The judge claimed that Bolt’s articles breached Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act, which is one of those laws written with enough ambiguity to allow the above nine freedom haters to use and abuse to protect their native racket.  The Herald Sun say they may appeal. The ABC is salivating tonight on the news about the decision.

Apart from the obvious freedom of speech issue, the salient issue is about who really qualifies as an aborigine. At what point is someone not allowed to be an aborigine, or does someone only have to self-identify as such to claim the range of benefits and privileges that society and the government see fit to bestow upon aborigines? Australia does not seem to have any blood quantum laws relating to those claiming to be aboriginal. For instance, some native American tribes require a person to have at least one parent to qualify for a tribe in order to qualify for US government benefits. Other tribes stipulate other qualifications. Here in Australia it seems anything goes. The above nine were claiming after the court case that they don’t have to prove their genealogical ‘identify to anybody’. This would not be an issue, except that they use that identify to fleece the rest of us of our hard earned money.

BTW, the ABC’s 730 report did not interview a single person who disagreed with the ruling.

UPDATE

“Regardless of the niceties of the case, the fact is today in Australia… journalists, commentators, ordinary citizens are not free to make critical and unpopular remarks in the course of ordinary political exchange,” Senator Brandis told Sky News.

“I think that is a terrible thing.

I don’t know how to solve the problem: change the constitution or just the law? What is clear is that self-identified Aborigines are all unproductive government funded and protected individuals, like some type of latter-day aristocracy.

At the 10 minute mark the Ferrari’s get a police escort through busy traffic.

I’m just saying.

UPDATE

Here is the damning proof that I got it wrong. Thanks to readers.

However one Australian did make the list:

44. David Kilcullen

for writing the book on how America fights small wars.

Counterinsurgency expert | Washington

A gregarious former lieutenant colonel in the Australian Army, Kilcullen had an epiphany as a Ph.D. student in political anthropology. At root, guerrilla movements were motivated not by radical ideals, but by mundane, everyday drives; defeating them requires protecting the population and developing an in-depth knowledge of local social networks. In 2007, as the Iraqi insurgency was reaching its height, Gen. David Petraeus brought him on as a senior advisor, and many credit Kilcullen’s ideas with saving countless lives. Now, the Aussie has begun applying his out-of-the-box thinking to Afghanistan, starting with his book The Accidental Guerrilla. “If I were a Muslim,” Kilcullen told the New Yorker, “I’d probably be a jihadist.… The thing that drives these guys — a sense of adventure, wanting to be part of the moment, wanting to be in the big movement of history that’s happening now — that’s the same thing that drives me, you know?”

….

Worst idea: The notion that the West can afford to fail in Afghanistan and still have a chance of preventing the collapse and terrorist takeover of Pakistan.

Identity crisis: our cross to bear

These tax-payer funded community consultative processes have become veiled attempts to air the views of the radical left – because they wouldn’t get an airing any other way. You know, Australians are just a bunch of racists and so are our national symbols. Everything from the Union Jack to the Southern Cross. And of course guess who is to blame?

…the Australia Day Council launched a campaign last week to ask which symbols and images best represent our country, opinion-makers and public figures were at odds on how to answer the question – variously describing the Southern Cross as everything from ”beautiful” to ”racist”….

Tim Soutphommasane, a first-generation Australian and author of Reclaiming Patriotism: Nation-Building for Australian Progressives, said symbols such as the Southern Cross came to be associated with a new wave of patriotism under the conservative Howard government.

”Many Australians have been content to regard all expressions of national pride as thinly disguised racism,” he said. ”The result has been a surrender of all things patriotic to extreme nationalists.”

It is a bit formulaic – ‘ we are all meant to question our current symbols because clearly they are inadequate, especially after JH’. However if the Australia Day Council wants to promote this tosh they might want to consider that the only people with the identity crisis are those on the PC and radical left.

Australians for Constitutional Monarchy national convener Professor David Flint disagreed, saying critics were out of touch with the Australian people and that it was a ”pity to undermine the great symbols of the nation”.

”The fact [the symbols] have been imported doesn’t make them any less Australian.”

Thirty years on and Mad Max 4: Fury Road is about to restart the local movie industry, being filmed entirely in Sydney and Outback NSW.