Well, I guess we can thank Michael Mansell and his fellows of the Paleface-GimmeGimme tribe for doing us a favour of sorts. Mansell’s unhinged, grasping greed is showing exactly what an “Indigenous Voice” will be like in action: a never-ending concatenation of whingeing and demands for more and more gibsmedat.
Mansell has long been something of a cross between the clownshow and the huckster in the circus that is Tasmanian politics. He first came to national notoriety in the late 80s, when he travelled to Libya to pal around with Colonel Gaddafi. Now he’s making a clown of himself (again) by trying to lay claim to a yacht.
The owners of a $170,000 yacht abandoned during the Sydney to Hobart must pay a third of its value to the Indigenous community that “owns and operates” the remote Tasmanian island where it washed ashore, according to the local Aboriginal Land Council.
Indigenous residents of truwana/Cape Barren Island claim the boat should not have been removed from the island by a salvage operator because “whatever washes up on the shore of Aboriginal land becomes Aboriginal property”.
The yacht was abandoned in Bass Strait after it lost its rudder during the Sydney to Hobart race. It ended up washing ashore on Cape Barren Island a week later. The insurance company successfully salvaged the yacht, with permission from Indigenous representatives from the Cape Barren Island Aboriginal Association.
But the association and Aboriginal Land Council of Tasmania now claim the boat is subject to an old Aboriginal sea law, which means it cannot be removed from the island until one-third of its value is paid or ownership is transferred to the Aboriginal people.
Ah, yes — just like the Aboriginal yachts of yore. Enter Mansell, honking his idiotic little horn and grasping for yet more attention and money.
“I want my boat back,” ALCT chairman Michael Mansell said.
Asked how he would do that, Mr Mansell said: “We’ll sit down and talk to the insurers and owners. We’ll explain that there was a process they should have gone through, which they didn’t. If your boat washed up in New Zealand, you wouldn’t just go get it, you would ask what local law was.”
The Australian
Well, we know what local law — Australian law — is. And it says that Mansell is entitled to precisely diddly.
We’re also entitled to ask for evidence of this alleged “traditional law”. Otherwise, it sounds suspiciously like someone making up stuff to line their own pockets.
But this is an important case because it’s a stark warning of what Labor’s dangerous, racist “Voice” referendum will lead to… the trumping of Australian Common Law with Stone-Aged tribal rules.
It’s notable, though, that these activists are highly selective about which tribal laws they want to live by. Arranged marriages for girls at puberty? “Payback” by spearing or clubbing?
Meanwhile, as one wag has suggested, if “whatever washes up on the shore” becomes Aboriginal property, we’ll duly dump the next boatload of asylum seekers on Michael Mansell’s doorstep. They’re all his, now.