The Mocker on Julian Burnside

Julian Burnside. Picture: Peter Ristevski

Julian Burnside AO QC serves as an example that not all middle-aged white males are despised by the progressive left. Perhaps best known for his advocacy of asylum-seekers and his condemnation of the government’s immigration policies, he is a darling of the chattering classes and feted at writers’ festivals.

His list of accolades is a long one. Like fellow luminaries Gillian Triggs, Waleed Aly and Yassmin Abdel-Magied, he is a recipient of Liberty Victoria’s Voltaire Award for free speech. As with businessman Clive Palmer and many other pontificators, he is one of Australia’s National Living Treasures. In 2014 he was awarded the Sydney Peace Prize, and is an Officer of the Order of Australia, and – look, I could have a go at listing all of his awards, but this column does have a word limit.

An avid user of social media, Burnside regularly tweets homilies on the virtue of manners and decency. “’Political correctness’ is a way of restoring good manners to public discussion,” he said in 2016. “Free speech should not free us from good manners.”

Presumably this explains in part why he wishes parliament to retain section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which makes it unlawful to offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate another person on the basis of their race, colour, or national or ethnic origin. This section, he helpfully tweeted in 2016, “helps encourage good manners”.

Section 18C also helps drag innocent people before po-faced officials of the Australian Human Rights Commission to account for making innocuous remarks, as well as forcing them to spend thousands of dollars to defend themselves in court. One could point out to Burnside the incongruity of his enthusiastic support for this legislation and his accepting an award based on Voltaire’s apocryphal remark “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”, but he might construe this as bad manners.

Last Saturday week Burnside provided us with an example of his respect for good manners and all things decent. “@PeterDutton_MP is the most powerful MP in Australia, and arguably the least scrupulous,” he tweeted in reference to the Home Affairs Minister. His remarks were accompanied by a retweeted image showing Dutton’s head superimposed on the uniform of a Nazi SS officer.

Not surprisingly, this undergraduate and offensive slur provoked repugnance and shock, especially among those in Australia’s Jewish community. “No Australian can be compared to Nazism,” said Melbourne resident Moshe Fiszman, 96, a survivor of the Auschwitz and Dachau concentration camps. “Us few survivors are very upset about this.”

Burnside has since apologised to “those offended by the tweet,” (which he has not deleted), but does not regret sharing the image. “I did not mention the Holocaust,” he said. “My concern is to remind people that the way the Nazis thought, and in particular the way they distorted public opinion to encourage fear and hatred of Jews, is worth remembering these days.”

Mind you, Burnside himself is not above encouraging fear and hatred. A quick search of his Twitter account reveals he incessantly refers to Australian immigration centres as “concentration camps”. What is the purpose of using that terminology if not to insinuate those who operate them are no better than the Nazis? In his attempt to avoid that accusation he argues that he refers to the British concentration camps of the Boer War and not those of the Nazi regime. That is sophistry. “A doctor from Manus told me ‘It’s what Auschwitz must have been like’,” tweeted Burnside in 2015.

This was the same Burnside who in 2015 tweeted his outrage that then prime minister Tony Abbott had compared Opposition Leader Bill Shorten to Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels. “This man is our PM???,” said an indignant Burnside. Perhaps he had forgotten a tweet of his from the year before: “Question Time: (minister for immigration) Scott Morrison looking more and more like Hitler as he ranted at the despatch box”. Or this from last year: “Turnbull has given Dutton powers that (Hermann) Goering would envy,” tweeted Burnside, referring to Nazi Germany’s notorious vice-chancellor.

Many of Burnside’s disparaging tweets are directed towards Dutton, for whom he reserves a special rancour. “Oh yes, I forgot,” a sneering Burnside tweeted in 2015 in response to an allegation that Dutton had lied. “He was a Qld policeman”. Bear in mind this comes from the self-proclaimed man of manners. The imputation is not subtle: Burnside no doubt was attempting to conflate Dutton with the corruption-ridden Queensland Police that was exposed in the Fitzgerald inquiry of 1987-89.

This is a risible smear, for Dutton’s service record in the police force was a sound one. One of the new breed, he joined in 1990 when the force was implementing reforms following the inquiry’s recommendations, and was soon made a detective. His integrity and competence were such that he was seconded to the then National Crime Authority. But that has not stopped Burnside’s sinister insinuations. “Over $5m in negative geared property,” he tweeted in 2016 in reference to Dutton’s investment portfolio. “Not bad for an ex-cop”.

Notably, Burnside – who normally engages with people on Twitter – did not disassociate himself from the tweets in response that inferred Dutton’s holdings had been accumulated by untoward means. In fact, Dutton is long renowned for his formidable work ethic. At only 12, he worked as a butcher’s assistant while still at school. He bought his first property at 18, and supplemented his modest police salary by working on building projects with his father. The barrister Burnside – a good burgher of the Melbourne inner-city suburb of Hawthorn who has grown wealthy from representing the likes of the late billionaire businessman and corporate fraudster Alan Bond – is not as egalitarian as he would have us believe.

It is not the first time Burnside has made a complete goose of himself on Twitter. In 2011, after a series of tweets referring to a book by Susan Mitchell, Tony Abbott: A Man’s Man, Burnside sent a disparaging tweet in reference to “Paedos in speedos”. In the backlash that followed, he strongly denied he was referring to Abbott and his swimming costumes. “This is (sic) unprompted apology to #Abbott. He is NOT a pedophile and I was not referring to him. He has many flaws but that is not one of them,’’ he tweeted. “I am new to Twitter and thought I was replying to one person,” he added. Only last week he claimed in his defence that “Twitter is not an ideal place for complex ideas.” Instead it would appear Twitter is far too complex for Burnside.

Unfortunately, it is unlikely Burnside’s self-awareness will benefit from the experience. “Let’s call out the trolls who like writing false, insulting, defamatory tweets,” he tweeted to his followers on April Fool’s Day. “The whole thing was brought to light by an article in the Australian, a Murdoch newspaper,” wrote Burnside following his Nazi smear against Dutton. “It is easy to forget that just before the last Federal election a Murdoch paper ran front page pictures of Shorten and Albanese in Nazi uniforms!”

Burnside is kidding himself if he thinks that amounts to moral equivalence. Contrary to what he claimed, the Daily Telegraph ran this edition during the election campaign of 2013, not 2016. It featured then prime minister Kevin Rudd and deputy PM Anthony Albanese, not Shorten, in a mock-up of the television comedy series Hogan’s Heroes. And the uniforms in question were those of the German Luftwaffe, not the death squads of the SS. Does Burnside really not see the difference between a comedy set inside a prisoner-of-war camp and one set in a concentration camp?

“It is now very clear that my ideas about human rights are out of tune with the thinking of ‘ordinary Australians’,” lamented Burnside in 2004 following the re-election of the Howard government, adding that he was seriously considering moving to Canada or New Zealand. “I want to say that Australia can do better than this. Does anyone care?” As it turned out, very few did, but – heaven be praised – he elected not to leave these shores.

“I was a goodie-goodie,” said Burnside, reflecting on his childhood when interviewed last year on ABC’s One Plus One. “I must have been insufferable.” Julian, some things never change.