On Borrowed Time Page 15

  The second kind of evidence I provided Bolt in the documentary collection was of explicit statements of government policy. There was, for example, the following statement from the 1911 report of the New South Wales Board for the Protection of Aborigines: “Of these children, a number who are half-castes, quadroons, and octoroons are increasing with alarming rapidity … Present experience has shown that the children cannot be properly trained under the present environments, and it is essential that they should be removed at as early an age as possible.” And there was the following statement from the Chief Protector of Aborigines in the Northern Territory, Dr Cecil Cook, in 1931: “Briefly, the halfcaste policy in this Territory embraces the collection of all illegitimate halfcastes, male and female under the age of 16 years, for housing in institutions for educational purposes …” This policy statement made it clear that at this time children were not removed in the Northern Territory because of suspected, let alone proven, neglect. The meaning of the word “all” is not difficult to grasp.

  Bolt claimed that Indigenous “half-caste” child removal was not racist. The documents also made it clear that the Commonwealth at this time supported Cook’s policy of “breeding out the colour”. Was a policy of “breeding out the colour” not racist then in his opinion? Or again; if the policy concerned neglect and not race why were no “full-bloods” removed in the Northern Territory or indeed elsewhere? And if no racism was involved in the policy and practice of “half-caste” child removal, why had the New South Wales Board of Protection referred to the high birth rate of the zoological categories – “half-castes”, “quadroons” and “octoroons” – as representing a positive “menace” to the future of their state? And, for that matter, why had the under-secretary of the Home Department in Queensland, W.J. Gall, written that the only solution to the problem of the “half-caste” was a state-sponsored policy of sterilisation?

  The third kind of evidence was of the occasional expressions of moral repugnance felt by those who observed or carried out the child removal policy. The document collection quoted a magistrate in Cardwell, Queensland, in 1903 who was approached by an Aboriginal mother whose fourteen-year-old son, Walter, had been seized and who then wrote on her behalf to the Protector Roth: “All the sophistry you can bring to bear upon it, cannot alter it from what it is viz. a barefaced case of kidnapping, dare you assert that under English law you have a better right to this boy than the mother who reared and fed him…” It also quoted the 1919 exchange of letters between the police inspector at Broome, Drewry, and the Western Australian Protector, A.O. Neville. Drewry wrote to Neville:

  I desire to submit that this seizing and removing of these children is obnoxious to the Police and I trust that some official of the Aborigines Dept. will be appointed to do it … in these cases no cause has been shown, yet he can seize all aboriginal or half-caste children under 16 years of age. No neglect has been shown by the mothers in these cases … The children have the natural love for the mother …

  To Drewry’s letter, Neville replied: “If the duty of bringing in half-caste children is obnoxious to the Police, it is strange that this Department has not previously been advised of this, in view of the hundreds of cases that have had attention …” I wondered what Bolt would make of this exchange. If the policy was one of removing children in danger why did a tough police inspector from Broome believe it to be “obnoxious”? Why did he argue that in these cases of child removal there had been no shown cause of neglect? And, above all, how would Bolt be able to continue to claim that in Australian policy and practice there have not been even ten cases of “stolen children” between 1900 and 1970 when he discovered the Chief Protector in Western Australia referring to “hundreds” of removals, of a kind Inspector Drewry regarded as obnoxious, effected just in his state and just by 1919?

