After this year’s shambles, I thought I would get in early and nominate Alice Kunek as Australian of the Year for 2017. Alice is a basketball player and a member of the Australian Opals. Another member of the Opals is Liz Cambage. Born to a Nigerian father, she is 6 feet 8 inches tall and is therefore not to be trifled with on the basketball court or, so it seems, when she takes on collective responsibility for all black basketball players she thinks are being subjected to racial vilification. Recently, Alice, Liz and their team-mates decided to have a Silly Sunday fancy dress party to celebrate the end of the season. But what should have been a fun occasion turned, or so we are told, into a rampant and disgraceful exercise in racism. The thought police have found another victim, Alice Kunek. Unfortunately, Alice decided to go to the party as her favourite singer, Kanye West, an American hip-hop artist married to Kim of the Kardashian clan. He is also an African American and you will therefore appreciate that to go to a fancy dress party as the man himself necessarily involves some change in your general appearance, unless you are black. Alice got herself up as what is sometimes referred to as ‘blackface’ and put an image of herself as Kanye West on social media, although judging from the photograph she was more beige than black. She was of course doing no more than having some fun by dressing up in a time honoured tradition as a tribute to her hero. But the effect on Liz Cambage was cataclysmic. She burst into tears and was ‘devastated and absolutely gutted’ by her team mate’s appearance. It was the most she could do in this state of advanced distress to rush off to play basketball in Shanghai as one of the highest paid players in the world. Worse, a ‘racial row’ is now ‘gripping’ the Opals team. Now, everyone knows their role in these sensitive days when the slightest deviation from the approved line on diversity can have immediate and enormous consequences, not to mention public naming and shaming and trips to the Human Rights Commission and the Federal Court, as Andrew Bolt found to his cost. Accordingly, Basketball Australia leapt into the fray and announced that they too were outraged, that the matter was a case of ‘incredibly serious’ racial vilification and that Alice would undergo education in ‘sensitive social issues’.Heaven knows what horrors await young Alice during that process. Moreover, not only is the miscreant to be re-educated, but the same treatment will be meted out for ‘the education of all basketballers around the country on racial and religious vilification’. Naturally, the Race Discrimination Commissioner, Dr Tim Southphommasane, hungry for work and ready to seize on every imagined wrong, quickly got decreed, without a hearing, that Alice’s conduct was a case of racial mockery, humiliation and, like everything else with which he disagrees, ‘unacceptable.’ The whole thing is an absurd, appalling over-reaction to a harmless joke. Yet again, we are allowing our lives to be divested of all humour and our actions to be manipulated and forced into a boring, regimented mould of conduct approved by a band of jumped-up moralists. And they are winning. The pronouncement that ‘all’ basketball players are to be taken to the re-education camp is a particularly gross over-reaction and smear; are they ‘all’ racists? I am appalled by the whole thing, for several reasons. First, the very idea that Alice Kunek would have been motivated by racism rather than fun, is ludicrous. Racism is denigration because of race; Ms Kunek was not denigrating West, but honouring him. The thought police, of course, say that blackface was always racist. It was not; if anything, it was adulation. Its most famous practitioner, Al Jolson, used it to promote recognition of Jewish and black suffering and struggles and the popularity of ‘My Mammy’, for instance, generated immense support and sympathy for the black struggle. Secondly, before they branded Alice as a racist, someone might have asked Mr West if he felt offended. The notion that anyone in the narcissistic Kardashian clan could be sensitive about being impersonated stretches credulity to breaking point. Moreover, West’s wife has a half sister, Kylie, who has herself been accused of using blackface. Her reply could well be adopted by all do–gooders and moralists, especially Ms Cambage: ‘Let’s All Calm Down’. Thirdly, where is the racism in dressing up as a black entertainer for amusement or mimicry? Black entertainers, today, insist on being identified as black, simply because they are black. They demand seats on the Oscars panel to be reserved for blacks and that a quota of Oscars be awarded to blacks. That is real racism, not dressing up and pretending to be a black entertainer. Finally, there is a very serious point here, about the road we are now heading down. The finding of guilt against Andrew Bolt in the infamous 18C case was bad enough; but at least the alleged victims were making a claim about how they, themselves, had been offended. Ms Cambage, in contrast, has been allowed to name and shame her team mate in public and have her punished, by claiming a right to be outraged on behalf of others, namely all other basketball players. The result is that they will now ‘all’ be re-educated. What is the next step on this disturbing downhill road? Are we all to be encouraged to be outraged and offended on behalf of others? Are we all to become public dobbers and pimps?