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In 2014, the race-obsessed Andrew Bolt bemoaned being branded “racist, racist, racist” after the Federal Court three years earlier found he’d breached section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.
But the landmark decision doesn’t seem to have done much to deter him. Because more than a decade later, and Bolt, now a 66-year-old YouTuber perhaps best known for his low-budget Sky News talk show, has narrowly avoided another brush with the legislation.
The latest complaints came from three First Nations people in the Federal Court last month. The suit alleged Bolt’s commentary calling Indigenous knowledge “primitive” amounted to racial discrimination, and called for apologies and compensation for alleged contraventions of section 18C, which the applicants said “caused offence, insult, humiliation and intimidation”.
The suit was launched in mid-May by musician Adrian Burragubba, a Wangan and Jagalingou man, and Gomeroi people Cameron Manning and Gwenda Stanley, who were represented by the Racial Justice Centre. When CBD asked about the case last week, we were told the matter had been discontinued. Racial Justice Centre executive director Sarah Ibrahim wouldn’t be drawn on why.
At issue for the applicants was a television segment aired on Sky News in November 2023, along with two opinion pieces Bolt had written for the Herald Sun later that year.
On air, Bolt commented on a Tiwi Islands elders’ legal effort to block Santos’ $5.7 billion gas pipeline running through their traditional sea country. He said: “The Tiwi Islanders, who are fighting this – not all of them are, but these guys really depend on government handouts, so since three quarters of them do not work according to the latest census, they’re either out of the workforce or unemployed, so why, how can they actually say no to the kind of money that goes to the social services they rely on.”
In the first Herald Sun article, published on December 13, Bolt called Energy Minister Chris Bowen anti-science and racist after Bowen said Indigenous people across the world had been at the heart of climate change and had cared for lands for millennia at a COP28 conference.
“Bowen wouldn’t have dreamt that the ‘Indigenous peoples’ he claims have cared for lands ‘for millennia’ included the white tribes of Europe, let alone the Japanese or Han Chinese. And why not? Because those people left their ‘Indigenous knowledge’ behind as they used reason and science to work out better ways to live without dying early and poor,” Bolt wrote.
“We’re supposed to show ‘profound respect’ for the ‘Indigenous knowledge’ of Aboriginal people, some of whom are now in the Federal Court trying to stop a $5.6 billion offshore gas project by claiming an undersea pipeline will upset a man-turned crocodile they claim has lived in that patch of ocean since the Dreamtime.
“Don’t Bowen and the prime minister himself realise many Australians are sick of this kowtowing to the primitive?”
Bolt then moved to clarify what he meant by “primitive” in a second column published on December 17, where he also responded to Bowen calling his initial opinion piece “racist”.
“If he’s smart, he’d know I was not calling Aboriginals ‘primitive’. Indeed, I have Aboriginal friends – Jacinta, Warren, Anthony, Adam – far more sophisticated than Bowen. ‘Primitive’ is what I called a Stone Age belief in an anti-gas Crocodile Man,” Bolt wrote.
When asked about the action last week, a News Corp Australia spokesman said the company would “vigorously defend” the matter. Once it had been discontinued, days later, the spokesman said the company always had “full confidence” Bolt would be “exonerated”.
Not that we had any reason to doubt them. It was only in December that Bolt was seen hoofing it up the street en route to Lachlan Murdoch’s annual Christmas party. The year before, Bolt was part of Rupert Murdoch’s personal entourage during The Sun King’s first visit to Australia in six years.
Ruddock’s new book
Well, talk about good timing. Former Howard government immigration minister Philip Ruddock is set to release a new book on immigration and his time in government.
The book, Nation Building: How Immigration Made Australia, will be the first detailed account of Ruddock’s time as the nation’s longest-serving immigration minister, from 1996 to 2003. We’re told it’ll make the case for how immigration and the “structural changes” made at the turn of the century have made Australia “younger, wealthier and stronger” than its counterparts.
“I have never accepted that immigration should be judged only by its controversies; for all the debate, it remains one of the great nation-building stories of modern Australia and the world,” Ruddock told CBD. “I hope this book makes a positive contribution to that story.”
Fox spotting amid Icelandic works in Melbourne
Fox spotting has become a bit of a sport in Melbourne after the billionaire Fox family’s high-stakes succession drama erupted in public earlier this month, when patriarch Lindsay Fox confirmed his eldest son Peter was retiring as executive chairman of Linfox.
Lindsay, 89, and his wife Paula are currently in Europe. Lisa Fox, their eldest daughter and co-co-chair of the Fox Family Foundation – a major supporter of the NGV – was spotted among the guests at the opening of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s exhibition, named Mercy, at the National Gallery of Victoria on Thursday night.
The Kjartansson exhibition is a bit of a trip. One of the more unusual pieces on show is a video work, titled Me and My Mother, in which every five years Kjartansson asks his mother, Icelandic actor Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, to spit on him. Fun.
Kjartansson was at the opening on Thursday, where instead of giving a speech, he led a toast to the exhibition by singing an Icelandic folk/drinking song.
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Kayla Olaya is a culture reporter at The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
John Buckley is a CBD columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.Connect via email.
Fiona Byrne is the CBD columnist for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.From our partners
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