  The final kind of evidence in the documentary collection came from letters and memoirs showing policy and practice in the different states and territories at different times. The case of “Walter” was revealed in a detailed correspondence. It illuminated the cruelty of Queensland policy in the early days under Roth, where “half-caste” children were routinely seized. The memoir of Margaret Tucker, If Everyone Cared, was quoted to show the tragic human impact of the post-1911 New South Wales removals policy. The conservative Christian memoir Mt Margaret: A Drop in a Bucket, written by Margaret Morgan, the daughter of missionaries in Western Australia, documented the crippling fears of the police felt by mothers of the children of mixed descent. The memoirs of Bob Randall, Songman, and John Moriarty, Saltwater Fella, showed vividly how the policy operated in the Northern Territory during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Randall was sent to the Bungalow at Alice Springs to the outrage and distress of his Aboriginal family. Moriarty was one day taken by authority from school at Roper River. His mother simply did not know what had befallen him. Doris Kartinyeri tells us in her memoir, Kick the Tin, how in South Australia in 1945, she was removed to a mission after her mother died in childbirth. Her entire Indigenous family was distraught. In the collection there is a letter Lang Dean wrote to the Age recalling how his father, a policeman who worked on the Murray River during the 1930s, would weep openly in the evenings after his work that day had involved seizing the “half-caste” children living on the station at Cumeragunga. What would Bolt make of this evidence? Would he have the temerity to claim all these people were lying? And if he would not, why precisely did cases such as these not meet his demanding but also secret “stolen children” qualification test?

  Bolt received this documentary collection in front of an audience of 700 people. Shortly after, I wrote in the Age:

  Before the debate I prepared a 46,000 word documentary collection on “half-caste” child removal. No one could read this collection without understanding how widespread, cruel and racist the policy and practice was … I handed Bolt a copy on Sunday. If Bolt, without taking this evidence into account, continues to claim that the stolen generations is a myth, the nature of his journalism will be plain.

  Not only did Bolt ignore the evidence presented in the documentary collection. After the debate, almost everything Bolt wrote about the Stolen Generations was not merely a lie but provably so on the basis of the evidence he had in his possession.

  Bolt claimed on a dozen occasions or more that I had been challenged but had failed to name even ten “stolen” children. Usually he failed to mention that I had sent him some 260 names. He never mentioned that I had asked him to supply a definition of what counted for him as a stolen child and that he had refused. On one rare occasion when he did acknowledge that I had sent him more than 200 names, Bolt claimed that the names I had sent him all came from Queensland. They did not. He claimed that in these cases neglect had been proven at court. In fact, as I had already made clear to him, having Aboriginal blood was itself sufficient proof of neglect under Queensland’s 1865 Industrial Schools and Reformatory Act. Bolt also claimed that the children in the “half-caste” homes in interwar Darwin and Alice Springs were sent there because of neglect. As the documentary collection shows beyond ambiguity, they were not. The policy set out in 1934 was explicit: “It is the policy of the Administration to collect all half-castes from the native camps at an early age and transfer them to the Government Institutions at Darwin and Alice Springs.”

  Bolt continued to claim that no racism was involved in the policy of mixed descent child removal. As already argued, the documentary collection revealed that the Commonwealth government in 1933 supported the policy of “breeding out the colour” of the “half-castes” whose removal it had organised. The collection published the 1909 view of the Western Australian Protector James Isdell: “I would not hesitate for one moment to separate any half-caste from its aboriginal mother, no matter how frantic their momentary grief. They soon forget their offspring.” Indeed anyone reading the documentary collection would discover that a vicious racism concerning the “half-castes” was pervasive during the period before World War II. Bolt cont
inued to claim that because now Indigenous children in danger were not being removed “my” Stolen Generations myth was responsible for killing children. As already argued, the Bureau of Statistics had shown that the practice of removing children had greatly diminished by 1994, three years before the publication of Bringing Them Home.

  As Bolt had ignored evidence in his possession, it was indeed perfectly plain by now what kind of journalist he was. Given his obvious disregard for truth, it is no surprise that he has been found guilty of a serious case of defamation (Popovich) and of a serious breach of the Racial Discrimination Act (Eatock et al.).

  My story has a curious ending. When the erstwhile anti-Murdoch campaigner Bruce Guthrie was still editor-in-chief of the Herald Sun I emailed him asking for a thousand words to refute Andrew Bolt’s “name ten” big lie. Guthrie replied that he could not give me an answer while Andrew Bolt was on holiday. This was a curious answer. I had presumed the editor-in-chief might actually run the paper. On several occasions I repeated my request. Guthrie did not respond. In June 2011 Michael Kroger delivered an address to the Institute of Public Affairs in honour of Andrew Bolt. “It was Andrew Bolt who challenged Robert Manne to name just 10 members of the Stolen Generation, something Manne has yet to achieve.”

