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| Trumped at last! | |
Dealing the race card has been a time honoured favorite for a generation of
ethnic minorities. Whenever you don't get something you asked for (like
someone else's money for instance), just throw yourself on the floor and scream
'racism' repeatedly. It
works for small children, so why not victims of racial
discrimination? Of course time marches on, pets die, children grow up, and societal attitudes to things
like institutionalized racial discrimination evolve. But not always for the
better. Like in the case of former ATSIC commissioner Alan Wolf,
who is suing the Tasmanian Aboriginal Council for not being racist. Yes, dear
reader, for not being racist. The Australian reports that Alan Wolf, who has presumably based his entire
career on claiming to be a member of the institutionalized racial minority (that
would be the Australian Aborigines for anyone who doesn't get out much), has
suddenly found that the Tasmanians don't accept his qualifications as an
Aboriginal and won't give him preferential treatment in his application for a
fishing licence. He may have apply with all the white people at the back of
the bus. If this all seems a little confusing to anyone with a logical mind, It
really is totally logical. You just aren't considering the bigger picture. Remember that Aborigines (by weighted genetic proportion) are actual less
than two percent of the population. That's not much to support a political
movement. [Actually it's probably about the same as the Libertarians, and look
how spectacularly ineffectual they have been in changing Australian
politics]. Even as a special interest group, the percentage is too low to have
much effect. So in the heady '80s, Aboriginal lobby groups decided that the best special
interests of the Aborigines were served by an 'inclusive policy'. That is, get
as many people as possible to claim to be victims of the Aboriginality,
regardless of whether they were, or weren't actually of pre-European ancestry.
Even in Tasmania. And boy it worked. Never was there so much hand-wringing and self
flagellation for such a small minority group. And the buckets of money started
flowing into 'Aboriginal concerns'. This might have been a surprise to those of us unfortunate enough to have
been educated by the Tasmanian State education system. We were
taught that the last full blooded Tasmanian Aboriginal was a woman called
Truganini, who died in an Aboriginal settlement in 1876 (far too soon to have
given birth to modern political correctness). But the money still flowed. And nothing exceeds like success. Once money
(and affirmative
action policies) were flowing. Then a new strategy was effective - to
maximize your share of the trough by locking people out. Suddenly, people of
questionable ancestral qualifications were having that ancestry questioned. One of the fastest growing populations in the world has suddenly started
shrinking. A new genocide, or just a mercy culling
of a stupid political movement? Normally leftist political movements shrink when the government money supply is
cut. But in this case the movement is just reeling from a reduction in blood
supply.
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