Have you heard of the satirical website The Babylon Bee? It’s the American equivalent of The Betoota Advocate.
TheY run funny headlines and satirical stories about contemporary issues where nothing seems to be off limits.
But neither of them compare to our very own taxpayer funded SBS which ran a very important story about ‘fake aboriginals.
The story was sparked by a 25% increase in the number of self-identified aboriginals in the 2021 census.
It’s a phenomenon known as ‘race shifting’ for a bunch of people who “are now “box-ticking” ‘Indigenous’ as their identity in the Census, at workplaces, within cultural institutions and in educational settings”.
Fair enough. A pretty important story. Particularly if people are exploiting a race-shifting loophole to gain benefits, preferment or patronage.
Goodness knows there are probably more than a few of those in public life.
Of course to challenge their claims of heritage would be racist so we’ve likely got a few Elizabeth Warren equivalents in our midst. You may recall she’s the US Democratic Senator who claimed to be native American, gaining all kinds of career benefits.
Donald Trump labelled her ‘pocahontas’ and forced her into getting a DNA test that revealed she had less native American DNA than most every other American.
Maybe we need the same test here.
If we did, I’m pretty sure the list of those exposed as ‘fakes’ would be long and distinguished
In any event, in doing the story on fake aboriginals the team at SBS went off to Dark Emu author, Bruce Pascoe for comment.
No, they weren’t going to him as someone who has been exposed as having a heavily contested heritage claim himself.
Instead they went to him as an Aboriginal man who was decrying the fake aboriginal movement.
Pascoe said that some who identified later in life “need to pull their heads in a bit.”
“What I have seen is recent identifiers coming with their income, and their education, usually acquired because they're not dark [skinned], skewing what is happening in local Aboriginal politics.
I've seen these people assume positions of power, and literally push around both old men and women who they disagree with,”
Sky News Andrew Bolt has documented Pascoe’s transformation to Aboriginality, detailing his desperate search for an Aboriginal great-grandmother to support his writings.
It appears the quest began after his first novel was published and one reviewer noted:
Pascoe is, after all, imagining the psyche of an Aboriginal person; and it is not possible for him to convey all that the concept of ‘my people’ would mean to, say, Colin Johnson [sic. Johnson was later exposed as non-Aboriginal]…
He writes as a humane, informed liberal, but as a white man as well.
The genealogical research actually shows that his great grandmothers were a UK resident Mrs Smith and a Sarah Matthew who was born in the UK.
In 2012 Pascoe admitted this was the case but still went on to claim membership of multiple aboriginal tribes.
Incredibly, despite all the evidence our own taxpayer funded Babylon Bee, the SBS uses this man as a prop to support their concerns about fake Aboriginals.
You couldn’t make this up if you tried. That’s our taxes at work at their SBS.
