Aboriginal TV personality condemns lack of opportunity for Aborigines

Becoming a TV personality would be something of a pinnacle achievement for many people so the grievance in Stan Grant seems strange.  Governments of all sorts in Australia bend over backward to improve the lot of Aborigines and there are various sorts of "affirmative action" designed to help them.  So on a straightforward view the racism is against whites.  So what is Grant's evidence that Aborigines are badly treated by reason of their race?

He simply reiterates the old litany of Aboriginal poverty and ill-health.  That does reflect reality.  But is it the fault of the white man?  Hardly. Aborigines and whites get the same dole payments but few whites live the totally degraded life that many  Aborigines do: failing school, poor hygeine, drinking methylated alcohol and smashing one another around -- with Aboriginal men commonly visiting casual violence on their women and children.  I have seen the latter with my own eyes.

In short, no government programs so far have been able to rescue Aborigines from their own self-destructive behaviour and it seems unlikely that anything could.

Grant simply fails to take account of the fact that Aborigines really are different.  They are not "just like us but browner".  Cultures do differ.  And that that does have consequences, one of which is that whites who know them tend to avoid them -  as they would anyone found to be a dirty drunk, regardless of skin color.

Grant moans that he and his family were treated as suspect  because of their Aboriginality during his childhood. The big thing missing from his thinking is any sense of perspective.  He  assumes that he is the only one who has had crosses to bear

But we nearly all have our crosses to bear.  It's not only racial differences that can burden us. Just ask any short man about how he feels when women look right past him, for example.  And very tall women usually wish they were shorter.  And what about being fat? Is there any greater social disadvantage than that these days?  Fat is usually regarded as changeable but it rarely is in practice.

I grew up in a small country town where sport was the focus of most social activity. But at no time have I had any interest in sport.  So I was "left out" and "did not fit in" too.  But I was too busy reading books to be much bothered by that.  I could have been a whiner and a whinger about the heavy focus on sport and the way that "marginalized" people like me.  But I was not such a whiner and whinger.  I just got on with making the most of what opportunities I did have. I guess I had what people call a "thick skin".  I think I still do.  Grant clearly does not. 

He has in fact had excellent opportunities that he has  seized to his great benefit.  Why does he now want the moon too?  Nobody can have it all and the amount of social support and acclaim he has now is great.  From the position of success that he occupies, he  could surely be indulgent and tolerant -- maybe even amused -- towards anybody who criticizes or avoids him.  But he is not manly enough for that

If I am accused of hate speech for my factual reports here, it is my contention that Stan Grant is the one who is guilty of hate speech against whites


Indigenous journalist Stan Grant has declared racism is "killing the Australian dream", in an impassioned speech that has gone viral on social media.

The powerful speech, delivered at the IQ2 Racism Debate in October, emerged online last week, with journalist Mike Carlton describing it as a "Martin Luther King moment" on Twitter.

Declaring the Australian dream as "rooted in racism", Grant said the legacy of Australia's dark past continues today, citing the lower life expectancy and higher rates of incarceration still experienced by indigenous Australians.

"The Australian dream - we sing of it and we recite it in verse: 'Australians all let us rejoice for we are young and free'," he said.

"But my people die young in this country - we die 10 years younger than average Australians - and we are far from free."

Grant said Australians need to acknowledge the two centuries of "dispossession, injustice and suffering" faced by his ancestors.

"We are in so many respects the envy of the world," Grant said. "But I stand here with my ancestors and the view looks very different.

"Every time we are lured into the light, we are mugged by the darkness of this country's history," Grant said.

The speech was published online just a week before Australia Day, a day commonly mourned by indigenous Australians as the anniversary of the British invasion.  

The Sky News journalist said he had succeeded "not because of... but in spite of the Australian dream", pinning his success on his family's hard work in the face of ostracism and discrimination.

"My grandfather, who married a white woman... lived on the fringes of town until the police came, put a gun to his head, bulldozed his tin humpy, and ran over the graves of the three children he buried there. That's the Australian dream," Grant said.

"And if the white blood in me was here tonight, my grandmother, she would tell you of how she was turned away from a hospital... because she was giving birth to the child of a black person."

Grant urged Australians to acknowledge Australia's dark past and be "better" than racism.

"Of course racism is killing the Australian dream; it is self-evident… But we are better than that," he said.

"One day I want to stand here and be able to say as proudly, and sing as loudly as anyone else in the room, 'Australians ALL let us rejoice'."

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Do-gooder gets a gong

He's noticed that not everybody gets to fulfil all their potential.  But who does anyway?  And what's he going to do about it?  He doesn't say. Is he going to make the poor rich?  If so, how?  It's just feelgood rhetoric -- but people like it.  They probably think he's got new ideas.  And what's this republic rubbish? He says we need a republic so that "we can stand both free and fully independent amongst the community of nations”.  Who says we don't already? I don't think he's all that bright

It was the phrase that shocked a Defence Force riven by sex scandals and prejudices against women and minorities.  The “standard you walk past is the standard you accept” the then army chief David Morrison told the force in a YouTube video that quickly went viral around the world. His soldiers needed to show ­respect to women or “get out”.

