his most arrogant way, by pouring contempt on the idea that any children were stolen. His extraordinary performance on that occasion took many people's breath away. В
Michael Duffy, another "expert" on Aboriginal affairs
The Murdoch tabloid directed at the less formally educated sections of society, the Daily Telegraph, retains three rabidly right-wing populist columnists whose function is to cater to the perceived prejudices of the paper's audience, to whit, Piers Ackerman and the Janissary journalists Miranda Devine and Michael Duffy. p> On the Telegraph opinion page of January 5, 2000, Duffy has a carefully worded piece headed, Keep the H word out of our history. He goes out of his way to stress the Jewish origins of a number of prominent public critics of Australian racism against Aborigines, while of course disclaiming any anti-Semitism, in singling out these Jews. p> Apparently Jews are more sensitive on these things because they got here more recently and their familiarity with the Holocaust directed at the Jews of Europe has made them overly preoccupied with such matters and led them to exaggerate the magnitude of the atrocities perpetrated on Australia's Aboriginal population. Get the message! Rootless cosmopolitans don't understand Australian history as well as older "Real Australians" such as Duffy, who properly understand in their bones that our treatment of the Aboriginals wasn't all that bad.
Duffy is worried that the Labor side of politics may be gaining some momentum among liberal-minded Australians by its defence of Aboriginal rights, and he bemoans the fact that the vigorous defence of Aboriginal rights, and a vigorous focus on past wrongs done to the Aboriginal population, is dividing Australia. He says:
The last thing Aborigines - or those genuinely interested in their wellbeing - need is for their future to be affected by the introduction of concepts and words which inflame and confuse our view of those horrors which did happen here.
And, later:
In the meantime, the best thing the rest of us can do is resist attempts to polarise Aboriginal matters. This includes attempts to change the meanings of words in common use. p> Elsewhere he makes the extraordinary statement:
Most people would now agree that One Nation was in fact not a racist phenomenon.
So we had all better get the message. Pauline Hanson is not racist, and anyway, many of the people making a fuss about Aboriginal oppression are a just a bunch of Jews. British Australia did some bad things to the Aboriginal population, but we shouldn't exaggerate it. After all, the main danger in Aboriginal affairs is not really the oppression of the Aboriginal people, but the damaging possibility that inflaming anger about injustices to Aborigines will interfere with the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
In the Telegraph a bizarre competition is developing between Duffy and Piers Ackerman, with the two tabloid columnists trying to outdo each other in the vicious extravagance of their comments on Aboriginal affairs. Well, Duffy now has to be way in front in this contest, with his contribution on March 25 to the debate on mandatory sentencing. The following extract is something of a new low in nasty tabloid treatment of these matters:
It is particularly nauseating that this new racism has been practised in the name of virtue. Many of these sanctimonious whites, this small army of lawyers, anthropologists, public servants and journalists, have lost touch with the spiritual roots of their own culture and have tried to redeem themselves by feeding off Aboriginal issues, which they pervert to suit their own decadent spiritual requirements. Their new religion is anti-racism, and everything is interpreted as a racial issue, no matter how wrong and destructive of Aboriginal interests this might be. It is time these white moral maggots were shaken off the body of black Australia, from which they have sucked so much life.
White maggots, indeed! White maggots of Australia unite! Within a couple of days of Duffy's extraordinary outburst in his column, an opinion poll was published in the newspapers of March 28, showing that more Australians opposed mandatory sentencing than supported it, and many more again opposed mandatory sentencing of adolescents. I'm considering having a badge made for public sale, with the slogan, "I am a white maggot".
It almost goes without saying that it would be fascinating to get Duffy down on a couch and try to draw out of his mind by psychoanalysis what ghosts and demons are running around in his head about "rootless cosmopolitans" and "white maggots" "Interfering in Aboriginal affairs". <В
The saga of Jack and Lallie Akbar
A brutal and instructive episode in both Aboriginal affairs and Australia's race policy relating to Asians...
