The Tide Begins to Turn on Virtue Signalling in Indigenous Criminal Reform

Treating Indigenous criminals differently from other criminals is a recipe for resentment.

Ian Leavers, president of the Queensland Police Union, at the Brisbane Entertainment Centre in Brisbane, Australia on Dec. 21, 2022. AAP Image/Jono Searle

Commentary

The overwhelming rejection by the Australian people of the attempt to insert a new chapter into the Australian Constitution known as The Voice appears to have emboldened many previously silenced people to push back on the guilt narrative.

Be it the enduring of the tiring and wearisome “Acknowledgement of Country,” which according to many of Australia’s Aborigines is either a joke or simply made up, or the woke proposal of “truth-telling and treaty” which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was so anxious not to talk about during the recent Voice referendum.

There are now emboldened Australians willing to speak out. Now people on the other side can do a bit of their own truth-telling and expose the hollowness of the one-way traffic Australians have had to endure in recent years.

When it comes to truth-telling, Queensland Police Union President Ian Leavers has not held back.

In an opinion piece published in his local, The Courier Mail, Mr. Leavers would have spoken for many of the nearly 70 percent of state citizens who voted to reject The Voice in Queensland.

Yet the pushback from the usual suspects shows that some have learned nothing from the repudiation of their corrosive views by their fellow Australians, and in particular, Queenslanders.

The ideas that had been gaining traction, which allows people identifying as Indigenous to be automatically released if suspected of a crime and not requiring bail, earned the justified wrath of the representative of those in our community who risk limb and life every day to protect us and our property.

Police in Queensland, Australia on June 7, 2020. Ian Hitchcock/Getty Images

The continual clammer by certain elements to suggest that every misfortune an Indigenous person faces is due to colonisation needs to be called out. And Mr. Leavers did it with facts and the powerful ingredient of the on-the-ground experience of a working police officer.

While state government ministers, academics, and others in the Aboriginal industry formed a conga line of condemnation full of hyperbole and self-righteous flagellation, they were unable to debunk the stark evidence that Mr. Leavers produced.

It is a sad reflection on the state of journalism and public debate that the “outraged” could call for Mr. Leavers’ resignation and provide him with free character assessments while studiously avoiding the persuasiveness of the evidence and rationale he had to offer.

They played the man and not the ball, steering clear from any debate of the facts.

The Reality

We are told to believe that the statistical overrepresentation of the Aboriginal population in our jails is a direct result of colonisation and the resultant socio-economic and historical disadvantage from which they suffer.

Yet at the same time, the statistical overrepresentation of the Aboriginal population in our national Parliament is not because of this same colonisation and the socio-economic and historical disadvantage.

Cherry-picking statistics is never clever.

Consistency of argument and use of data allowing for genuine discussion has been denied to the Australian population—that is until the advent of the tidal wave of “No” voting gave “permission” to reject the prevailing woke orthodoxy.

So when statistics point to heinous levels of violence and sexual abuse in Indigenous communities perpetrated by the Indigenous on their fellow Indigenous peoples, the deniers seek refuge in name-calling and obfuscation.

Queensland Police set up at the Queensland and New South Wales border at Coolangatta on March 25, 2020 Chris Hyde/Getty Images

It would not surprise Mr. Leavers and his police comrades to learn that Indigenous females are 35 times more likely to be hospitalised due to family violence-related assaults. The police are the first responders and deal with the carnage.

In one year, there were 150 Indigenous deaths due to assault. An Indigenous woman is 10 times more likely to die from assault compared to their non-Indigenous counterparts.

And who attends these scenes?

Not the state government ministers in Queensland or the gaggle of academics who were so quick to disparage.

No, it’s the police whose representative was right to speak out and expose the nonsense and corrosive influence on community safety and law and order of an ideology that denies the need for Indigenous lawbreakers to be held accountable for the safety of all of us and, in particular, their own.

Treating Indigenous criminals differently from other criminals is a recipe for resentment and false assertions of Aboriginality, leaving the police in a precarious predicament.

No wonder Mr. Leavers and his colleagues were pleased with the proposed dumping of the truth-telling policy by the Queensland Labor government.

The government would be better off to listen to the voice of the first responders so ably articulated by their president.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.