Fierce and unapologetic, the Canberra-based retired lieutenant-general has been named the 2016 Australian of the Year for his commitment to inclusion, diversity and gender equality.

Mr Morrison last night vowed to lend his voice to the republican movement after state and federal leaders reignited the push to have an Australian head of state.

“It is time, I think, to at least revisit the question, so that we can stand both free and fully independent amongst the community of nations,” Mr Morrison said in his acceptance speech.

His 2013 video blast, aimed at ending a practice of those in command of personnel turning a blind eye to the misdeeds of soldiers beneath them, sparked a cultural shift in the male-dominated armed forces. The writer of that speech was Catherine McGregor, a senior transgender military officer who was also an Australian of the Year finalist.

Speaking to The Australian before the announcement, Mr Morrison’s message for 2016 was just as sharp. “We are a great country but imagine how much better we would be if everybody was able to reach their potential and wasn’t held back through the most questionable of criteria: their gender, their racial heritage, their sexual orientation or the god they believe in. Imagine what we could do,” Mr Morrison said.

The 59-year-old chairman of the Diversity Council Australia said he could never “unsee” mistreatment of fellow human beings.

“The nomination as the ACT Australian of the Year has given me a degree of public awareness again and I think I’d be abrogating what has happened so far if I was to simply stay silent, so I don’t intend to do that. “We’ve got a distance to travel in the Australian Defence Force and certainly the army but I’ll leave that to the current Chief of Defence Force and Chief of Army to deal with.

“Australia has got a long way to go, we are a great country, but we do have that wonderful Australian pragmatism that looks at ourselves in a fairly rational way and say ‘Well, you know what, I think we could probably be better’.”

During his 37-year military career, Mr Morrison commanded the army through a crucial part of its long-term commitment in Afghanistan. He retired in May last year and was named director of the anti-family violence organisation Our Watch in November.

On the stage with Mr Morrison last night was Gordian Fulde, the country’s longest-serving emergency department director, who was named Senior Australian of the Year; 21-year-old social entrepreneurs Nic Marchesi and Lucas Patchett, the Young Australian of the Year Award recipients; and Local Hero Catherine Keenan, a Sydney-based youth educator.

“I believe that we’re actually gaining a much greater awareness of what is right about us,” Mr Morrison said.

“We’re at something of a tipping point and the fact that so many of the nominees for all of the categories of Australian of the Year have earned their reputations through their commitment to communities both at a local level and at a national level, there’s something enormously positive about us as Australians. How could you not want to be a part of it?”

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These Leftist Double Standards are Simply Mindboggling

Until recently most folks would have been rather ashamed to be found guilty of committing gross double standards, horrific hypocrisy, and being swamped with logical contradictions. But regrettably many today not only do not mind all this, but even wear it as a badge of honour.

And there is no group more guilty of all this than the secular left. They regularly delight in utter hypocrisy and rampant double standards. But in an age where reason, logic and morality mean very little, they don’t seem to mind a bit being caught out time and time again with such duplicity and deception.

Examples of this are everywhere to be found. Let me just offer two very recent cases of this, both from Australia. The first one comes from Tasmania. As one news report states:

    "Former Greens leader and Senator Bob Brown has been arrested during a community protest over logging in northwest Tasmania, after he refused to leave the site. Mr Brown was protesting with activists about the Forestry Tasmania’s logging project at Lapoinya when he was asked by police to leave the site but refused.

    He was taken to Burnie police station to be processed before he is released from police custody. Steve Chaffer from the Bob Brown Foundation told AAP that Mr Brown had gone up to support the community protest. He said the arrest is a reflection of new “draconian” laws in Tasmania which prevent protests at workplaces."

Um, and what would those draconian laws be Mr Brown? Oh yeah, exclusion laws – you know, the very ones you and the Greens fully supported when it comes to peaceful vigils outside of abortion clinics. You don’t want any of those crazed baby lovers anywhere near those death mills, and you find nothing draconian about such laws at all. But here, well….

Jim Collins, head of FamilyVoice Australia’s Tasmania branch was quick to get a media release out highlighting this gross hypocrisy. He writes:

    "Tasmanian Greens former leader Bob Brown has been arrested for protesting inside an exclusion zone around a northwest logging site. Everybody knows Bob Brown is passionate about our environment. But where was his objection in 2013 when all Tasmanian Greens MPs voted for a draconian law prohibiting any form of protest – even silent prayer – inside a 150 metre exclusion zone around abortion facilities?

