Editorial
Frank racism

Last Sunday, a few hours before dawn, a group of men in black masks arrived at Northland in Melbourne with a banner that read “Ban n-----s not machetes”. They posed for a photograph in front of the shopping centre, their hands balled in impotent fists.

A few days earlier, Andrew Bolt wrote a column making much the same point, although he cleaned it up a little, having spent a career wiping the grime off racism, making it a touch more presentable for the mainstream. In the column, he asked: “Is it machetes that should be banned, or immigration from some tribal and war-torn countries?”

It is no coincidence that the two thoughts should occur so closely to each other. If the Herald Sun were bigger, neo-Nazis would hold it up in car parks. It is the journal of racial slurs and Jim Crow era cartoons.

Bolt has long visited with Australia’s racist fringes. He has been found guilty of racial discrimination, having vilified “fair skinned” First Nations people. His work has offended, insulted and humiliated.

For Bolt, Australia is gripped by the censorship of race. The left is to blame. Police won’t say every time a criminal is black. He admits that for every machete attack he thinks “African” and every shooting in Western Sydney he thinks “Middle Eastern”.

Bolt calls this being frank. He calls it the full facts. Another term is profiling. “Example: reports of ‘youth crime’ in the Northern Territory and Queensland, when the real issue is often crime by Indigenous youth, demanding a very different response.”

Bolt writes, as the Nazis march, in the wake of Victoria’s decision to classify machetes as prohibited weapons. His affection for the long blades is new but his racism is not. “You might wonder why useful tools freely sold for centuries are suddenly so dangerous that we can’t have them,” he writes. “Have machetes changed – or has Australia?”

At the same time as Bolt was stoking division here, Donald Trump was announcing another string of travel bans. America’s borders will close to Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. There will be partial restrictions for Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.

“We don’t want them,” Trump says. “In the 21st century, we’ve seen one terror attack after another carried out by visa overstayers from dangerous places all over the world.”

All this is of a piece. Across the world, there is a concerted effort to bend back the arc of history. It is happening on race and on gender. Sad men are taking their revenge. It is an ugly and unsafe time. The world’s goons are throwing off their charade of powerlessness. The cowards are saying what they have pretended was unsayable.

Bolt says it is important to be frank, to let facts be our guide. The fact is the only difference between his column and a Nazi banner is the n-word. It is appalling, but that is the state of debate in this country.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on June 7, 2025 as "Frank racism".

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