The Aboriginal Establishment has made itself clear: dodgy “academics” peddling nonsense-dressed-as-history, and touting their alleged “Indigenous” racial credentials will be not only tolerated but celebrated. Uppity women who promote Aboriginal entrepreneurialism and rock the Establishment boat will be summarily clubbed over the head with a political nulla-nulla.
The indigenous entrepreneur who formally alleged that acclaimed author Bruce Pascoe gained a financial benefit from wrongly claiming to be Aboriginal has lost her place on the senior body advising government on the co-design of a voice.
What’s even more egregious about this gutless grovelling to the racial grievance mongers is that it is perpetrated by a so-called “conservative”, supposedly in charge of the process of “reconciling” Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal Australians.
“I have today written to Ms (Josephine) Cashman to advise her of the cessation of her appointment to the Voice Co-design Senior Advisory Group,” indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt said in an email to newsrooms on Tuesday.
“Following recent discussions with the Senior Advisory Group Co-Chairs, Professor Dr Marcia Langton AM and Professor Tom Calma AO, and after careful consideration, I have decided that Ms Cashman’s membership of the Group is no longer tenable.
“Ms Cashman’s actions are not conducive to the constructive and collaborative approach required to progress the important co-design process for an indigenous voice.”
In other words, the narrative is set in stone. Either shut up and do as you’re told, or you’re out with a clip over the ear.
The AFP [Australian Federal Police] did not inquire into Professor Pascoe’s indigeneity as part of its assessment. The agency assessed the material provided by Ms Cashman to determine a financial benefit and there was not one, The Australian has been told. This meant the AFP did not take any further steps.
No financial benefit, I suppose, if you just ignore the tens of thousands of dollars in public money intended solely for Aboriginal Australians, not to mention the cosy “Indigenous” sinecures. The Feds, like the government itself, have opted for the gutless path of least resistance.
It cannot be merely coincidental that Cashman was threatening to open a can of worms that could potentially have brought much of the Aboriginal Establishment crashing to the ground.
The complaint sparked a furious debate about indigenous identity, particularly because Ms Cashman had suggested in her email to Mr Dutton that Australia should develop a national register of indigenous people.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/ken-wyatt-dumps-josephine-cashman-in-wake-of-dark-emu-scandal/
While author and political staffer Helen Dale has a fair point when she notes that “I’m horrified at the thought of a ‘register of Aborigines’ — as if that sort of thing hasn’t led anywhere awful historically”, even she acknowledges that such a register has been implemented by some indigenous groups themselves. Native American groups, for instance, demand specific ancestral quanta, among other things, from individuals wishing to claim Native American status.
These rules, as Dale notes, “permit groups such as the Navajo to police who gets access to revenue from casinos or other local enterprises. They also allow First Nations people to give opportunistic sorts a boot up the jaxie, as the Cherokee did to [Elizabeth] Warren”.
No doubt many Aboriginal Australians would dearly love some similar means of weeding out opportunists and frauds. It certainly doesn’t escape the notice of the poorest Aboriginal Australians that the extraordinary amounts of taxpayer money that Australia lavishes on the Aboriginal Establishment – $30 billion, or just over twice what the government spends on non-Aboriginal Australians – rarely seems to reach the remote communities in the direst need. Instead, city-based “Aborigines” too often seem to be ghostly-pale, well-off, inner-city types, who scoop the cream off Aboriginal funding.
Dale is right that the idea of a race-based national register is repugnant. But, isn’t that where you inevitably end up, once “progressives” start insisting on race-based policies, and policing racial quanta with all the obsessiveness of an Obersturmbannfuhrer drawing up an Ahnentafel of Jewishness?
As YouTuber Derrick Pilot observes, people who call themselves “anti-racists” often end up being very racist indeed.
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