Statue haters can’t handle truth of Australia’s past, by Andrew Bolt.

THE new statue haters claim they just want the truth told about our history. But I don’t believe them.

I don’t believe ABC presenter Stan Grant, for instance …

He’s told how he’d stop by Poison Waterholes Creek in New South Wales to tell his son how “the local homestead owner grew tired of the black people on his property, so he poisoned their waterhole”, causing “agonising deaths”.

In fact, historian George Gow in 1951 wrote in the Narandera (sic) Argus that a rabbit inspector who’d worked on the station containing the creek in the 1880s told him the name came from baits for dingoes. …

Genocide? Ongoing??

This week came Bronwyn Carlson, a Macquarie University associate professor who identifies as Aboriginal and called for the tearing down of not just Cook’s statues, but those of Lachlan Macquarie, our fifth colonial governor.

“It seems a little odd … to have statues that continue to represent those people who were part of genocide in this country,” she said. …

Nor was Macquarie guilty. True, to keep settlers safe he ordered soldiers to clear out Aborigines from some areas, and shoot those who did not surrender.

By our modern standards, now that we’re comfortably settled, that seems ugly. Some might even call it murder. But genocide?

If the statue haters really do want more precise language, then let’s ban that word “genocide” when applied to our history.

Let’s not have activists like singer-songwriter Dan Sultan attack Australia Day as he did on the ABC on Monday: “We should recognise the 26th of January for what it is — which is a day that started the ongoing genocide of our people.”

In fact, there are now more Aborigines now than there were when the British arrived.

While we’ve had some shameful massacres, there was never a government campaign to wipe out Aborigines. Rather, there were campaigns to save them. …

Our Aboriginal population grew an amazing 17 per cent over the past seven years, according to the census, and we spend twice as much government money on them per person.

For Sultan to call this “ongoing genocide” is to trivialise a true genocide and suffering of the dead. Compare. On the one hand, there’s Sultan, invited as a celebrity Aboriginal by the ABC to come lecture and sing. On the other, there were millions of Jews gassed, shot, hanged, burned and butchered by Hitler. Spot the real genocide. …

“Stolen” generation??

Let’s admit that despite all the claims of up to 100,000 children being “stolen” by racist officials just because they were Aboriginal, the courts have so far found only one, Bruce Trevorrow.

So let’s also strip the words “stolen generations” from signs. The statue haters did demand truth, right?

Obviously the purpose of inventing this history is to funnel goodies and status to some groups in the present, and to demote white men at the expense of other identity groups.