Noel Pearson has declared the “soft bigotry” of Australia’s progressive left in education, the environmental movement and media as “the most fundamental challenge to Indigenous reform in our country”.

The Aboriginal leader amplified his recent attack on the ABC with a sweeping indictment of “the left” generally over Indigenous policy failure, a critique he credited to an unlikely source, former US president George W Bush.

In a speech in Brisbane, Pearson said the low expectations of “false progressives” for Indigenous people and their habit of attacking policy geared towards their social and economic advancement had trapped reformers such as himself in a “zero-sum game”.

“We will die in the arms of the false progressives whom we mistakenly think are on our side, but they harbour a basic bigotry towards our humanity and oppose our dignity at too many turns,” he told an audience at an event organised by his organisation, Good to Great Schools Australia.

Pearson’s public airing of this critique comes as his involvement in Queensland Indigenous schools hangs in the balance amid efforts to limit the use of his Direct Instruction (DI) curriculum.

It also follows his broadsides against the ABC, which themselves came on the heels of ABC reporting on issues linked to the use of DI in those schools, the role of Pearson’s organisation and accounts of abusive language used by him in exchanges with government figures.

Pearson said the left’s “soft bigotry” – which rejected the idea that social change was the product of individual agency, putting disadvantage down to “the structures of inequality” – was the “most important idea in race relations since the advent of civil rights”.

He said the “basic hypocrisy” of the left came from double standards such as “the greens who prioritise conservation over Indigenous development needs”.

Pearson said there was a “relativism” of the left towards “the poor generally”, a “class aspersion” where their expectations for people they wanted to help fell short of their expectations for themselves.

“The relativism appears to reflect an acceptance or sensitivity to ethnicity and culture, but in fact it cloaks double standards, where the progressive purveyors fail to ask themselves: what would I want for myself and my children if I was in the same circumstance,” Pearson said.

“The answer that you would like to participate in economic development, have jobs, not be on welfare and so on – is not a question the purveyors of this culture ask themselves.”

This prejudice was “even worse in its effects” than “hard bigotry” and confronting it had succeeded the fight against racial discrimination as “the most important development in the cause of human dignity” in the first half of the 21st century, he said.

“Australia and the world needs to wake up to it. This form of prejudice wreaks a massive toll on the marginalised and perpetuates great social injustice,” he said.

Pearson said the vexed public reaction to this idea when he first raised it against the ABC last month showed it was “completely foreign to thinking people”.

He said the “strangest thing is that this profound insight came from George W Bush”, who was “such a notorious wrangler of the English language and someone many would rate such a poor president”.

Pearson said Bush’s grasp of the challenge of education for the disadvantaged, including that a reform agenda must “expect every child can learn” and “to blow the whistle on failure”, has “never been better put”.

He said Bush’s reforms were “doomed” when the all-consuming “war on terror” dawned after the 9/11 attacks. “One of the great ironies of 9/11 was that at the very time ‘Dubya’ was told of the terrorist strikes, he was in a classroom reading a small Direct Instruction booklet to young students called ‘The Pet Goat’. No kidding.”

Pearson criticised the Queensland premier, Annastacia Palaszczuk, for her comment that Aurukun, when temporarily closed this year over teacher safety concerns, should look like “a normal state school”.

Pearson, who has since withdrawn his organisation from the Aurukun school after an impasse with the government over the role of DI, said: “What thoughtful person would think that ‘normal state schools’ have been serving children like those in Aurukun in decades past?”

“Normal state schools are routinely failing Aboriginal children. They are preparatory schools for too many Indigenous youth moving on to lives of welfare dependency and economic exclusion, and worse, juvenile detention and adult imprisonment.

“We want schools that cater to disadvantaged students, and that do not leave them behind with low expectations.”

Pearson said DI – which has been criticised by some educators as a rigid, expensive and culturally inappropriate remedial curriculum – was “precisely the approach to schooling that removes all excuses” based on a student’s disadvantage.

“The operating principle of Direct Instruction is: ‘If the student has not learned, the teacher has not taught’,” he said.

Pearson said there was “more insight in the reality television” of the SBS First Contact series produced by Perkins than in “the ABC’s investigative reporting on me and my schools work over the past two weeks”.

“When reality television is more truthful than current affairs journalism, then something is going on,” he said.

Pearson said people had “misapprehended my critique of soft bigotry” at the ABC, which he had described as a “miserable, racist national broadcaster” that was “willing the wretched to fail”.

He said he did not object to reporting that exposed problems in Indigenous communities, citing Four Corners’ recent Don Dale report and its 1990 report by David Marr on Aurukun’s “grog crisis” as important journalism.

“My problem lies with the journalism that deals with attempts to tackle the very problems about this journalism constantly reports,” he said. “Because it is in relation to the policy response that the culture of soft bigotry at the ABC, and other progressive media, comes to the fore.”

Having been “in this reform business for 25 years”, Pearson said he had repeatedly witnessed a media and political culture that “exposes attention to problems and then kills any response to these problems”. “Indigenous reform is a zero-sum game, as a result,” he said.

“This is why we have policies and initiatives that seek to reduce imprisonment, keep children with their parents, give hope to juveniles, get Indigenous children to succeed in schools, reduce ‘overrepresentation in the prison system’ – and yet a couple of decades later the numbers are worse, there are more people in prison and we are heading towards half of children in protection coming from 3% of the population.

He said there was a progressive media culture “allergic” to ideas like welfare reform, economic development and land rights that clashed with conservation-driven laws protecting rivers and vegetation.

Pearson complained that at the ABC there was “no evidence-favouring neutrality in this, except for iconoclasts like Chris Uhlmann taking a stand on freedom of religion”.