James Morrow: Flag stunt shows why Indigenous voice plan may divide us

The left is always accusing the right of running culture wars and yet they are the ones who keep trying to wage war on the culture— just look at the Greens’ latest stunt, writes James Morrow.

Well, what a surprise: the Greens have once again got the wrong end of the (flag) stick.

And can this column just say, how good is it that Labor is able to govern in its own right, without having to negotiate every damn piece of legislation with the demands of some weird-beard Newtown sharehouse collective in the lower house?

That’s right.

Once again Adam Bandt has gone out and presented his own, weird vision for Australia.

And once again Australians have looked back at him in squinting, head-tilted bewilderment, like a cocker spaniel who has just been told that humans pay anything at all for lettuce much less 10 dollars.

Ahead of a press conference with Greens leader Adam Bandt, a Greens staffer has just moved the Australian flag out of the TV camera shot. Picture: Twitter

In case you missed it, here’s what happened.

Greens leader Adam Bandt, or one of his staffers, decided to be cute and shuffle the Australian flag offstage before a press conference in which the party’s high command was to talk about Net Zero and unicorns and the like.

Instead, Bandt and his deputy would speak only in front of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.

Well, bless.

As a move to win the hearts of the hard left Twitterati (the sort that put mask emojis and water drops and Ukrainian flags and their own bespoke pronouns in their profiles) it could not have been better confected.

After all, if Labor was going to balance the Coalition’s previous muscular press conference flag-waving by putting the Australian flag up with ATSI standards, the Greens were going to go one better and all but jam the national ensign in the bins behind Bligh Street.

Adam Bandt MP, Leader of the Australian Greens. Picture: Josh Woning

It’s a funny thing, isn’t it, how the left is always accusing the right of running culture wars and yet they are the ones who keep trying to wage war on the culture.

Of course the Greens’ move backfired quicker than a second-hand lawnmower, something your average terrace-dwelling, Tesla-driving Bandt fan would have had very little experience of indeed.

Indigenous leader Warren Mundine was the first of many to accuse the Greens of wanting to run down the country and it is indeed hard to see the Greens’ move as anything but.

Which is where the real danger of this move comes in.

The left, broadly speaking, is trying to get up an Indigenous Voice to Parliament, saying that it’s a move that will bring the country together, right wrongs and so on.

“Don’t worry,” the argument goes, “this is about making Australians more united, not tearing down the nation’s identity as part of some loony left passion project.”

Yet here is the left’s most prominent political outfit, the Greens, doing just that by claiming that the Australian flag is just a hurtful relic of the past when countless Aboriginal Australians have died in uniform defending the flag and what it represents.

As Julian Leeser, shadow minister for Indigenous Australians, told me, “If it is good enough for Indigenous Australians to fight under the Australian flag it should be good enough for all our parliamentarians to respect the flag.”

Bandt’s move on Monday was cynical, ridiculous and divisive and just proves why the Greens struggle to be taken seriously by mainstream Australia.