, victimhood is a thriving industry. Whether well-meaning or a sinister exercise to divide society according to ethnicity, colour, gender, religion, sexual orientation and social status, self-identifying minorities are demanding, and receiving, preferential treatment.

While ordinary Aussies have yet to be told to sit at the back of the bus, they watch in bewilderment and with rising anger as they see their national identity ­replaced by a patchwork of incoherent foreign values. Should they complain, new government agencies and statutes are there to keep them in their place and to ensure they keep their whiteness and cultural and ­religious values to themselves, lest they ­offend others. Rather than oppress ­minorities, we pander to them. Complaining about a discriminatory “indigenous only” computer room can, at great personal cost, land you in court, as Queensland University of Technology students found.

Some minorities shamelessly exploit this obsequious regime. Centrelink refuses to collect data on polygamous marriages under Islamic law, despite the fact when claiming welfare, some families involve a domestic relationship with more than one wife. We indulge the tiny transgender, ­intersex “community” with gender-neutral toilets paid for by taxpayers and businesses.

To placate minorities, Victoria Police has regularly baulked at calling Middle Eastern crime by name and played down the dangers posed by violent Sudanese criminals, notwithstanding they are 44 times more likely to bash, rob and invade homes. When Victoria’s Premier Daniel Andrews ­referred to “out-of-control South Sudanese youth”, The Age ­accused him of making “unpleasant and inflammatory” comments to provoke “a predictably base ­reaction from those sensitive to immigration on racial grounds”.

Perhaps this is why Victoria Police told media before interrogating Saeed Noori, the accused driver who allegedly mowed down Christmas shoppers in Melbourne’s Flinders Street, that the attack was not terror-related. Noori later spoke of Allah and the mistreatment of Muslims. Police had similarly played down an Islamist angle after the siege in the Melbourne suburb of Brighton last June, despite the offender’s links to known terrorists.

Sydney’s Lord Mayor Clover Moore was quick to dismiss Man Haron Monis, the gunman who laid siege to the Lindt Cafe, in which two innocents died, as a terrorist, despite him displaying an Islamic State-like flag in the cafe window and having affiliated himself with the terrorist group.

When it comes to sentencing, the courts take The Age’s sensitive approach. Ibrahim Kamara, from Sierra Leone, received a suspended sentence of just over one year, with an 18-month good ­behaviour order, after admitting to five counts, including grooming and having sex with a minor. The ACT Supreme Court judge said “(Kamara) has tried to make a good start on his life in Australia”.

Sevdet Ramadan Besim planned to drive his car into a police ­officer performing duties on Anzac Day and then behead him to promote “violent jihad”. He ­received a minimum sentence of just 7½ years.

In NSW, an Islamic sect leader was the first person in Australia to be imprisoned over the genital mutilation of two sisters aged six and seven. Notwithstanding a 21 years maximum, the leader ­received 11 months’ jail, while his two accessories will serve a minimum of 11 months’ home detention. This sets a derisory bench­mark for future sentencing.

Federal Health Minister Greg Hunt refreshingly observes that “state courts should not be places for ideological experiments”. Yet they are. Judges have become politicians in robes and, like the police and other unelected authorities, selectively administer the law according to their prejudices.

Then there’s South Australia’s initiative to commit $4.4 million to commence indigenous “treaty” ­negotiations. It joins Victoria, which began similar Aboriginal engagement in 2016. An indigenous Referendum Council is pushing for a constitutionally elected indigenous body in federal parliament, a mechanism for treaty-making and a healing com­mission. There is talk of inserting a racial non-­discrimination clause in the Constitution and amending pro­visions allowing the common­wealth to make special laws for indigenous people on the basis of race, the very antithesis of American civil rights ideals.

Aboriginal broadcaster Stan Grant writes: “We don’t have to reckon with the treatment of ­Aboriginal people because they are invisible. Indigenous people become a postscript to Australian history.” When Australian taxpayers pay the equivalent of $43,000 a year for every First Australian, that’s some postscript.

In his Christmas message, Malcolm Turnbull told Australians we have much to be grateful for, not least that so many people of “so many different backgrounds, races and religions live together here in a harmony founded on mutual respect”. His sentiments are well intended and worthy but the multicultural policies he and Labor support have left us, in American commentator Pat Buchanan’s words, “irretrievably divided on separate shores”.

Australia no longer pursues the rapid assimilation of minorities. Rather, diversity is institutionalised. It would be foolish to believe profound and unpredictable consequences won’t follow as the silent majority reflects on its own segregation. Yet the louder it protests, the more it will be controlled. Civil liberties be damned.

It’s time to admit the safe ­waters around us are receding and we’re sinking like a stone.