Ugly race debate gets in way of helping victims, says Ray Martin

Ray Martin warns the ugly debate over Australia's indigenous community risks getting in the way of helping victims.

Ray Martin: ‘You can’t just keep calling the “poor bugger me” card and blaming white fellas’.

Veteran broadcaster Ray Martin has warned that the debate over Australia’s indigenous community has become so mired in hate- speech baiting and “poor bugger me” posturing it is getting in the way of the far more urgent challenge of stopping the carnage in Aboriginal communities.

Martin, a longtime champion of indigenous Australians, says every serious attempt to debate the “horrifying” rate of chronic illness, suicide, domestic violence and rampant sexual abuse that continues to dog remote Aboriginal communities in particular is invariably derailed by “nonsense” charges of racism.

Martin’s comments follow an ugly on-air spat on Monday’s episode of Network 10’s Studio 10 program between fellow panellists Yumi Stynes and TV veteran Kerri-Anne Kennerley.

Stynes said Kennerley was “sounding like a racist” after she asked why ­Australia Day protesters weren’t doing more for remote indigenous communities where “babies and five-year-olds are being raped … their mothers are being raped”.

That prompted a massive backlash against Kennerley, including calls from protesters for the Logies Hall of Fame inductee to be sacked.

Alice Springs councillor and indigenous leader Jacinta Price, who publicly defended Kennerley in The Australian on Tuesday, was so overwhelmed by social media trolls and abusive posts yesterday that Facebook blocked her ­account. She said Stynes had used the oldest and most cowardly trick in the book, shutting down debate by crying racism.

Martin yesterday told The Australian indigenous Australians — 2.5 per cent of the country’s population — were “still the sickest, the most sad, homeless, jobless and ­suicidal community” in the country — and on some counts the world. But he said the only time the issue was debated was when people “hurl racist abuse at each other on television”.

“So often, TV comments will spark a debate, but the debate never goes anywhere. Everyone just wrings their hands about who is a racist and who isn’t,’’ Martin said.

Martin, whose great grandmother was a Kamilaroi woman from Tamworth in NSW, says he doesn’t believe the “average Aussie is racist”. But, he says, the desperate plight of First Australians was not going to change without a more confronting and honest discussion about why Australia still hadn’t managed to close the huge disadvantage gap.

Issues such as land rights and Australia Day, he said, came a far second to more fundamental and confronting concerns such as making sure young Aborigines had a fair start in life.

He said it was “outrageous” the rates of Third World diseases such as rheumatic fever and scabies in Aboriginal communities were the highest in the world. Yet, inexplicably, no amount of government and corporate funding seemed to be able to fix the problem.

“There is $34 billion going out there every year somewhere and it’s doing next to nothing,” Martin said.

“You can’t just keep calling the ‘poor bugger me’ card and blaming white fellas when kids don’t go to school and get their faces and noses wiped. It’s also pointless to blame the Kerri-Anne Kennerleys or the black fella leaders in outback communities,” he said.