Racist ethnic crime claims are Re-bolting

Once again Andrew Bolt is shooting his mouth off, on another one of his racist rants. Its getting a bit tiring and repetitive yet no doubt he feeds into the hunger of the small minority of bigots out there in readership land.

This time, he claims that it is only the nasty Muslims and Africans that are creating crime waves across the country especially in Melbourne, Darwin and Adelaide. Its sounds like an epidemic if you were to believe Bolt. Its easy to pick out police reports of crimes involving men of African appearance, they are freely available on the Police website.

However, we need to place all of this in context. Its not Muslims that fill our gaols. Neither is it Africans. Even looking at it proportionately the numbers are still low.

The ABS website says: As of 30 June 2010 there were 29,700 prisoners in Australian prisons. This represented a national imprisonment rate of 170 prisoners per 100,000 adult population. The median aggregate sentence length for all sentenced prisoners was 3 years. The most serious offence/charge category of acts intended to cause injury accounted for the highest proportion of all prisoners (20% or 5,805).

Of the total prisoner population, 8% (2,228) were female. The median age of all prisoners was 33.5 years.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander prisoners comprised just over a quarter (26% or 7,584) of the total prisoner population. This was 14 times higher than non-Indigenous prisoners.

Australia was recorded as the country of birth for 80% (23,863) of all prisoners. This was followed by New Zealand (3% or 842 prisoners), Vietnam (3% or 755) and the United Kingdom and Ireland (2% or 600). Prisoners born in Samoa had the highest imprisonment rate (555 prisoners per 100,000 adult population for Samoa), followed by prisoners born in Tonga (531 prisoners per 100,000 adult population for Tonga).

The national average daily Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander imprisonment rate was 2,250 per 100,000 adult Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander population.

As you can plainly see, no Sudanese, no Lebanese or Somali people listed amongst these statistics. If Bolt is going to create false hysteria about one ethnic group over others, then he should start with Australian-born inmates, who are mostly of Anglo-European descent. And if there was a justified article then Bolt should be writing about the Samoans and Tongans.

Sadly, this man gets paid to feed crap down our throats and most of us are gullible to believe him. It's a great tragedy of modern day journalism.