Fisk-like in its accuracy

You've got to read this. Professional lefty panic merchant author Richard Flanagan has a "Comment is Free" article in The Guardian about the aboriginal situation here. Where ever he is writing from, it seems to be somewhere that is free of talk back radio, TV news and all Australian papers. Here's some extracts; you decide how accurate it sounds:

Howard's response - a five-year takeover of 60 indigenous communities, with soldiers and police overseeing alcohol and pornography bans, the part-quarantining of welfare payments to parents to ensure money is spent on food and other necessities, and the compulsory testing of Aboriginal children for sexual abuse - stunned Australia. Initial confusion soon gave way to condemnation of the plan as draconian, racist, unworkable, an ill-conceived shock-and-awe campaign, a cunning land grab and a black Tampa doomed to fail. Howard's past was rebounding.

It took many back to the horror of the infamous "stolen generation", thousands of Aboriginal children taken, often forcibly, from their families into institutions in a misguided attempt at assimilation through the 20th century. Despite Howard's reassurances, fear and panic were reported to have seized Aboriginal communities. Families were already fleeing to the bush, fearful of seeing soldiers take their children away.

Then condemnation transformed into what is now being described as "a widening revolt", joining together Labor state premiers, a former Liberal prime minister, indigenous leaders, religious leaders, police, and more than 60 community and indigenous groups.

So, the most he can say about the initial response is "initial confusion"?

And how's this for a short summary of the Cronulla riots last year:

He [Howard] has overseen a transition from a national commitment to multiculturalism to a strident advocacy of "national values" - an oily phrase that appears to be a stalking horse for a new intolerance. When riots broke out between white supremacists and Lebanese youths on Sydney beaches in 2005, he described it as an issue of law and order, rather than race.

Talk about a slanted description of the parties involved. "White supremacists" makes them sold like 30 year old neo-Nazis; "Lebanese youths" makes it sound like they were all younger than the young white men involved, as if a pack of 13 years old on the Lakemba Youth Group picnic were attacked.

For some context on Richard, there's this from the Kerry O'Brien interview linked to above:

There are a lot of disturbing tendencies in Australian public life. We have this language which I haven't heard used since the Stalinist era of elites, a word that was first used by Stalin when he wanted to attack Jewish intellectuals in 1948, the use of the idea that there are things that matter more than individual freedom. Again, that's a Stalinistic argument. We have the rise of hit men in the media who are there to do the Government's bidding and seem to have no conscience or scruple in attacking any individual who has a position different than that of the Government or is questioning government policy. We have an ever more conformist society. We have an ever more cowed media and we see daily anybody who rightly questions or simply interrogates the process of government or government policy being destroyed. Those sort of things, when people who are simply seeking the truth have to put their reputations on the line, when that starts happening, I become very frightened.

Richard seems to have avoided conformism and destruction so far; he must be living in a bunker somewhere avoiding the police with their packs of dogs trying to ferret him out. Prat.