Former prime minister Kevin Rudd says it is "100 per cent bullshit" that the booing of Adam Goodes had nothing to do with his Aboriginality, in a speech that called on Australians to name and shame racism.  
Speaking on the eighth anniversary of his apology to the Stolen Generation, Mr Rudd said that he was perhaps naive when he said five years ago that he did not believe that racism was at work in Australia. 
"Perhaps I was just wishing that the better angels of our nature had begun to prevail in a newly reconciled Australia," he said.
"Or perhaps I was just plain wrong."
But at a breakfast gathering of indigenous and political leaders at the NSW Parliament on Friday, Mr Rudd cited examples of what an Indigenous friend had recently described as the "low, steady hum of racism" in Australia. 
This included a black, but not Indigenous, Australian who left a job because "he just couldn't put up with it anymore, being called a 'monkey' by one of his co-workers", as well as an elderly Aboriginal couple who were refused service in a country cafe.
"To me this story sounded more like one from the Birmingham Alabama of the 1960s rather than regional Australia half a century later," he said. 
Mr Rudd said when he spoke out last year about the treatment meted out to footballer Adam Goodes "people screamed back that it wasn't because Adam was Aboriginal. It was just that they disliked his behaviour as a footballer".
"I'm not exactly a connoisseur of the finer points of the game," Mr Rudd continued. "But I think the claim that this was to do with as Adam Goodes as a sportsman and not to do with his Aboriginal identity, I think that claim is 100 per cent bullshit."
Mr Rudd said there was another side to Australia, as experienced by many in the community, that is "more confronting than we white folks are ready for".
"I don't believe this racism represents the mainstream of our society," he said. 
"But it would be wrong to conclude that we don't have a problem."
Even if it is expressed by a small minority, racist words "still carry a great weight, because they are powered by the force of history".
"It's like a cancer that eats away at the fabric of our society - the fabric that binds us together as the wider Australian family," he said. 
"The next time any of us see or hear racist behaviour, don't be silent. Call it out for what it is. Name it. Shame it. For racism in any form has no place in the Australia of the 21st century."
Mr Rudd also remarked on the latest Closing the Gap report, noting that although its findings were mixed, objective data was better than the situation previously, where there had been none at all. 
"Without data, while acknowledging its limitations, we would be left in a world of subjective pain, forever tilting at windmills, however nobly, or ignobly."
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