Book review: 'still not sorry' by Andrew Bolt

That more women than men engage with the supernatural might say a bit about the females who do and perhaps a little about femininity, however, it’s irrelevant to issues surrounding representation in parliament. It’d be just as easy to say that more men kill themselves in car accidents, or commit suicide, so we shouldn’t let males anywhere near our strongholds of power because they’re given to dangerous behaviour.

Mind you, if we do have any witches in the senate they might wish to turn Ron Boswell into a handsome prince and Barnaby Joyce into a Liberal from Sydney’s north shore.

Fans and foes alike should get pleasure from Bolt’s revelation that he used to be a drummer in a dance band with a fondness for donning polka-dot bow ties and playing uncool tunes. His message in “My Australia” seems partly to be that a pragmatic kind of tolerance was widespread in rural areas when he was a boy. For example, Bolt’s closest friend at school was Aboriginal and this was neither here nor there.

It’s interesting that the Left is adept at accusing moderates and right-wingers of positioning minorities as the “other”, at the same time as never appreciating that they do it all the time, with urban sophisticates and bush chauvinists just one of those binaries.

Of course, Aboriginals in two states and the Northern Territory were disenfranchised federally until 1962, which says something about institutionalised racism, and perhaps something about the way they were treated on a daily basis. Since moving to Melbourne last April, I’ve seen about five Indigenes so who knows what their position is in this otherwise diverse city.

There’s a range of other subjects Bolt discusses in his book, with the story of a baby aborted alive at 21 weeks - confronting and difficult for a pro-choice advocate like myself.

Agree or disagree with him - I suspect a majority agree with some, most or all of his work - Bolt knows how to stimulate debate and a columnist who wasn’t capable of that wouldn’t be releasing a book.