We Put Up with It …

Sir: The people who champion so-called anti-hate-speech laws talk as though Aboriginal and ethnic groups are uniquely targeted. The truth is that any hate speech directed at these groups is trivial by comparison with the venomous abuse and generalisations that have been hurled at the white people of Australia. Here are some examples.

Sun Herald, June 20, 2004: “In her new book Whitefella Jump Up, writer Germaine Greer has called for Australia to embrace its Aboriginal roots to heal the ‘devastation’ of more than 200 years of white settlement. Greer, who has lived in the United Kingdom since the 1960s, said Australia’s ‘sophisticated recreation lifestyle’ has created a spiritual wasteland and pushed the lucky country to the brink of environmental disaster.”

Canberra Times, November 11, 2002, columnist Ian Warden: “The fact that there is someone like Alan Jones, and that his points of view are so sickeningly awful and yet are so stupendously popular, is a cause of great pain … This would be a better, smarter, wiser, kinder and more exciting country if he didn’t exist and/or if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of dull and gullible sheep-like people to be led, baa-ing in unison, by slick shepherds like him.”

Canberra Times, January 23, 1998: “Sydney environmental activist Peter Garrett, speaking at an Australia Day address, said that native title needed to be addressed without provisos or hidden agendas. Until it was, ‘we shall remain what we have always been: a people without a soul, not a nation but a community of thieves’.”

Canberra Times, August 29, 1985: “White people should get out of Australia and New Zealand and leave these countries to the indigenous people, Maori academic Ms Pauno Hohepa, a lecturer in women’s history at Auckland University, told the conference yesterday … She said the whites of Australia and New Zealand were the product of the ‘riff-raff, flotsam and jetsam of English culture’.”

“Australia” by A.D. Hope:

She is the last of lands, the emptiest …
Without songs, architecture, history;
The river of her immense stupidity
floods her monotonous tribes from Cairns to Perth …
And her five cities, like five teeming sores,
Each drains her; a vast parasite robber-state
Where second-hand Europeans pullulate
Timidly on the edge of alien shores …

Imagine what would happen if a poet or some other commentator said there was a river of immense stupidity flooding Italy’s monotonous tribes from Venice to Palermo; or if some academic said black people should get out of the United States and leave the country to “indigenous people”. The self-righteous activists would yell their heads off about “racism”, “bigotry”, “xenophobia” and the other empty phrases they use as a substitute for honest argument. Their pretence that everybody should be judged by the same standard, and that colour is no guide to the worth of a person, rings hollow in view of their record over many years.

If it is good enough for ordinary Australians to put up with such abuse, then it is good enough for Aboriginal and ethnic groups to put up with far milder criticism.

Malcolm H. Brandon
Merimbula, NSW