Real row over writer's fake Aborigine comments

Herald Sun columnist Andrew Bolt. Photo / Supplied

For sports-mad Australians, the advent of autumn means rugby league, soccer and Australian Rules.

This year it has brought an extra spectacle: the country's most notorious right-wing columnist, Andrew Bolt, defending himself against charges of racial vilification.

Rather than fire off volleys of invective from his 12th-floor office at the Herald Sun, the Melbourne tabloid, Bolt has spent much of the past fortnight in the Federal Court, where he has heard himself linked to eugenics, Nazi race laws and the Holocaust.

The spark for such explosive claims was a series of columns and blogs in which Bolt questioned why nine prominent Australians identified themselves as Aboriginal despite being fair-skinned and despite Aboriginality representing the "thinnest strand" of their genealogy.

Brought under the Racial Discrimination Act (RDA), the case has not only subjected a favourite bugbear of the Left to scathing analysis of his ideology and beliefs; it has also reignited simmering issues of racial identity, media ethics and the limits of free speech.

The plaintiffs - who include the novelist Anita Heiss, the former chairman of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission Geoff Clark and the Sydney academic Larissa Behrendt - claim Bolt accused them of faking their Aboriginality in order to win grants, awards and appointments.

They want the Herald Sun - Australia's biggest-selling daily newspaper - to apologise and refrain from publishing anything similar in future.

Bolt, Australia's most widely read - and most inflammatory - columnist and blogger, rubbishes the notion of climate change. He rails against asylum-seekers. He denounces the "myth" of the Stolen Generations - the part-Aboriginal children forcibly removed from their parents.

But when the 51-year-old attacked Heiss, Clark and the others, he opened a seething can of worms.

Debate has long raged about how to define Aboriginality, and about the influences of biology, culture and perception. A decade ago, Tasmanian Aborigines - all of them light-skinned - argued bitterly about who could claim indigenous heritage.

In one article, headlined "It's so hip to be black", Bolt called Behrendt "a professional Aborigine" who had "won many positions and honours as an Aborigine" despite having a German father. (In fact, her father was Aboriginal and her mother English.) Addressing Mick Dodson, an eminent academic and advocate of a black-white treaty, whose father was white, Bolt snapped: "Sign a treaty with yourself, Mick."

He wrote of another of the nine, the artist Bindi Cole, who has an English-Jewish mother and part-Aboriginal father. "[She] could in truth join any one of several ethnic groups, but chose Aboriginal, insisting on a racial identity you could not guess from her features.

"She also chose, incidentally, the one identity open to her that has political and career clout."

It was Bolt's emphasis on biological descent that prompted Ron Merkel, QC, the plaintiffs' counsel, to accuse him of outdated notions of racial identity akin to 1930s-style eugenics.

Merkel claimed Bolt's attempt to distinguish between "true" black Aborigines and "false" white Aborigines was "a downhill escalator to a racist hell", and, he declared dramatically: "The Holocaust started with words."

For his part, Bolt insisted that, far from being racist, his columns were a plea against racism and an appeal to a common humanity. His main concern, he said, was that the prizes and accolades won by the nine should have gone to more deserving, poverty-stricken recipients.

He also called Clark "a racist ... [who] promotes racial division".

While Bolt may not win any popularity contests - "a lot of us cringe at the stuff he writes", says a colleague - the case has caused dismay, even among his left-wing detractors.

Spencer Zifcak, president of Liberty Victoria, told the Age it was immensely important for freedom of speech. Chris Berg, a research fellow with the Institute of Public Affairs, said it could have "a stifling effect on political debate".

However, Denis Muller, a research consultant specialising in media ethics, believes the threat to free speech has been overstated. He said the main problem was the RDA, which had set the threshold for discrimination too low.

The act outlaws behaviour likely to "offend, insult, humiliate or intimidate" a person or group on the basis of their race, colour or ethnic origin.

Muller calls Bolt a member of "that ultra-conservative part of the commentariat which is preoccupied by issues of race" - namely, indigenous and refugee policy. "He's in the same league as Fox News, although not quite so rabid. He's not unintelligent and he's a good rhetorician, a smart bloke. Whether he actually believes any of this stuff, I don't know."

Bolt's colleague thinks he does. "There's no doubt that he's a professional provocateur; he presses all the buttons," he says. "But while he may be pandering to the readers, he's quite obsessed with the black-white issue and he has very deeply conservative views."

Justice Bromberg,is expected to deliver judgment next month. But it seems unlikely that Bolt - who began his career at The Age and once worked briefly for Bob Hawke's Labor government - will suffer professionally, whatever the outcome. Channel Ten has just hired him to host his own political talk show, the Bolt Report, on Sunday mornings.