Matthew Abraham: Carolyn Power is having none of this, and who can blame her?
As meaningless apologies go, you’d have to go a long way to find one quite so ridiculous as SA Labor’s to Carolyn Power last week, writes Matthew Abraham.
Opinion
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Sorry but not sorry. This is the new apology you have when you’re not having an apology. The “sorry but not sorry” apology bobs up repeatedly on social media, often abbreviated to simply “sorry, not sorry”.
It is an apology that is taken back before it has left the thumbs, and that’s because the person tapping it out on their phone isn’t sorry at all for what they’re about to do. So it’s a meaningless apology. If anything, it adds insult to injury.
As meaningless apologies go, you’d have to go a long way to find one quite so ridiculous as last Sunday’s weird mea culpa from the South Australian Labor Party for its smear campaign against Carolyn Habib, now Power, in the 2014 election campaign.
That’s right, the 2014 election. Seven years ago. It’s taken seven years for the ALP to apologise for a pamphlet it sent to 16,000 homes in Elder clearly targeting the Arabic surname of Ms Habib.
The pamphlet asked “CAN YOU TRUST HABIB?” in street graffiti typeface set against a bullet-pocked brick wall, the sort you’d see in a shell-shocked Middle Eastern urban battleground. It was racist.
Of course, the ALP could have said “CAN YOU TRUST SOMEONE WITH AN ARABIC SURNAME?” but that would have been way too obvious.
At the time, the Labor Party machine and then premier Jay Weatherill vehemently rejected criticism that the leaflet was racist and the party has stonewalled for seven years.
Until last Sunday, that is, when the man who authorised the leaflet — Labor’s state secretary Reggie Martin — apologised.
“I am sorry that the flyer we put out did cause distress,” he told the ABC’s Stacey Lee. “That was never my intention.”
(Hint to Reggie: when apologising in front of a TV camera, don’t fold your arms across your chest. It’s not good body language.)
Mr Martin said that when the leaflet came to him for approval he didn’t see it as racist.
“I looked at it, I studied it, I checked it and proofed it, and in that time it didn’t come across my mind that it had any kind of racist intention,” he said.
Note, he still isn’t conceding the leaflet was racist, just that he’s sorry if some people who saw it that way were “distressed”.
An alternative form of words could go something like: “I don’t know how I couldn’t have realised the leaflet was racist because it’s now clear to me that it was and I apologise unequivocally.”
Mr Martin is an intelligent person and the fact he authorised a leaflet many see as racist doesn’t mean he is racist. But rather than being penalised for the decision, he’s been preselected by Labor for a Legislative Council seat. It’s one of the best jobs in the business.
So what brought about this half-baked apology after so long in the political Crock-Pot?
Let’s backtrack a few steps. Labor’s Annabel Digance won the seat in 2014 but Carolyn Power took it from her in 2018. She did so campaigning again as Carolyn Habib, only choosing to use her husband’s surname after winning.
Like me, she’s half-Lebanese, so in my book that was a gutsy performance, refusing to take the easy option.
She told me during the week that she did so because she wanted to send “a very clear message I wasn’t going to be bullied and intimidated by them”.
On the eve of last weekend’s ALP state convention, Ms Digance launched a broadside at her old party over the “horrible” leaflet, telling The Weekend Australian it’d been cooked up by a “boy’s club” of party operatives, was designed and letterboxed without her knowledge and she’d been instructed not to ring Ms Habib to apologise.
The next day, out trotted the Martin apology.
Ms Power is having none of this, and who can blame her? The ALP’s apology looks very much like an exercise in damage control — but then that’s probably the case with most apologies.
Compare this to radio station FIVEaa’s prompt and unequivocal apology for broadcaster Jeremy Cordeaux’s appalling on-air comments, describing alleged rape victim Brittany Higgins as “a silly little girl who got drunk”.
Cordeaux’s words, first exposed by this paper’s Matt Gilbertson, were blurted out on Saturday morning last weekend and, by Monday, he was sacked. (I’m a paid contributor to the station.)
Australia’s parliaments suddenly find themselves knee-deep in apologies — all of them to women, all of them belated, and all of them with varying degrees of sincerity.
But those apologies have to be accompanied by evidence of real change. Sorry but not sorry, anything else is a failure.
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