Aboriginal leader Noel Pearson was partially correct the other day when, speaking at the launch of Troy Bramston’s new biography of Paul Keating, he denounced the ‘soft bigotry’ directed towards indigenous Australians.

‘Not the least the country’s miserable, racist national broadcaster: a spittoon’s worth of perverse people willing the wretched to fail,’ he thundered, colourfully tarnishing all who work at the ABC with the same ideological brush.

‘They need blacks to remain aliened from mothers’ bosoms, incarcerated in legions, leading short lives of grief and tribulation – because if it were not so, against whom could they direct their soft bigotry of low expectations? About whom could they report of misery and bleeding tragedy?’

His specific criticism is, of course, accurate. But he has put his finger on a far larger truth than simply a question of how aboriginal Australians are viewed. He has belled the cat on identity politics. The list of ‘wretched’ groups whom the Left are ‘willing to fail’ for their own ‘perverse’ ends includes not only all indigenous Australians, but all Muslims, all asylum seekers, all gays, all transgenders, all women, all people of colour, all young people, and… well, pretty much everybody who isn’t over forty, male, white and ‘privileged’.

The Left wallow in and peddle wretchedness and victimhood. It is the only product the Greens, and now increasingly Labor, have any success in flogging; so it’s hardly surprising they manufacture ‘misery’ wherever they can.

Mr Pearson describes the very essence of what drives, these days, the politics of ‘compassion’ and ‘identity’. You either belong to an ‘aliened’ tribe – which can be easily joined via links to cultural background, skin tone, sexual preference and other markers which require neither skill, proof nor merit to establish – or you belong to the evil Oppressors. Once you have chosen to identify with an oppressed group, this gives you carte blanche (as it were) to be as demanding, as rude, as vitriolic, as nasty and as greedy as your base envy desires; for the simple reason that you are now ‘fighting’ for your ‘equality’ and access to your ‘entitlements’. And those who refuse to hand you holus bolus whatever it is you demand are, by definition, ‘denying you your rights’.

So in order to recruit activists to the cause, and to swell their coffers as well as their numbers, the Left in Australia draw on every tool at their disposal to perpetuate the ‘low expectations’ that Noel Pearson refers to – and apply them to entire communities, willing them to permanent failure status. Thus, aboriginal Australians are so fragile, so put-upon, so hopeless that even a poignant cartoon or a flippant comment on facebook is an egregious insult requiring government intervention. Thus, Muslims are so downtrodden and harassed that even suggesting that their religion foments terrorism will, illogically, fuel in them an unstoppable urge to kill. Thus, gay youth are so enfeebled, so distraught, that even debating the word marriage will see them charge lemming-like to their own deaths. Thus, children who like to dress up and play at being of the opposite sex are so at risk of being bullied that they require instant medical intervention lest their every whim not be instantly gratified. Thus, every two-bit, low-life scumbag from Africa or the Middle East who gets to the West and then sets about thieving, vandalising, molesting or worse is so fragile and oppressed that they cannot be identified by the police as being who they actually are.

The list goes on, and it grows longer every day. As do the entitlements; the latest of which are preposterous concepts such as ‘adjustment disorders’ and ‘domestic violence leave’.

Pearson is right to blame the media for encouraging ‘low expectations’ among minorities. Endlessly telling girls, as our feminists gleefully do, that they will face a lifetime of sexism and violence from angry white husbands; telling Muslims that someone needs to ‘ride with them’ to keep them safe; telling gays that they are hated, only serves to increase individual anger and a sense of aggrieved victimhood. The Left play upon this largely imagined oppression like sinister paedophiles, grooming the weak and vulnerable with the lure of ideological revenge and the promise of ever more lavish taxpayer-funded ‘entitlements’.

In praise of Dutton

Australia is rightly proud of its migrant history, often proclaiming itself the most successful ‘multicultural’ nation on earth. But we can only take credit for our successes if we own up to our failures. Peter Dutton is correct in his criticism of the downside of the 1970s unfettered Lebanese Muslim immigration. Truth hurts.