How the unAustralian lost the plot

The Oz excitedly published Calma's actual salary - which is simply a prescribed public service remuneration package.

In a stunning invasion of privacy, they also published a front-page photo of his Canberra house to accompany a quote that the paper had somehow managed to prise from the notoriously shy and retiring Warren Mundine.

In a torrent of patronising penmanship reminiscent of a primary-school report card, the national broadsheet opined that Calma must “do much better” and that he “lacks a basic grasp of what social justice means”.

How this ill-informed and petulant sneering stacked up against the “respect your opponent” rhetoric of three days earlier is hard to say.

And - make no mistake - from inside the narrow confines of The Oz's policy tunnel, Tom Calma must indeed look like an opponent.

You see, the meticulous, sober and carefully-documented Social Justice and Native Title reports that the Social Justice Commissioner produces each year are based on a fundamental premise: Indigenous Australians have human rights.

This is anathema to the big paper, which abhors talk of “rights”. They prefer to employ missionary zeal in dispensing wisdom and succour to the poor benighted blackfellas - that they might one day have housing mortgages of their own.

In a worrying development, The Australian has identified that Calma may be working in cahoots with others, noting that his views "run parallel with those of another well-educated, highly-paid member of the Indigenous elite who also needs to find more compassion for the real needs of her people, Marion Scrymgour (NT Minister for Aboriginal Affairs)".

This is a truly staggering slur - all the more incomprehensible because of the nature of the charges: Well-educated? Highly paid?

These are clearly very serious criticisms of Aboriginal people who don't seem to fit The Oz's preferred mould of “charity case”.

The notion that Calma and Scrymgour lack insight into the “real needs” of their people is risible. It is also grotesquely insulting.

The Australian signed off its breathtakingly pompous “new civility” editorial by invoking the Age of Enlightenment, and calling for the “national conversation” to be a “battle waged with wit”.

But do they have the armoury?