Everyone is Racist, Including the ABC, and SBS – Except Paul Keating by Tom North

Some media statements by notable people need to be quoted rather than paraphrased for the full impact to hit. Thus, consider Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson’s comments about the “racist” ABC (The Australian, November 22, 2016, p. 1) in the context of Paul Keating’s promising reforms which had been:

“Wrecked by ignorant ministers and malign bureaucrats, aided and abetted by the media, not the least the country’s miserable, racist national broadcaster.” The ABC was “a spittoon’s worth of perverse people willing the wretched to fail.”

How so?  “They need blacks to remain alienated and incarcerated, leading short lives of grief and tribulation because if it were not so, against whom would they direct their soft bigotry of low expectations? About whom could they report of misery and bleeding tragedy?”  And between the ABC on the Left and Quadrant on the Right, is “the common ground of mutual racism.” Oh, the SBS has been now added to this list, along with most major newspapers, by others: The Australian, November 23, 2016, p. 5.

Thanks for that, I will remember it all, and especially when it comes to the Constitutional referendum, voting “No.”  I, for one, are a bit fed up with being told that I am a racist, sexist, homophobic etc. etc. My revenge, like yours will come in voting.
As for reports about “misery and bleeding tragedy” I think not enough is heard. I did not find Noel Pearson or Paul Keating’s response (which is not to say that there was not one, just that I couldn’t find it), to the story ran in The Australian (November 18, 2016, p. 1), “Culture ‘an Excuse’ for Violence.”

Quoting from the article, three Aboriginal women at a panel on indigenous community violence at the National Press Club said that “(s)hocking rates of domestic violence among indigenous Australians are being excused as “a matter of culture” and left unpunished to reduce the number of assailants being sent to jail.” This “reverse racism” involved “an indefensible adherence to traditional law” which “was denying women and children their human rights.”

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, while just 2 percent of the adult Australian population, account for 27 percent of the prison population. Academics, mainly whites in city universities, say that such arrests are a product of institutionalised “racism”.  I was at a sociology seminar once where a (white) professor basically said that almost all of these people were innocent, essentially framed by crooked cops. That could be true for some, but is unlikely to be generally true, accounting for the full statistic.

Those claims by the sociologists need to be evaluated in the light of the domestic violence data. The article from The Australian cites facts: almost 10,000 indigenous fathers are in gaol for acts intended to cause injury, sexual assault or other crimes and “almost a quarter of the indigenous population older than 15 reported that they had been victims of physical or threatened violence in the past 12 months;
that indigenous females were 32 times as likely to have been hospitalised as non-indigenous females between July 2011 and June 2013;
and that indigenous males were eight times as likely to have been hospitalised for assault as other males.”

In remote and very remote regions, indigenous hospitalisation rates for assault were between 28 and 23 per 1,000 people respectively.
The rate in major cities was four per 1,000 people.

Is all of this a product of white “racism”?  Not so according to one indigenous woman at the panel:

“we can’t keep pointing outwards and blaming the non-indigenous people… for our problems.”
“There’s a social inability to criticise anything indigenous, and Aboriginal people are encouraged not to evolve with the rest of humanity… our leaders need to be held to account. It is not acceptable that any human being has their human rights violated, denied and utterly disregarded in the name of culture. It is a national shame that in our recent history Aboriginal male perpetrators have got away with their crimes based on the argument that they are operating within their culture’s confines.”

I would be very interested in knowing, if comments have not already been made which I am unware of, Noel Pearson’s and Paul Keating’s thoughts on this issue. Especially you, Keating.