No statue should last forever, no matter how tall

The fight over statues of historic racists and colonisers is far more nuanced than politicians can seemingly grasp.

The federal Coalition party room didn't have time this week to talk about the Black Lives Matter protests. It did, however, manage to share some vapours over the defacing of Winston Churchill's statue in London. Somebody had written the words "was a racist" on the plinth, as an unironic statement of what is an objective fact.

But irony, these days, is the exclusive preserve of the ruling class, so Josh Frydenberg dropped a pearler on the party room which was duly shared with the media: if Churchill was a racist, he asked, then what would you call the guy he stopped? If Hitler is the last word on human evil (not an unfair proposition), and he was definitely a racist, then, according to Josh, Churchill was not. To say otherwise would be what, illogical?