Australia is being urged to become an apartheid state: to adopt, as the Cambridge dictionary defines it, a political system in which people of different races are separated. In the bizarre world of contemporary leftism, this racial separation doctrine is being touted as supposedly an “antidote” to an imaginary “systemic racism”.
Australia is heading down the wrong road on race relations…the leading ideas in Aboriginal politics have transformed into an Australian version of the astonishingly destructive identity politics approach to race…the conflict that identity politics brings is guaranteed to go on forever. The rewards and attention go to people who express the greatest grievance the loudest, so pressure for escalation is endless.
To reject this toxic and terrible formulation is not about defending whiteness or any such drooling nonsense. It is about common sense.
One of the few noteworthy things Malcolm Turnbull did during his lamentable time in office, was to reject this racist proposal.
Morrison and Malcolm Turnbull before him both rejected the Uluru Statement from the Heart proposition that an Aboriginal voice to parliament should be established and enshrined in the Australian Constitution. They rejected the idea not because it couldn’t pass at a referendum. They rejected it in principle.
They rejected it because it would introduce into the Constitution a distinction between classes of citizens based on race or ethnicity. One childish debating trick proponents of the constitutionally mandated voice go for is to say race is a meaningless social construct so therefore anyone who says such a voice would introduce racial classifications into the Constitution is being racist.
This argument is circular, silly and dishonest.
Those championing this apartheid law bizarrely claim to be “liberal”. This is just another lie.
The liberal position on this is clear. Liberalism is about removing all distinctions of race, ethnicity or ancestry in any legal, constitutional status.
Martin Luther King argued for a society in which his children would be “judged by the content of their characters, not the colour of their skin”.
By the standards of contemporary leftism, MLK was a drooling, far-right racist.
All this gibbering nonsense about an “Aboriginal voice to parliament” ignores one single, simple fact: Aborigines have a voice to parliament. It’s the same one members of every other racial group have. It’s called a “vote”.
I conceive of myself in many [identities] — family, professional, voluntary etc. But I only want the state to recognise me in one way — as an Australian citizen.
Every other Australian citizen, whether they came as a refugee from Syria or are Aboriginal or arrived as grown-up migrants or their ancestors came generations ago, is just as good as me and as anyone else. The arguments for a special constitutional category for Aborigines are spurious.
theaustralian.com.au/commentary/a-constitution-that-distinguishes-us-by-race-this-way-madness-lies
And very, very racist.