‘Racist’ left-wing trope reveals disdain for fellow Australians | Caleb Bond
When the ABC star says Australia is a racist country she doesn’t mean her friends or viewers of 7.30, writes Caleb Bond.
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ABC political correspondent Laura Tingle freelancing as a left-wing warrior on the weekend may have been bad.
The national broadcaster has a charter to which it must adhere and a journalist of Ms Tingle’s experience should know better than to go running her mouth at the Sydney Writers Festival.
Perhaps she felt comfortable among the crowd, as though she were sitting in an eastern suburbs drawing room sipping chardonnay with her socialist mates.
A cursory glance at the festival’s program reveals a who’s who of insufferable lefties – ABC acolytes Barrie Cassidy, David Marr, Hamish Macdonald and John Lyons, author Bruce Pascoe, who says he identifies as Aboriginal, and many more.
But her real crime was to wheel out the oldest and tiredest of tired Australian left tropes – that we’re a racist country.
For Pete’s sake.
Unoriginal virtue signallers have been using that one since Adam was a boy.
She could have come up with something slightly newer like calling for intifada or declaring nuclear energy as not economically viable.
You’d have thought Ms Tingle and her ilk would have learnt their lesson from the flop that was the Voice to Parliament.
After being routinely bashed over the head with condemnation for months that they were racist if they voted no, people surprisingly decided that they didn’t like being called racist for not wanting to divide people by race and voted no.
But it’s usual programming in Tingle Territory.
It says it all, really, that she had to invent a scenario in her own head at which to be angry in order to reach the conclusion that Australia is racist.
She took opposition leader Peter Dutton wanting to cut migration to ease pressure on housing and extrapolated it out to a “sudden flash of people turning up to try and rent a property or at an auction, and they look a bit different – whatever you define different as – (and) that basically he (Dutton) has given them licence to be abused, and in any circumstance where people feel like they’re missing out”.
Even Inspector Gadget would struggle to reach that far.
It exposes not only the deep disdain she and many on the modern left have for their fellow Australians but also their incredible disconnect from their fellow Australians.
Imagine being so desperate to claim the moral high ground that you have to make up stories about which to be upset.
Yes, racism exists. It exists in every country on the face of the planet.
But there is no institutional racism. There is no widespread desire to split and discriminate against people on the basis of race.
When Ms Tingle says Australia is a racist country she doesn’t mean her friends or viewers of 7.30 – she means people living out in the suburbs.
But if she ever left her bubble she’d know that they’re already living cohesively in areas with large migrant populations.
Their children are going to school with people of every race, ethnicity and colour.
More than 30 per cent of Australia’s population was born overseas.
I’m sure they all came here and keep coming here because they love racism.
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