Calling greenies “watermelons” (“reds hiding under a green cloak”) is clearly descriptive and racially irrelevant but labeling indigenous Australians “coconuts” (“brown on the outside, white on the inside”) is racial vilification and intolerable. The antidevelopment crowd must repudiate this slur in the strongest possible terms.
MP Carol Martin’s serve for ‘a mob of bludgers and liars’
TONY BARRASS AND PAIGE TAYLOR
IN typical blunt fashion, Australia’s first female indigenous MP has labelled some of the environmentalists fighting Woodside Petroleum’s $30 billion gas hub in the Kimberley “a lazy mob of bludgers and liars”.
After telling Kimberley Aborigines gathered outside Fitzroy Crossing yesterday that she was retiring at the next West Australian election, Labor MP Carol Martin said the vast majority of Australians concerned about the environment would be appalled by the behaviour of some anti-gas campaigners who had “bullied, lied and abused” indigenous people in a bid to stop the project at James Price Point, 60km north of Broome. As revealed in yesterday’s The Australian, Ms Martin, the member for the Kimberley since 2001, will retire at the next state election due in March 2013.
She said she made her decision to be closer to her family, but being branded a “coconut” – a derogatory term for Aborigines meaning brown on the outside, white on the inside – by opponents of the gas hub was something that “I just don’t want to put up with any more”. (The Australian)
