I wrote for the Crikey email yesterday about the YouTube bullying video, and the way tabloid current affairs television sucked the issue dry. I called it child abuse.

I was interested to read Andrew Bolt’s column on the same issue, and to find that I agreed with much of what he said – and he has a way with words.

But one part of the column left me puzzled. Well, not really, but it did make me raise my eyebrows. He strongly implies the bullying incident as being, somehow, about multi-culturalism and why it doesn’t work. He says:

And what are the right ways to get on in North St Mary’s, a suburb that the local council’s social plan valiantly describes as “a typical post-war working-class Australian community”, to which has been added large Pacific Islander and Arabic-speaking communities, plus the leavings of the welfare state — part of that exciting diversity we’re told in Government ads is our “strength”.

There the Chifley College’s Dunheved Campus, which Casey and Ritchard both attend, battles the uneasy consequences, noting on its website that “our families come from 15 diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds”.

Absenteeism is high, academic results are low and the school warns (or merely concedes) that it imposes “reasonable and fair discipline that fosters resilience in our students”.

Now let me get this straight. We have a muti-cultural school in a poor neighbourhood. There are Arabs and Pacific Islanders present. Two Anglo (to all appearances) kids get into a fight. Not an Arab or a Pacific Islander in sight.

And its about how diversity doesn’t work?

Can’t figure that one out.