By Allen Myers
"The defence of ignorance is no longer available. Individual Australians are not responsible for the actions of others. But if Australians fail to respond to what you now know, that is another thing", said Gatjil Djerrkura, the chairperson of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission, speaking in Sydney on March 10.
Djerrkura was referring to the refusal of the federal government to make a formal apology and pay compensation for the treatment of the "stolen generations" — the tens of thousands of Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their families.
The report (Bringing Them Home) last May of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from their Families revealed that between one in three and one in 10 indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families between 1910 and 1970. These removals were official policy of governments, which sought to bring about a forced "assimilation" of (lighter-skinned) Aborigines into European Australian society.
The contents of the report are now widely known, which explains Djerrkura's remark about the defence of ignorance. But Djerrkura failed to take account of Sydney Morning Herald columnist Padraic P. McGuinness, who is not merely a defender, but a veritable champion, of ignorance.
Columnists at the Sydney Morning Herald tend to fill particular roles. If Gerard Henderson is the paper's "intellectual" ultrarightist (because he is paid by a "think-tank"), McGuinness is its ultraright buffoon. McGuinness can always be relied upon to defend the most reactionary position available, no matter how indefensible it is or how foolish it makes him look; last April, for example, he wrote describing Senate travel rorter Mal Colston as a "crusader for democracy", which must have made even Colston laugh.
Attack on Amnesty
Since Amnesty International has just issued a report criticising the government's position on the stolen children, McGuinness began his March 5 column by attempting to discredit Amnesty.
AI, according to McGuinness, "once" carried out valuable work in defence of human rights, but "in latter years" it has become a "propagandist and little more".
"Propagandist" for what?, one might ask. And, exactly when and why did this striking change take place? Ask as you will, however: Padraic P. McGuinness declines to answer.
Instead, he trots out his sole bit of evidence for the supposed change in AI: Albert Langer, who was jailed for three weeks in 1996 over his attempt to inform people how they could vote non-preferentially, was the "only ... genuine prisoner of conscience in Australia in recent years". And — here comes the clincher — "I do not recall Amnesty being at the forefront of his defenders".
After a crushing blow like that, you'd think that Amnesty would just quietly close up shop and never trouble Thunderer McGuinness again.
But there is one little problem: reality and what McGuinness recalls are not the same thing. AI did adopt Albert Langer as a "prisoner of conscience". Chalk one up for the champion of ignorance.
Amnesty's report on the stolen children was launched in Sydney by Dr Heinz Schurmann-Zeggel; at the event, a representative of the National Indigenous Working Group also spoke. As the Thunderer "recalls" this event, it consisted of the NIWG "wheeling out" Dr Schurmann-Zeggel.
As for the NIWG, its "faith in free speech goes so far as its recent silencing of Fr Frank Brennan". The implication is clear: why isn't Amnesty defending the human rights of this silenced priest?
Could it be because Brennan's human rights are not being violated? The NIWG does not, after all, have any power to "silence" Brennan: it cannot jail him, or take away his livelihood, or prevent him from ever again seeing family members.
But again, McGuinness declines to allow reality to intrude on his ignorance. The NIWG "wheeled out" Schurmann-Zeggel "to support its campaign against the Government", and "a man of such high principle as Brennan has serious reservations" about this campaign.
Disagreements between the NIWG and Brennan have been reported in the Sydney Morning Herald. These have concerned solely the tactics to use in regard to the government's Wik bill. Brennan has expressed no "reservations" or disagreements with the NIWG the stolen generations. Once again, the Thunderer recalls things incorrectly.
Mining company booklet
Having thus demonstrated the breadth of his own ignorance, McGuinness feels qualified to comment on what he perceives to be the ignorance of others. It is "doubtful", he writes, that Dr Schurmann-Zeggel, "has familiarised himself with the concerns about the truthfulness of the [Bringing Them Home] report".
The "concerns about the truthfulness" of the report turn out to be just as solid as all the rest of the Thunderer's ignorance. What he is referring to is a booklet published by an anthropologist named Ron Brunton, who is employed by the Institute of Public Affairs — a "think-tank" which fronts for mining companies.
Three days before McGuinness' column, Robert Manne published an article in the Sydney Morning Herald which dismissed Brunton's booklet both for its misstatements of fact and for his "conflict of interest", given mining companies' stake in government policies on Aborigines.
Manne, it should be noted, is as right wing as McGuinness, although not such a partisan of ignorance. He was McGuinness' predecessor as the editor of the ultraright magazine Quadrant.
McGuinness could not claim ignorance this criticism, but he managed to refer to it only obliquely and without naming Manne: "Of course, Brunton has already been attacked because of the politics of the IPA and his work for the mining industry".
But the criticism is dismissed with the words: "It seems that anthropologists who refuse to accept the professional bias and fads of the academic anthropologists should live on the dole".
Robert Manne is not an anthropologist, academic or otherwise, and no-one has proposed that the Institute of Public Affairs be prohibited from buying as many anthropologists as are willing to sell themselves to it. The point which McGuinness tries to obscure with this red herring is simply that the words of a hired advocate are not to be confused with the conclusions of impartial science.
Defending Howard
Does McGuinness' love affair with ignorance have a point? Of course: it is to defend the Howard government.
Referring to the supposed "concerns about the truthfulness of the report", McGuinness asserts that these concerns "account for the unwillingness of the Government, and many others, to leap to support its [the report's] positions on every aspect of this issue".
Here, McGuinness uses arguments that the government itself does not dare to use. No-one in the government has claimed to have any doubts about the truthfulness of the report.
Nor has anyone demanded that the government support "every aspect" of the report. What is demanded is that the government apologise for and attempt to compensate for the great wrongs that were done, and which not even McGuinness can quite bring himself to deny. At least, he hasn't done so yet — but give him time to work on his power of recall.