The new Inquisition: Tim Soutphommasane’s ‘grievance industry’ sees bigots everywhere, by Nick Cater.
“If someone says to me they’re not even going to try to pronounce my name, that doesn’t necessarily send a good signal,” the race relations commissioner [Thinethavone Soutphommasane] told The Australian Financial Review in a revealing interview this month. …
Just when you think the threshold for taking offence could not get lower, the salaried hand-wringers of the grievance industry prove you wrong. Every slight, real or imagined, is tendered as evidence of the bigotry eating away at our society. …
The commission’s failure to kill off the sinister Queensland University of Technology case, in which students have been put through the mill for daring to object to being ejected from an indigenous-only computer room, shows that commissioner Gillian Triggs and her team have no regard for natural justice, let alone a sense of proportion. …
The commissioners’ inclination to take the grimmest view imaginable of their fellow citizens — those, at any rate, with white skin — is at best uncharitable. At worst it suggests they are subject to the same hidebound prejudice they so freely identify in others. Why else would Soutphommasane believe the election of Pauline Hanson could trigger civil unrest? … His attempt to censor an elected politician seems impertinent, but in the racism-calling caper that’s the way they think. …
The warnings four decades ago were correct:
Thus the fears of those who opposed Gough Whitlam’s Racial Discrimination Act legislation in 1975 have been fulfilled.
Far from eliminating social tension, the Racial Discrimination Act’s draconian measures have increased it.
We have ended up, as former senator Glen Sheil warned, with an official race relations industry staffed by “dedicated anti-racists earning their living by making the most of every complaint”.
Bill Leak? Tim Soutphommasane urges anyone who was offended by his cartoon to lodge a complaint under the Racial Discrimination Act.
Meanwhile a fine cartoonist has had an unjustified slur cast over his name by a 33-year-old with a philosophy degree who is paid more than $6000 a week from the public purse.
Ah yes, always the big pot of taxpayer money.
