Senior ABC political journalist Laura Tingle set off a storm this week when she chose her appearance at the hopelessly woke Sydney Writer’s Festival to claim Australia is a racist country because Liberal leader Peter Dutton finally joined with One Nation and told the truth about high immigration driving the nation’s housing and rental crisis.

It’s hard to understand why an ABC political commentator would say this would be a surprise. It’s standard operating procedure for the Australian left to repeatedly denigrate, attack, and demonise the Australian people in their hypocritical hatred for the sensible, conservative values on which this great nation was founded and built.

We’ve come to expect this from the ABC, which is why so many Australians no longer watch it. The ABC’s ratings have gone through the floor and continue to drop despite the shabby, old, and now-inaccurate claim that the ABC is “Australia’s most trusted news service.

It isn’t. Not by a long shot. And Tingle’s rant shows why.

Tingle’s claims are also manifestly untrue. Few countries are as tolerant as Australia, which literally has laws against racial discrimination and which has welcomed immigrants and visitors from every country and culture on the planet, but for a long time now, the political left has never cared about the truth getting in the way of their claims. They just ignore it. They wear their rank hypocrisy, extreme Marxism and stunning economic illiteracy like a badge of honour.

No apology or justification is ever required for putting your country and its people first. We know the majority of Australians don’t want the big Australia the left is intent on creating. We know that record immigration is the primary driver of record housing demand. We know that reducing the numbers will reduce demand. These are facts that Tingle can easily ignore on her $500,000-plus ABC salary funded by the same Australian taxpayers she called racist. The people who can’t ignore them are those waiting in long lines to inspect a rental, waiting in traffic jams, waiting in hospital emergency rooms, living in cars and tents, and struggling to pay for groceries, fuel, medicine, and mortgages.

There are many problems in this country, but racism isn’t one of them. Indeed, Australians overwhelmingly voted against racism only a few months ago by rejecting the indigenous voice to Parliament at the referendum. And the left called us racists for that too. Racism isn’t the problem. The left is.