Opinion: Heroic street sweeper the voice of silent majority on welcomes to country

We need more people like Shaun Turner, who said what we were all thinking about the welcome to country, writes Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

Street sweeper Shaun Turner has been embroiled in a row over acknowledgements of country. Picture: Alex Coppel

We’d signed up for a pub tour and were standing on a Hobart street corner in the early evening with a chill Antarctic wind whistling around our ears as we waited for our guide.

He turned up on time and began his spiel by incanting an acknowledgment of elders and welcome to country, his voice trailing away as he withered beneath the stony gaze of our six-strong party.

He never did finish. “Anyway, that’s enough of that,” he mumbled. We’d made our point. We’d paid for a pub tour, mate, not acknowledgments and welcomes. Get on with it.

Had Shaun Turner been part of our group, he would have given us the thumbs-up.

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Shaun, who will be the next Australian of the Year if there is any justice in this country, loves a game of golf, and was having a hit while on leave from his job with a local council when one of his bosses realised that he hadn’t ticked the boxes indicating that he had completed online workplace modules that included racial discrimination policies.

This, of course, would never do. There was no place in the council for non-box-tickers, so to overcome this shocking state of affairs, the council officer ticked Shaun’s boxes for him.

Crisis averted, and unaware that he had been ticked, Shaun went on to enjoy his leave.

This would have been the end of it if Shaun hadn’t decided that he’d had enough of welcome to country and acknowledgments and asked why he was being told he had to sit through them before he started his shift as a street sweeper.

Would the streets be swept more cleanly by Shaun if he had stared at his feet and endured this tiresome woke incantations without complaint? Would he have gone forth and attacked the sweeping of the streets to which he had now been welcomed with renewed vigour, aspiring to ascend to the pinnacle of his noble art and be named Street Sweeper of the Week, tapped on the shoulder with a broom and awarded a suitably engraved dustbin lid?

We’ll never know, because Shaun – in the quaint but mistaken belief that he lived in a country in which the right to freedom of speech was enshrined – gave the council some free advice, telling the meeting that “if you need to be thanking anyone, it’s the people who have worn the uniform and fought for our country to keep us free”.

“I don’t need to be welcomed into my own country,” he said. One can but imagine the shocked silence that greeted this heresy. Was it possible to gather a pile of winter leaves around Shaun’s feet and burn him at the stake, or have him dragged through the streets behind a garbage truck?

Instead, as punishment, Shaun was ordered to hand in his broom and dismissed for serious misconduct.

You might think that at this stage, the council burghers might have paused for thought and said to Shaun: “Mate, if you feel that strongly about the issue you can sit outside the meetings until the acknowledgments are over.” Problem solved.

Perhaps they thought that if Shaun the Heretic was allowed to be excused, his stance would spread like the plague through the council. Before too long, acknowledgments and welcomes would be intoned to empty rooms. This would never do.

Shaun, however, was not going to give up his broom without a fight, and marched off to the Fair Work Commission, where the council’s lawyers claimed that as Shaun had ticked the racial discrimination online module boxes and was therefore aware of council policies, his dismissal had been legal.

What you have said about Welcome to Country

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■ November 2024: Surf club’s war against WTC

■ May 2024: ‘They are overused’

It was at this point Shaun’s team scored a hole in one, saying that on the date the boxes had been ticked he had been on holidays, had no access to a computer and could prove he was swinging a club on the golf course.

Not surprisingly, his claim for unfair dismissal was upheld by the commission. Will Shaun be reunited with his broom and continue with his battle against leaves and litter?

The council has yet to announce if he will be given his job back, so we will see but in the meantime people around the country in meetings, sporting events and planes are being forced to sit through acknowledgments and welcomes which are devoid of meaning, substance or relevance.

More strength to your elbow, Shaun, as my Irish forebears would say. We need more like you.