Baz steals the president!

Andrew Bolt reporting in The Herald Sun says it was mad enough that Tourism Australia spent $40 million to promote Australia as racist and asks, which tourists was it trying to lure?  

Members of the KKK? But even madder are the latest claims of fact-fuddled Baz Luhrmann, who directed the two commercials on which Tourism Australia did our dough, and who now says even Barack Obama could have been “stolen” if he’d been born here.

“The President-elect of the United States is 47,” burbled Baz.

“If he was living in Australia, it is absolutely credible that the government, because he had one white parent and one black parent, could have taken him forcibly from his family . . .”

“They would have put him in an institution, probably lied to him that his parents were dead, changed his name and reprogrammed him to be European . . .”

So come visit Australia!  A country so racist they’d have stolen Obama!

Luhrmann’s ads themselves aren’t the real problem, even though they promote exactly the deserted bits of the country few tourists want to visit.

It’s the movie they’re deliberately and closely tied to – Luhrmann’s Australia, which features the same landscapes, look and Aboriginal child star – and it’s Luhrmann’s big mouth.

Luhrmann’s film, which I’ll review here next Wednesday, is framed around a story of the “stolen generation”, even though no one has yet been able to identify even 10 children truly stolen from their parents just because they were Aboriginal.

Indeed, the Federal Court said it could find no evidence of any such policy in the Northern Territory. The Bracks government’s Stolen Generations Taskforce concluded Victoria had had “no formal policy for removing children”, either.

A South Australian judge last year likewise found no formal policy there for stealing children just because they were Aboriginal. And so on.

But Luhrmann ignored such facts, and decided to promote the “stolen generations” myth with a film showing cruel officials stealing an Aboriginal boy from an English lady played by Nicole Kidman.

But he hadn’t finished yet. To promote his movie to Americans, he then told this even bigger whopper about the new US president.

Fact check: Barack Obama is not actually an American Indian, but was abandoned by his Kenyan father and raised by his white mother and white grandparents.

So, Bolt has six questions for Luhrmann before he next defames his country and distorts its history.

1. Please name a single child stolen by Australian officials from a Kenyan immigrant and his white wife on the grounds that their son was Aboriginal.

2. Please name a single child stolen from any white mother just because the child was Aboriginal.

3. Please name just 10 children stolen simply because they were Aboriginal.

4. Please explain your racist assumption that it would be evil to raise a child of a white mother — or white father – as “European”.

5. Please explain how Obama himself was not raised as “European”, given he was brought up by his white mother and grandparents. Or, conversely, explain why that upbringing was bad.

6. Please explain why you continue to assert as facts things that are untrue, unhelpful and utterly absurd.

A Report by The Mole from The Herald Sun