  Nothing I will ever write will make the slightest difference to people like Kroger. My supposed failure to name ten members of the stolen generations is now a settled part of contemporary right-wing mythology. Following the devastating Bromberg judgement that found Bolt in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act one thousand well-heeled members of the Australian Right donated money for a full-page advertisement in his defence. That a journalist of his type is now a hero of what passes for Australian conservatism is a telling indication of what has happened to the political culture of this country over the past twenty years.

  The Monthly blog, 17 October 2011

  RUPERT MURDOCH’S POLITICS

  In late July 2013, Robert Thomson, the suave chief executive of News Corp – the recently separated and financially challenged publishing branch of the Murdoch media empire – announced that Col Allan, the editor-in-chief of Rupert Murdoch’s favourite tabloid, the New York Post, was coming home to Australia on a two- to three-month assignment. Unless Allan’s visit had some political purpose, the return of the native was difficult to explain. Under his editorship, the New York Post has reportedly lost several hundred million dollars since 2001. In the letter to Australian colleagues, Thomson defined the mission, with studied vagueness, as “providing extra editorial leadership for our papers”. “It will be invaluable for our papers in Australia,” he continued, “to have the benefit of his insight, expertise and talent.” Col Allan’s most famous insight is the fear that an editor might instil in his underlings by conspicuous acts of apparent derangement, like pissing in the office sink. His most famous expertise is bare-knuckled political combat and character assassination. His most famous talent is for the brazen front-page banner headline.

  Allan arrived in Australia on 29 July, a week before the announcement of the date of the 2013 federal election. Almost instantly, News Corp’s three most influential Australian tabloids – the Sydney Daily Telegraph, the Melbourne Herald Sun and the Brisbane Courier-Mail – began what looked to the outsider like a front-page headline competition for Allan’s approval in what was by now News Corp’s main game – the political destruction of Kevin Rudd.

  On 2 August, the Courier-Mail put in an early bid: “KEV’S $733m BANK HEIST”. The reference was to new taxes on beer, cigarettes and “your savings”, with Rudd pictured in a beanie and a mask grasping a sack of money. The next day the Herald Sun responded with “IT’S A RUDDY MESS”. As the paper explained, “Debt soars, unemployment to hit 11-year high, revenue crashes and boats bill blows out”. Two days later, when the election was announced, the Daily Telegraph upped the ante with its instantly notorious “Finally, you now have the chance to … KICK THIS MOB OUT”. It was on a roll. The next day, it followed with a Hogan’s Heroes catchphrase, “I KNOW NUTHINK!”, and caricatures of Kevin Rudd and Anthony Albanese as Nazis. The Courier-Mail was not to be outdone. After the prime minister announced the candidacy of former Queensland premier Peter Beattie, it answered the Tele with “SEND IN THE CLOWN”. And so it went. “DEAD KEV BOUNCE” (Courier-Mail, 10 August). “RUDD’S BULLY BOY” (Herald Sun, 10 August). “KEVIN DEADLY SINS” (Sunday Mail, 11 August). “DOES THIS GUY EVER SHUT UP?” (Courier-Mail, 22 August). By the final week of the campaign, it was clear that Tony Abbott would win the election handsomely. The headlines followed. “THE LONG GOODBYE” (Courier-Mail, 2 September). “RUDD FREE ZONE” (Courier-Mail, 5 September). “TONY’S TIME” (Herald Sun, 6 September). “THE CIRCUS IS OVER” (Courier-Mail, 6 September). Throughout the campaign there were scores of anti-Labor front-page items in the three critical Murdoch tabloids and not one that could be considered pro-Labor.

