That poor possum

Rowan Dean I 23 October 2024 I Spectator Australia

I’m not a vegan. You won’t find me stripping naked, drenching myself in red paint, and gluing myself to the front of an Ugg store to complain about cow lives in the leather trade. While I fleetingly feel guilt for the bunny rabbits on the menu, my inner carnivore usually overrides.

That said, I felt deeply sorry for the possum draped over Lidia Thorpe’s shoulders during her predictable tirade directed – not at the king – but at the university-bred useful idiots sitting at the fringes of the voting spectrum.

What a miserable afterlife.

Scraped down.

Preserved.

Stitched together.

And worn around as a piece of political propaganda – matched with high heels, no less.

That’s not a fitting end for an Australian animal.

Not even for a possum that spends its time breathing heavily outside people’s windows or stomping about on the roof.

As for Lidia Thorpe’s outrage theatre, she has convinced the majority that treaties and race-based politics are not only a folly, but a path toward permanent conflict between citizens.

A totally unnecessary and artificial racial divide.

It was not her intention, but that is what she achieved.

Even previously enthusiastic ‘Yes’ voters commenting on social media (no wonder they want to ban it) have backed away, shaking their heads and deciding that if this is what power looks like when held by the activist elite, they’d rather have the calm and respectful King.

The childish politics of Thorpe, of which there are many disgraceful examples, has sunk so low she no longer embarrasses Australia.

Australia has disavowed the drama.

These outbursts exist in their own class of meaningless, attention-grabbing nonsense padded out with nasty fabrications about history drenched in blood-guilt politics.

Lidia Thorpe was rewarded with international bewilderment and ten seconds of fame. Hosts from foreign countries tried to make sense of the footage, but guest after guest patiently explained that this was predictable nonsense from the Australian Parliament.

Blaming Australians of colonial ancestry (which Thorpe has) for all sorts of horrific things resurrects the notion of ‘original sin’, projecting it onto people who vaguely share a skin colour. In the eyes of this kind of activism, it doesn’t matter if your particular ancestors were convicts brought to Australia in chains or free settlers who never interacted with Aboriginal tribes. You’re guilty by race.

The reverse is true. Activists promote the idea of ‘original purity’ for those they class of victims, absolving them of the brutal way tribes treated each other, the land, women, children, and the settlers.

It is an ideology designed to be unfair and whose purpose is the creation of an exploitable division where political power and public funding flows – forever.

Or until those on the receiving end get sick of it.

So much for the underpinning law of Australia where citizens are born free.

No one carries the crimes of their ancestors, not even the King.

It is a terrible shame, because the story of Australia is one of shared survival that was, on a global and historical scale, remarkably peaceful.

We should be exceptionally proud of our culture, of our heritage, of our Aboriginal inhabitants, of our Colonial settlers, of the convicts, of the explorers, of the farmers, of the bush guides, and of every single person who created the civilisation of Australia.

This is the message we should export to the world.

Thorpe and her brand of politics is being shown the door.

Hopefully, after her last outburst and the deeply unacceptable Instagram post displaying a cartoon of a beheaded King Charles which she claims was put up without her knowledge (but nonetheless on her account), she will be removed from Parliament.

The taxpayer should not have to pay for this sort of behaviour.

Author: Rowan Dean