Another example of honest analysis and impeccable expression.
Posted by John on November 2, 2016, 11:12 am
I refer to Kerryn Pholi’s, article in today’s issue of The Australian titled: I’m offended by Human Rights Commission, not Bill Leak. It is most unfortunate that it is behind a paywall, as every Australian needs to read it as a counter to the bias and blatant misrepresentation that occurs in much of our media.
The article commences:
Bill Leak draws satirical cartoons for The Australian, and one of his cartoons has landed him in trouble with the law. The offending cartoon was produced after shocking footage (shocking for most people, anyway) from inside the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre was aired on the ABC’s Four Corners program.
Leak’s cartoon was informed by the Four Corners program and by related commentary, which included an opinion piece I had written for The Australian on August 2. My article was just as critical as Leak’s cartoon of so-called “Aboriginal parenting styles”, which, I had said, “would be regarded as extreme and dangerous neglect in a non-indigenous family” and which leave many Aboriginal children with “very little experience of the basic safety, security, routine, hygiene, guidance and consistent discipline that every child is entitled to”. It is entirely possible my remarks could have caused an Aboriginal person to feel “racially offended or insulted”. So why is Leak in trouble while I am not?
In response to Leak’s cartoon, Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane publicly advised that any Aboriginal person who felt offended or insulted could lodge a complaint with the Human Rights Commission under the Racial Discrimination Act — an offer that one Melissa Dinnison has taken him up on. In response to a suggestion that public servants shouldn’t go about drumming up business in this fashion, Soutphommasane replied that it falls within his role to promote awareness of the law.
Leak’s cartoon reached a wide audience and the controversy spread it further, which provided a ready opportunity for Soutphommasane to spruik his business. I would argue, though, that if Soutphommasane’s job is to promote awareness of the law by pointing out potentially offensive material, he is a bit of an underperformer. Along with things I have said, my friend and colleague Anthony Dillon has said a lot of things, Warren Mundine has said plenty of things (and I could go on, but you get the picture) that could very well prompt a number of Aboriginal people to take the huff — and yet the AHRC has been silent. I wonder why.
To be fair, I don’t blame Soutphommasane for any reluctance to take Aboriginal commentators such as us to task, since that would, to use the parlance of identity politics, “complicate the narrative” beyond the AHRC’s capacity to cope. I must acknowledge also that the AHRC is an equal-opportunity ignorer, since a number of other commentators with critical things to say about the state of Aboriginal affairs — such as Gary Johns and Jeremy Sammut — have not yet been the subject of a Soutphommasane community service tweet, as far as I know.
Why Leak, then? Perhaps the Racial Discrimination Act is not merely concerned with what is actually said (or drawn), but with how many people might see it. A cartoon’s message hits home immediately, whereas text requires more effort from its audience. If that is the case, it doesn’t seem quite fair that the medium Leak happens to work in should expose him to greater risk than we scribblers might bear.
Or perhaps it’s not just about what gets said (or drawn), but about who says it. Leak, like Andrew Bolt, is a high-profile trophy scalp for the AHRC, whereas a few dissident Aborigines and policy boffins are a comparatively paltry prize.
It is a pity that I cannot reproduce the entire article, as it is a gem of honest and clear thinking and expression. However, I hope I have not strained the patience of The Australian by taking it as far as that last paragraph of my excerpt. The whole schmozzle has nothing to do with racial discrimination; it has solely to do with bringing down the clear-thinkers in the conservative camp, and is itself a blatant act of racial discrimination – “Get Whitey, but leave the indigenous alone" As Kerryn Pholi asks, why is Leak in trouble and she is not?
In August, Kerryn Pholi wrote a Spectator article, Cartoon heroes, with a sub-title of
The indigenous grievance industry has found a new villain
It commences:
While non-Aboriginal Australians squirm with guilt over their ‘privilege’, a cabal of middle-class Aboriginals have proven adept at pretending their own privilege doesn’t exist.
It started with Stan Grant’s ‘boiling’, ‘simmering’, ‘pulsating’, and ‘coursing’ fury at the ABC’s exposé of abuse within the Northern Territory’s Don Dale Youth Detention Centre:
‘This is an anger that comes from the certainty of being. This is an anger that speaks to my soul… this week my people have been reminded that our place is so often behind this nation’s bars,’ Grant said.
‘Our’ place behind bars, Stan? Unless mangling of metaphors becomes a criminal offence (what exactly does ‘the howl of the Australian dream’, mean anyway?), Stan is in as much danger of being incarcerated as I am. I note that Stan was venting all this anger in the course of accepting an honorary doctorate of letters at the University of New South Wales. The man certainly knows his way around a thesaurus and apparently he can even type with fists ‘clenched in rage’, so the honour is well-deserved.
Stan went on: ‘This week Australia is Aboriginal boys tear gassed, locked down and beaten. These are the images on our television screens. The boys who look like my boys.’ Please. The boys in the Don Dale centre might ‘look like’ Stan’s kids, but that is where the resemblance ends. Unlike the Don Dale kids, Stan’s boys have experienced parenting, nurturing and safety. In his speech, Stan said his teenaged son ‘wondered at the difference between himself and the boys on the screen.’ Despite all their missed schooling, the NT boys could probably enlighten Stan’s son on their differing life experiences with great eloquence, perhaps whilst relieving him of his lunch money and shoes.
A few days after the Four Corners report, Bill Leak drew a cartoon depicting an Aboriginal cop telling an Aboriginal deadbeat dad he should talk to his miscreant son about ‘personal responsibility’. The dad says ‘Yeah righto, what’s his name then?’. And then a whole lot of people lost their minds. ‘It’s a racist stereotype!’ they said. (Clearly they were upset about the depiction of the Aboriginal dad, not the Aboriginal cop.) Then came this impressive leap of logic:
‘Bill Leak is saying all Aboriginal dads are hopeless drunks who don’t know their own kid’s names! What a racist!’. Perhaps if Leak were thoughtful enough to provide footnotes explaining that his cartoons don’t necessarily represent the entire world in all its rich diversity, he might have been spared a week-long headache. Or perhaps Leak has a quaint faith in his audience’s ability to interpret a political cartoon in an intelligent way.
Predictably, a bunch of middle-class Aboriginals felt that they had been unfairly represented by Leak’s cartoon. They felt personally insulted because the figure in the cartoon was Aboriginal, and they too were Aboriginal. Never mind that these educated, successful Aboriginal movers-and-shakers were a world away – in terms of class, culture, community and actual geography – from the pathetic figure in the picture. This cartoon, they decided, was somehow about them.
The "indigenous grievance industry"? I wonder what the result of that would have been had the Bolta written it?