Bugger off Bolt

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Opinion articles of seething rage don't often attract my attention. It's interesting to read scathingly wicked prose written behind the protection of a keyboard, but it does not often change my mind about anything. So I hope to do something different here and provide a little more detail, even though the essence of it is Andrew Bolt, bugger off you attention loving, small minded git! 

I'm probably preaching to the choir here but there are a lot of reasons why people don't like Andrew Bolt. Let me just focus on one thing; this article. It has all the hallmarks of a very informative [read: trashy] article from the Herald Sun. A catchy simplistic title that appeals to "us all", pictures of footballers training and a good opinionated dash about Bolt's own family history and innocence. That, and it's riddled with rage inducing crap. Yes. Crap. 

1. The way Bolt clearly misinterprets Goodes' words: (Read Goodes' actual comments here). 

"That process starts with understanding our very dark past, a brutal history of dispossession, theft and slaughter. For that reason, I urge the many fair-minded Australians who seek genuine prosperity and equality for my people to find the courage to open their hearts and their minds and watch Utopia." - Adam Goodes

Nowhere does it say that you should feel shame, guilt and a personal responsibility for what occurred. Understanding is the key word that is employed here. Yet you, Bolt, take it as a personal attack upon yourself to feel guilt and shame. Goodes is appealing to the rectification of a historical event and ongoing inequality. You Bolt, are just trying to deny the existence of the issue.

2. Making the issue about Bolt's own views, and not the issue at hand

 "Adam, my grandparents committed no thefts, rapes or murders." - Andrew Bolt 

Adam Goodes never claimed your grandparents did any of those things. He neither claimed that it was an entirely 'foreign' force that is to blame and that his entire linage is innocent. He states that it is

"Europeans, and the governments that have run our country, have raped, killed and stolen from your people for their own benefit" - Adam Goodes

So why personalise things Bolt? Is it because you want to try and remove yourself from the issue by laying a duty of responsibility upon a few, which you then go on to say were a minority? Then you go ahead and implicitly (and explicitly) defend their actions. Andrew Bolt, you have misconstrued Adam Goodes' writing to make an issue that is just really you voicing your own opinion and trying to pin blame on others. No one is attacking YOU, yet you see it as so. For that I just pity you.

3. Hypocrisy and half told truths. 

"So why didn’t he praise the good as well as acknowledge the bad of our past — a bad that he seems to have grossly exaggerated" - Andrew Bolt

A) Ummmm, Goodes does! Did you even read his article!?
B) The little fact you get from Geoffrey Blainey's positive book about the successful lives of Indigenous Australian's pre European settlement, is GROSSLY EXAGGERATING your case. Not to mention the "per capita" reference.
C) In the same decision where the South Australian Supreme Court found that ruling, they also gave $755 000 compensation to Bruce Trevorrow, a victim of the Stolen Generation, for being forcibly removed from his family. That court decision doesn't prove the Stolen Generation didn't exist. It just cleared one party (the SA government) from orchestrating it.

4. Worst of all, the way Bolt obfuscates the issue to deny the existence of inequality. 

The start of Bolt's article highlights the benefits that Adam Goode's has received, and how positive his life is. This statement is also true

"Life for many Aborigines then was brutishly harsh and often included appalling rates of violence against women, as established by paleopathology expert Stephen Webb from the evidence of fractured skulls" - Andrew Bolt

But police and hospital reports from 2014, not 1700, show that an alarming rate of Indigenous women are subject to violence. Today, there is still massive inequalities in healthcare, education, and employment between Indigenous and non Indigenous Australians. Yet your small minded focus on proving that things have improved from being "brutishly harsh" misses the fact that life for most Indigenous Australians isn't even acceptable by Australian government or international standards.

"Our history is not as simple as Goodes claims. Nor is our guilt" - Andrew Bolt

You have the audacity to say that an issue is complex, though only deal with terrible facts that suit your case, and IGNORE the blaring issue of inequality existing today; a major theme of Goode's piece. 

Andrew Bolt, your weak attempts at looking like a professional journalist and commentator only serve to highlight how narrow minded and convoluted your theory of Australian history is, and your ongoing agenda to ignore the attempts at rectifying Indigenous inequality.