Racist pseudo-science still shapes Australian politics

Pauline Hanson speaking about Aboriginal people on a white Christian podcast last year said "they're the most primitive race on Earth and we're supposed to be holding them up and saying what they've achieved? They've achieved nothing." She resurrected the old shibboleth, "they didn't invent the wheel" and claimed that the entire achievement of 65,000 years of our ancestral peoples was "A few, you know, rock paintings".

The ABC and another media outlets claim that she gave a qualified apology but no apology is better than her incoherent nonsense about wanting to "unite" Australians. She claimed she was not talking "now," which we are supposed to intuit means this was not directed towards present-day Indigenous Australians. A truckie could drive a haul truck right through that. Her record tells us otherwise.

The response to Pauline Hanson's latest attack on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people has been extremely muted. Only a handful of politicians refuted her vile comments, and none convincingly. Following the Steve Bannon textbook handed to Trump before his first election to the presidency of the USA, she...