The ABC has apologised to incendiary columnist Andrew Bolt regarding the broadcasting of statements made by Indigenous academic Professor Marcia Langton on last week’s episode of Q&A (pictured above, second from the left) suggesting that she believed that Bolt was a racist during a discussion of the Federal Government’s plan to repeal parts of the same Racial Discrimination Act that Bolt has previously been found to have breached for discriminating on the basis of race.
In keeping with his MO [insatiably reactionary], the much-maligned Bolt is still not 100% satisfied with the apology.
Langton’s comments, which so profoundly devastated poor Bolt to the point where he was unable to go to work last Tuesday, arose concerning “articles that Bolt wrote about several Aboriginal people [which] were far from the subject of politics and simply abusive,” including one about her colleague Dr Misty Jenkins, an Aboriginal scientist and Oxbridge graduate who Langton alleges had been the recipient of Bolt’s “foul abuse [causing her to] withdraw from public life.”
Bolt’s comments regarding Dr Jenkins arose in a 2008 column in which he identified Jenkins as “a blonde and pale science PhD who calls herself Aboriginal”.
Regarding those comments, Langton suggested, “He argued that she had no right to claim that she was Aboriginal and, like most fools who put this argument in public, we are expected to deny our parents and our grandparents because somebody believes in race theories.”
Come Wednesday, Langton had apologised to Bolt for hurting his feelings in an interview with 2GB, saying “I don’t think he’s a racist” but “He plays with racist ideas. He goes too close to the line.” Following suit, Q&A host Tony Jones apologised last night “for broadcasting [Langton’s] remarks” – an apology Bolt today acknowledges as “a start”, albeit one that does “not go far enough.”
In case the irony of the situation has so far failed to avail itself to you, in September 2011 the Federal Court found that Bolt had breached Section 18C of the 1975 Racial Discrimination Act. Now known colloquially as ‘Bolt’s Law’, 18C protects people from “offensive behaviour because of race, colour or national or ethnic origin” as a civil offence. One of Bolt’s offending article (“It’s so hip to be black”) suggested that “fair-skinned”, “Political Aborigines” are taking advantage of “the one identity… that has political and career clout”; that “that there is a whole new fashion in academia, the arts and professional activism to identify as Aboriginal” and that ” self-identification as Aboriginal strikes me as self-obsessed, and
driven more by politics than by any racial reality.”
driven more by politics than by any racial reality.”
Fellow panellist Attorney General George Brandis remains resolved to amend the RDA, saying “it’s not the role of the Government to tell people what they are allowed to think and it’s not the role of the Government to tell people what opinions they are allowed to express.”
You can read Langton’s elucidation of her initial comments and apology here, the original Q&A transcript here, and Bolt’s initial reaction here, if you’re [redacted].
Photo via Q&A