    Graham Preston is currently on trial in a Hobart court for standing peacefully near an abortion clinic, holding a sign saying: “Everyone has the right to life, Article 3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” The back said: “Every child has the right to life, Article 6 Convention on the Rights of the Child.” His second sign showed an unborn child eight weeks from conception.

    Bob Brown’s protest was designed to save trees, and he faces a $10,000 fine. By contrast, Graham Preston wanted to peacefully save human lives. He faces a possible $11,550 fine and/or one year in jail. If Green activists want to protest about restrictions on their freedom to protest, removing our abortion clinic ‘no go areas’ should be on their protest priority list too!"

Yes exactly, but do not expect any rational clarity and logical consistency anytime soon from the mad hatter Greens. They seem to prefer things to be as irrational, bizarre and contradictory as possible. The secular left are experts at all this, after all.

Things get no better in the Australian state of Victoria. The radical leftist Labor government there seems to be on a crusade to stamp out biblical Christianity. They have already told us that religious Christmas carols are verboten at Christmas, and now want to tell the churches just what is and is not sinful behaviour.

They want to ban all help for any homosexual who may want assistance in exiting the lifestyle. Nope, they must not be allowed to have any choice in the matter. Homosexuals must remain as they are, and any attempts to help them go otherwise will result in Big Brother Victoria throwing the book at you.

I wrote about this diabolical anti-Christian bigotry here: billmuehlenberg.com/2016/01/25/our-victorian-gaystapo/

But let me try to get this straight. If you happen to be a homosexual in Victoria who would like some help in getting out of the lifestyle, the government will deny you that right, and prosecute anyone who dares to offer such assistance. Right, got it.

Yet I am 100 per cent certain that Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and his Labor Party are fully supportive of men who want to become women, or women who want to become men. They would simply squeal with delight over cases like that of Bruce Jenner.

They would enthusiastically promote, endorse and celebrate such “transitions” and would insist that all available help be given to them, all at the taxpayer’s expense of course. One can completely ignore reality and biology and simply proclaim you are not who you were born to be, and the secular lefties just love it.

‘Of course you can be any gender you want to be honey. How dare I or anyone else prevent you from choosing for yourself just what you want.’ But hey, when it comes to homosexuality, it is a completely different story: ‘Sorry bud, but once homosexual, always homosexual. You were born that way, it is immutable, and we will make it a crime to even suggest otherwise. Tough luck bud, you must remain as you are, because we say so.’

Hmm, gotta love the double standards of Andrews and the loony left. Biology is merely a figment of our imagination, and choice is the name of the game – indeed, a fundamental human right. But those who seek to leave one very PC lifestyle have no rights whatsoever, and any and all choices must be stripped away from them.

Never mind the many thousands of ex-homosexuals who have proven what a lot of baloney the “born that way” mantra is. I know many of these people. Real change is possible, and those who seek such change have every right to get any help required.

But not here in the People’s Republik of Viktoria. Fuhrer Andrews has decided that the right to choose will not be available to any homosexual who wants out, and they must remain as they are, because the State always knows best. Folks, in my books that is just about as fascist and totalitarian as you can get.

But with the gaystapo now running the show here, we can expect even worse hellishness to come. If you happen to be a Bible-believing Christian who lives in the police state of Victoria, you now have to decide if you are ready for prison ministry.

There will be no other options here: you will either remain true to Christ and His Word and become an enemy of the State, or you will renounce Christ and cozy up to the pink dictators. It is your choice. But I implore you to choose wisely my friend.

Welcome to the Brave New World of secular left hypocrisy.

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The animus against adoption among Australian social workers

BOOK REVIEW of "The Madness of Australian Child Protection: Why Adoption Will Rescue Australia’s Underclass Children" by Jeremy Sammut

Terry Barnes

In Australia there are tens of thousands of emotionally stable, financially secure but medically infertile people. As much as they may want biological children of their own, genetics, illness or injury render them incapable. Yet there are thousands of dregs at the bottom of the social teacup who seemingly breed like rabbits. No-hopers, drug-addicts, and the unemployable, for whom squalor is normality, who believe welfare is a God-given right and that fornication is not only time-passing relief from their miserable lot, but a passport to being able to dip their hands deeper into the public welfare and housing purse.

If you thought SBS’s reality series Struggle Street unfairly depicted welfare-fuelled life in underclass communities, think again. If anything it was too mild. I chief-of-staffed to a state community services minister a few years ago, and cases I saw were truly shocking. They shocked not only because of their facts – awful cases of domestic violence, sexual and emotional abuse and even incest – but because in the warped world in which these people lived they were routine, almost normal, events.

