In 1996 when Pauline Hanson called for ATSIC to be abolished and all Australians to be treated equally, she was incredibly branded a racist. Hanson and Graham Campbell were the first to say that welfare was killing Aborigines but were drowned out by most of the media as politicians stood by wringing their hands.
In the late 1990s, an intemperate Noel Pearson called John Howard a racist and described the Howard Government as ‘racist scum’ over Howard’s native title legislation. Howard prophetically stated, ‘Have we, surely not reached a situation in this country where, if you disagree with somebody, you have the smear of racism directed at you?’ Some years after Hanson, a calmer Noel Pearson conceded that welfare dependency was indeed the poison killing his people and he described ATSIC as being ‘very dysfunctional’, requiring ‘very radical reform.’
Racism has been around for a long time in different guises but those on the Left have developed the tagging with it into an art form in the decades after WW2. My paternal grandfather Luigi Pasquarelli, came from Northern Italy to the Ingham canefields before WW1 and had blue eyes and a pale complexion but he was considered ‘black labour’ by the then pro-White Australia policy AWU, who aggressively campaigned against all those Italian migrants on the canefields, in particular the ‘swarthy’ Southern Italians. Now we have the pot calling the kettle black with Aborigines calling each other ‘coconuts’.
The vilification of Hanson was constant and shocking and her defenders in the media and politics were few. Described as a f—ing whore and everything bad and evil from A-Z, it was the Greens and the Lefties who pelted her and her supporters with condoms of urine and packages of human excreta. Well after I left Hanson I was taken by surprise when sitting in a train at Flinders Street, I was spat full on in my face by a very pale young Aboriginal woman.
At a meeting between Hanson and Aboriginal elders at Purga Mission near Ipswich in 1996, Hanson was called ‘white trash’ and a Courier-Mail female journalist remarked ‘but what’s so bad about white trash?’ when I challenged her as to why the insult had not been published. When I was with Hanson I had dealings with many Aborigines who supported what she was saying but they were fearful of receiving the ‘Uncle Tom’ treatment from those militants in the Aboriginal industry and the same applies today with racial insults being traded over the Wild Rivers legislation and the Woodside Kimberley gas deal.
Over the years I have visited many outback Aboriginal settlements and have wondered why I didn’t meet those Aborigines described by Andrew Bolt, working alongside their brothers and sisters, helping to sort out the mess that too many of these places are, rather than having to listen to their lofty pronouncements made from the comfort of some taxpayer-funded, prestigious academic platform?
‘Racist’ has been so devalued by the intellectual pygmies who spew it out, that it now means nought. Professor Geoffrey Blainey and John Stone, ex-Secretary of the Federal Treasury have been branded racists, so one is in good company and I told Andrew Bolt the other day – ‘join the club.’
Living national treasure, champion of human rights and republican Julian Burnside who luxuriates in the title Queens Counsel, demonstrated recently just how bereft the mud-slinging Left is in the areas of decency and common sense. Burnside’s asinine 2011 “Paedos in Speedos” Tweet about Tony Abbott was compounded by his inability to remember who he originally Tweeted to – and this quality of memory from a much-vaunted QC? Compounding his bogan stupidity, Burnside pressed on by saying that Abbott has many flaws but paedophilia is not one of them! Burnside has been badly burnt but that won’t stop the Left.
John Pasquarelli is a former adviser to Pauline Hanson and wrote her 1996 maiden speech.