  The most influential of the News Corp columnists – Piers Akerman, Andrew Bolt, Janet Albrechtsen and Miranda Devine – if anything outdid in venom their headline-composing colleagues, no doubt under Col Allan’s approving gaze. According to their collective portrait of the prime minister, Rudd’s government was “chaotic” and “dysfunctional”. He had left the nation with a “Budget shambles” and had “squandered billions”. He now had “no policies to talk of” except “back-of-the-beer-coaster nonsense” and was, as a result, conducting “the dirtiest, the lowest campaign ever run by a major political party”. Rudd’s rhetoric was “pompous” and “verbose”. He tried to win arguments by “bullying not persuasion”. Under him Labor had been “flushed away in a sewer of hate” with his “blatant appeal to … class warfare”. Rudd’s (partly apocryphal) personal history was supposedly all too revealing. He “had been kicked out of a New York ‘gentleman’s club’ for behaving weirdly with topless dancers”. He was the man “whose abuse had made an RAAF stewardess cry”. He had even pulled “a hissy fit in Afghanistan over a missing hairdryer”. He was nothing more than “a foul-mouthed backstabber”.

  The News Corp columnists explained Rudd’s character like this. He was “venomous”, “a volatile, nasty man”, “a selfie-addicted, twittering Facebook junkie”, who thought that “rules are for other people”. Not only during the campaign had he “trashed the Bible” and “slimed his faith” but also “trampled on the lowly”. As a typical “class clown”, “the more Rudd tries to be like us, the less he is”, and “the more you know him, the more you detest him”. He was a “fake”, “a narcissist”, “hubris on steroids”, “callous and manipulative” with no capacity for “empathy” and most accurately to be understood as a thoroughgoing “psychopath”. Even his physical demeanour, we learned, was rather disgusting. He “smirks”. He “pouts”. He “wants to stamp his little feet”. He “flicks” his hair repeatedly. Not only is he “afflicted by a repetitive, involuntary twitch of his lower lip”, but “his rotating hand movements have to be seen to be believed”.

  In this collective portrait of Kevin Rudd, the News Corp columnists did not find him to have even one positive human quality.

  Rudd was returned as Labor leader because of his apparent popularity with the Australian people. With him therefore the News Corp attack dogs went in for character assassination. With Tony Abbott, by contrast – “the Oxonian Rhodes scholar”, “the volunteer fire-fighter and surf club member”, “the hugely intelligent, hugely decent, down-to-earth bloke”, equally at home downing “beers” and “writing books about political philosophy” – the same journalists practised character beatification.

  Australian journalists once did not write like this. How had Australian journalism come to this? Although the explanation is complex, the foundations were laid a quarter-century ago.

  *

  In 1979 Rupert Murdoch made his first takeover bid for the largest newspaper company in Australia, the Herald and Weekly Times, which he believed had mistreated one of its key architects, his father. The bid was resisted. Murdoch
had a well-deserved reputation as a manipulator of the political process. He was known to have used his existing papers ruthlessly in 1972 to undermine the Liberal prime minister, Billy McMahon, and then in 1975 to help destroy Gough Whitlam, the Labor prime minister he had once enthusiastically supported. In fighting against the bid, the Melbourne Herald expressed the general understanding: “Mr Murdoch’s newspapers always respond in unison – as though to some divine wind – as they pursue their relentless campaigns in favour of current Murdoch objectives – particularly his political ones. Every journalist in Australia knows that.”

  In 1986 Murdoch announced a second Herald and Weekly Times takeover bid. By this time the case for resistance was far stronger than in 1979. In order to pursue his television ambitions, Murdoch had become a citizen of the United States. The rules of the Foreign Investment Review Board made it clear that “foreign investment in mass circulation newspapers is restricted”. In 1981, Murdoch had taken control of the London Times and Sunday Times, we know now with the collusion of the UK prime minister, Margaret Thatcher. His bid had been spared reference to the Monopolies and Mergers Commission on the condition that he respected the newspapers’ editorial independence. Almost immediately, the condition was flagrantly breached and Murdoch threatened with a term in prison. Even more importantly, by this time it was clear that Murdoch was using his papers as standard-bearers for the Thatcher–Reagan radical-conservative revolutions that were undermining social democratic parties and progressive politics throughout the English-speaking world. The Hawke government’s opposition to the News Corp takeover bid for the Herald and Weekly Times ought to have been certain.