On Tuesday the High Court of Australia has handed down a decision that for all intents and purposes looks like the dictionary definition of racism enshrined in law on precedent. In determining that Daniel Love and Brendan Thoms cannot be deported due to the invocation of a new and unprecedented ruling, the High Court has, perhaps unwittingly, although not necessarily so, unlocked a Pandora’s Box of what will now become an era of what I predict will now become the most divisive identity politics yet seen by modern liberal democracies. And the ultimate irony of its consequences is darkly humorous in light of the purported Liberal ideal. 

The High Court determined, in a 4:3 split, that the constitutional provision pertaining to alien powers could not be applied to those who identified as Aboriginal Australian. In effect the Court found that those identifying as Aboriginal Australian had special status under the law. The result of this ruling is that both men who were not Australian citizens can not be deported despite not meeting the same standard of immigration test as applied to everyone else. 

The Oxford English Dictionary defines racism as follows: ‘Prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone of a different race based on the belief that one’s own race is superior’. And, ‘the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics, abilities, or qualities specific to that race, especially so as to distinguish it as inferior or superior to another race or races.’ 

The effect of the interpretation of custodial rights emanating from this ruling has the potential ripple effect that will now play out over the foreseeable future. If such a determination is to be applied equally and equitably on a global scale then all non-citizens will have asylum rights based on genetics and even potentially more spuriously, on racial self-identification. To suggest that Australian Aboriginals are somehow ‘special’ in this regard is patently absurd. The modern cosmopolitan and multicultural world that was a keystone of the liberal democratic project, means that very few individuals are genetically heterogeneous with racial inputs from far and wide. This is certainly the case within the Australian Aboriginal community.  

Indeed, only those utterly blind to the full sweep of human history could regard the Australian Aboriginal story, one of a hunter-gatherer society intersecting with a widely different outside world as anything unique or special. Despite this near-universal history of humankind, there now exists a legal precedent that if emulated on a global scale, will see a rush to asylum rights for non-citizens all around the globe. This may sound like a long bow, but look how other identarian issues have progressed legally, such as with Transgender activism in secular democracies. In many jurisdictions, the law pays no credence to biological facts whatsoever. Why should someone, many generations removed with some portion of Celtic genetic makeup, born in Argentina, not have unfettered asylum in Britain? And just as we have seen with Elizabeth Warren and Bruce Pascoe, what constitutes a substantive enough genetic or racial makeup to claim an exclusive connection to a particular race — 1:1000th or simply a claim to racial self-identification? And what legally becomes of all the other racial genetic components of an individual, are they to become ‘race non grata’ or is claim to racial asylum simply to be tradeable and changeable based on what is in an individuals’ self-interest at any given time.  

And here is the irony, as we see the rush to racial silos based on special legal status the liberal ideal of treating all as equal will unravel, as it has done in this instance. It exposes the identarian politics of the left for the divisive push for elevated power and status that it always was and is. It has nought to do with the ideal of equality as so poignantly captured by Martin Luther King JNR’s famous “I have a dream’ speech. In fact, quite the opposite is true. His dream which has been captured and mutilated by the left might now read ‘when a person is conferred special advantageous rights under the law based on their racial profile’. This will not cement the nationhood ideal and that of an integrated multiculturalism. It will simply act to drive people to identify first and foremost with a racial clan. And such tribalism never ends well. 

 It never ceases to surprise me, how ‘wokeism’ blinds all its adherents to history and true universal equality and requires that in order to supposedly usurp the alleged ‘white’ racist power structure, one must seemingly institute their own brand of racism. 

 Same old racism, different package. 

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