Not since Gulliver’s Travels has there been such an absurd visual image: a giant of a man towering over a land of pipsqueaks and midgets, as they grovel and fawn at his feet. The giant was of course a real one, the seven-foot-tall African American basketball player and occasional rap artist Shaquille ‘The Shaq’ O’Neal. The pygmies were of course metaphorical ones; the leading lights of the Albanese government; Labor’s Lilliputians.

As our editor pointed out on this page a week shy of the last federal election, in his warning to voters, an Albanese Labor government would comprise of ‘possibly the lowest calibre of intellects and individuals ever to assemble in a single federal parliamentary party room (other than the Greens, but that should go without saying)…’. Indeed, the events of the past week prove the accuracy of that prediction.

Only a moron would fail to see that there is no possible connection between this particular African American celebrity and those who are supposedly crying out for a ‘Voice’ to represent them in our parliament other than… the colour of his skin. There is literally nothing whatsoever that qualifies Mr ‘Shaq’ to speak on behalf of a single dispossessed or aggrieved indigenous Australian other than… the colour of his skin. There is no linkage, no matter how remote or tenuous or contrived, between a wealthy retired basketball player and the complexities involved in changing our constitution other than… the colour of his skin. There is no line that can be drawn in any credible way between alleged past atrocities committed against aborigines that can only be addressed through an entire new apparatus of government and a man who has made millions of dollars out of throwing a basketball around than… the colour of his skin.

Which leads to the inescapable conclusion – denied repeatedly by anxious commentators and politicians alike – that the Voice is about race, it is wholly about race, and it is about nothing but race.

But the stupidity does not stop there. As has been pointed out by numerous astonished commentators, Mr O’Neal is in Australia to promote an American gambling enterprise. In other words, The Shaq and his overseas sponsors make money out of a perfectly legal but – to many on the wowser Left – morally dubious activity that causes significant unhappiness (and worse) to many long-suffering individuals within the indigenous community.

Yet this inconvenient fact appeared to not bother Labor’s cheer squad one whit. Indeed, the ABC’s Patricia Karvelas, as woke as they come, tweeted – in response to the negative commentary that followed hard on the heels of the Prime Minister’s ridiculous stunt – ‘If you think Shaq doesn’t matter you haven’t lived in the multicultural suburbs of melb where I come from. He is a god.’

A god no less! A god who, it appears to have escaped Ms Karvelas’s attention, is happy with uber-misogynistic lyrics in his songs (yes, he’s a rapper as well) such as, ‘Taxiderm your bitch head, mount it on a wall’ and ‘We want the exotic, erotic ladies, not them toxic ladies that burn a lot’. So it can’t have been his songwriting skills that canonised Mr O’Neal in Ms Karvelas’s eyes.

What’s more, Shaquille O’Neal has gone on record praising Donald Trump. So it can’t have been his politics that conferred divine status upon him, either. What on earth could it have been?

Oh, that’s right… the colour of his skin.

Tanya Plibersek, another of Mr Albanese’s short-in-moral-stature ministers, decided that what qualified The Shaq for such a privileged role in promoting the Voice is his support for Black Lives Matter. Except, Mr O’Neal has been just as vocal in supporting the police against the supporters of BLM. So, no, it can’t be that. Which takes us back to her undoubted appreciation of… the colour of his skin.

Mr O’Neal is here to make a buck and we wish him well in that endeavour. That he was canny enough to use the preening, patronising racism of our left-leaning politicians and media to his own advantage is no indictment on him but a savage indictment of them. What this episode – savagely condemned by both Jacinta Price and Lidia Thorpe alike – demonstrates is that the Labor leadership team are as gullible and foolish as star-struck teenage girls.

Worse, much like Joe Biden – who famously proclaimed, ‘If you don’t vote for me, you ain’t black’ – this mob are racist to their very core, unable to see anything beyond the black skin of an African American. Shame on them.