Culture

Indigenous Australians Are Using The #DefineAboriginal Hashtag To Call Out Pauline Hanson

"What defines an Aboriginal?" Pauline Hanson asked Andrew Bolt.

by Osman Faruqi  29 November 2016

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There’s a lot of things to dislike about 2016, but right up at the top of the list has got to be the all to common occurrence of Pauline Hanson and Andrew Bolt getting together for a chinwag and broadcasting it live, straight into our lounge rooms.

Just when you thought they might have run out of wildly offensive things to say, they pop up with something new and terrible. Last night on The Bolt Report the pair were discussing… how to define “an Aboriginal”.

“What defines an Aboriginal?” Hanson asked Bolt. “You know there’s no definition of an Aboriginal?”

“If you marry an Aboriginal you can be classified as an Aboriginal,” Hanson claimed, before demanding a “big debate” on the issue, and pivoting her remarks back to Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act.

Last week Hanson said she was sick of being called a racist and declared herself the victim of “reverse racism”.

Indigenous Australians have used the hashtag #DefineAboriginal to respond to Hanson and articulate the division that exists across our society.

Earlier in the year the #IndigenousDads hashtag went viral in response to a Bill Leak cartoon.

It’s pretty infuriating that high profile commentators like Leak, Andrew Bolt and Pauline Hanson seemingly don’t care about the impact of their words and are happy to continually use national media outlets as a way to denigrate entire communities.