Pouring petrol on fires
Reckless ABC inviting race war with false claims of deaths in custody
RACE riots are destroying the US. Yet the ABC is now trying to import the toxic race politics that inspired this mayhem into Australia.
I knew our national broadcaster was biased, but I didn’t realise it was so dangerous.
More than 40 American cities have imposed lockdowns. Mobs torch buildings, and stone and shoot police. Swarms of looters ransack shops.
Yet ABC presenters see in this anarchy a glorious revolution.
So they urge Australians to not just feel rage at the killing in Minneapolis of a black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer, but to rage at supposed racism here.
“Australians need to turn their outrage at police brutality in the US to action in their own backyard,” preached the ABC’s Triple J.
And on the ABC’s Radio National Breakfast, presenter Fran Kelly invited Labor frontbencher Linda Burney to do just that: “Should all of us be using the race riots in the US as a moment to reflect on the problems here at home?”
Yes, said Burney, but the ABC didn’t need her permission. It was already insisting racist police were also killing black men in custody here, too. Get angry!
The ABC’s AM program promoted Floyd-inspired protests against our own alleged police brutality, and let an activist claim – unchallenged – that Aborigines were “unsafe” and “dying at the hands of police” because of “racism”.
Kelly pushed the same grievance: “Those race riots over in America have helped turn attention here at home to the 440 First Nations people who’ve died in custody since the Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody nearly 30 years ago.
“Too many First Australians are dying in custody … some of it by police behaviour.”
But Kelly was hyping an inflammatory myth. As that royal commission concluded: “Aboriginal people in custody do not die at a greater rate than non-Aboriginal people in custody.”
What’s more: “Commissioners did not find that the deaths were the product of deliberate violence or brutality by police or prison officers.”
Yet the ABC keeps promoting the “black deaths in custody” canard – while virtually ignoring the far greater number of black-onblack killings, like that of an 18-year-old mother in the Pilbara last month whose body was dumped in a wheelie bin.
It keeps pouring petrol over the country, waiting for the match. And now it reckons it’s found the match. Australia has its own George Floyd!
As Kelly sold the story: “Dunghutti man David Dungay … uttered ‘I can’t breathe’ 12 times before he died in a Sydney prison hospital in 2015 after being restrained by guards.
“Family members of David Dungay are drawing direct parallels with the death of George Floyd.”
So were ABC staff. “Australia had its own George Floyd moment,” lectured ABC indigenous affairs correspondent Isabella Higgins on Tuesday, complaining: “No one has ever been charged for Dungay’s death.”
That night, hundreds of protesters at a Sydney rally led by the Australian Communist Party chanted: “Justice today for David Dungay.”
How grotesquely and typically irresponsible for the ABC to omit the background that makes clear Dungay is not our George Floyd.
Yes, Dungay died in Long Bay jail after being restrained and crying “I can’t breathe”.
But that’s where the parallels end, and critically important differences begin.
Dungay had chronic schizophrenia and was acutely psychotic. He also had diabetes and was spotted by warders eating biscuits.
They told him to stop. He was a danger to himself – tests that day had shown his blood sugar was far too high.
Dungay refused and got agitated. Warders held him down so a nurse could sedate him.
He did say he couldn’t breathe, but from the video you can hear he shouted it, not gasped it. Most of the warders thought he was foxing.
He wasn’t. Tragically, he died, but the coroner ruled no one was to blame. Not only had the warders been trying to help, but Dungay hadn’t been suffocated. His heart gave out.
The coroner blamed his cardiac arrhythmia on “longstanding, poorly controlled type I diabetes, hyperglycaemia, prescription of antipsychotic medication … elevated body mass index, a degree of likely hypoxaemia caused by prone restraint, and extreme stress and agitation as a result of the events”.
This is the case the ABC presents as an excuse for protests like America’s – against our alleged racism, police brutality, and Aborigines being murdered by officials. The ABC is a public menace for so wilfully playing with the fires of race resentment.