I still seethe with fury over one particular case, of incest in a Victorian country town. Confronted by child protection workers, this pustule of a man insisted he was only asserting his rights as a father. ‘She’s mine, I can do what I want’, he said without any hint of comprehending his vileness, or contrition. That excrescence forfeited any claims to parenthood, yet the community services system still wanted to respect his parental rights as a father. While the abused little girl was taken into care, child protection workers still, absurdly, hoped the family could be brought back together.

Most parents love and care for their children, even in the poorest communities. But while child abuse and neglect is a pestilence across society it is the underclass, where poverty, unemployment, crime, welfare dependency and substance abuse are rife, that the deepest problems lie.

As respected Centre for Independent Studies social policy thinker, Jeremy Sammut, demonstrates in this book, The Madness of Australian Child Protection, an entrenched policy mentality keeps failed families together wherever possible. Removal is a last resort. Sammut demonstrates, persuasively, how in the last forty years the pendulum has swung so far against adoption that too many kids are trapped hopelessly in destructive, dysfunctional family relationships or doomed to living in institutions and unsuitable foster homes without any chance of a permanent, loving family to call their own.

Trendy lefty social theorists have done incalculable damage, but conservative politicians holding the family unit as sacrosanct have let them get away with it. As far as I’m concerned, when ideology – Left or Right – gives misguided succour to utterly incompetent and abusive parents, whose unspeakable actions and substance-addled minds expose children to great neglect and physical and mental harm, it must be shoved aside for the children’s good. Just get those kids out of there!

Sammut rightly advocates child protection policies and practices that take children away from such brutal lives, and promotes re-normalised adoption as key to rescuing underclass children from desperate and dangerous ongoing situations. Making adoption work, however, requires two things: instilling a child-first prevailing mindset amongst caseworkers and policy-makers, and society’s reacceptance that children being permanently adopted into loving homes is far better than unwanted or at-risk children in dangerously dysfunctional family units.

Citing case after awful case of a system gone badly wrong, the essence of Sammut’s message is ‘preserve the family at all costs’ child protection needs dumping for a willingness to remove children from unfit parents, and offer them hope of love and security through permanent adoption by competent adults genuinely wanting them. Surely that is indeed the right way to go.

To achieve this, adoption process itself needs fixing. While it takes years, has so many hurdles and seems purpose-designed to subject potential adoptive parents to deliberate humiliation, the local adoption rate is unsurprisingly shameful. In 2014-15 there were just 56 local adoptions across Australia. Fifty-six kids out of thousands deserving and needing a better life than the no-hopers they’re now with can ever give them.

Successive Labor and Coalition federal and state governments and oppositions should hang their heads in shame at what decades of destructive social theory, applied by them, has wrought.

But don’t expect fashionable social experiments like same-sex adoptions to change things. Same-sex adoption is about gay couples demanding, and getting, the same rights as straight ones: it’s not about promoting the best interests of at-risk and damaged children. Having the right to adopt doesn’t guarantee actual adoptions: in New South Wales, where same-sex adoption has been legal for years, only nine children were locally adopted in 2014-15. If such miserable figures improve as more states allow same-sex adoption, I’ll eat my hat.

Last year former Labor minister and Speccie columnist Gary Johns caused chattering class outrage by suggesting welfare dependants should take contraceptives in return for benefits. Johns was far too charitable: those doing unspeakable things to vulnerable children deserve forced sterilisation over and above any criminal penalties. They don’t deserve to be parents, let alone procreate. At minimum, child protection authorities should presume that children removed from these pathetic excuses for parents are available for permanent adoption, not temporarily removed only to return into danger. That policy shift not only would offer lasting hope to endangered children: it may save lives.

Sammut’s back to the future take on adoption, and making it easier, offers an enlightened way forward. Taking his path, however, will take a big change of heart not only from elected politicians, but from a wider community that wrings its hands over the cesspit of child abuse and neglect, rather than actually take responsibility for doing something.

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Melbourne woman 'bashed by police' during roadside altercation

A Melbourne woman claims she is the victim of police brutality after a violent roadside altercation.

Victoria Police insists Elisha Sherwood, 34, hurt herself while resisting arrest but she says they bashed and abused her for half an hour.

Battered and bruised, the Frankston woman claims she suffered these injuries at the hands of police after being pulled over in the early hours of Friday morning.

“They proceeded to say they were going to search the car for weapons,” she told 7 News. “I queried this and was basically tackled to the ground and my face was smashed into the ground and I was handcuffed."

“They were saying I was spitting at them but I was actually choking on my own blood,” Ms Sherwood said.

Police say the pair was aggressive and had to be restrained in an incident where police say three arresting officers had to be treated for minor injuries.

But Ms Sherwood and partner Daniel French dispute that version of events. “I only became aggressive after they started beating me,” Ms Sherwood said.  “If they’re going to charge me for assault, I'd like to see their injuries."

The couple is hoping locals who saw what happened will come forward to back their version of events and are planning to commence legal action this week.

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