‘Performative outrage’: For most of us, welcome to a second-order issue

While the far left and far right obsess over welcome to country ceremonies, most Australians - including many Indigenous people - don’t care. This performative outrage distracts from the issues that really matter, writes Joe Hildebrand.

There are two types of people who are obsessed with welcomes to country: the far left and the far right.

Everyone else – including most Indigenous people it seems – do not appear to particularly care.

And so it is passing strange that the Liberal Party has chosen this issue of all others on which to take a stand.

Over the weekend, the WA Liberals voted to scrap welcome to country ceremonies, with the party facing a push by elements of its membership to do the same thing across the nation.

Meanwhile, One Nation MPs famously turned their backs on the welcome to country ceremony at the opening of federal parliament last week.

Now of course they are well within their rights to do that if they feel so strongly about it, but what is really the point?

I couldn’t agree more that much of what passes for ‘respect’ for Indigenous Australians is in fact performative Anglo-Saxon virtue signalling – or merely procedural box-ticking.

But getting just taking the opposite point of view isn’t fixing the problem. Instead, it’s repeating it.

Indeed, the idea that publicly abolishing welcomes to country will solve the Liberal Party’s woes is as deluded as the progressive elite belief that endlessly repeating them will solve those of Aboriginal people.

And how do we know this? Because it is exactly what the Liberal Party tried to do at the last election.

When far-right activists hijacked the Anzac Day Dawn Service to protest against the welcome to country, many thought that this could be the silver bullet to turn the Dutton campaign around.

Instead of unequivocally condemning or ignoring the stunt, many on the right picked up the cause and ran with it, arguing that it was indeed time to dump welcomes to country.

Did Australians disagree with them? Probably not – but they also didn’t care.

And so the Liberals spent the precious last days of the campaign arguing about something that for the overwhelming majority of Australians was at best a second order issue.

Far from being the campaign’s saving grace, it took them – as Paul Keating once said of his early career in rock’n’roll management – from nowhere to oblivion.

Peter Dutton and his supporters had thought that this would replicate their success in the Voice referendum but in fact they were repeating the mistakes of the Yes campaign. It wasn’t that people were violently opposed to Indigenous recognition or even such empty token gestures. Rather, they just didn’t want to talk about it when they had so many other more pressing problems to deal with.

And the more politicians and activists talked about the Voice instead of those other issues the more it alienated ordinary people from their cause.

The Libs and others on the right are now embarking on a rerun of that final fatal week of the election campaign.

I suspect most people do think that welcomes to country and acknowledgments of country are vastly overdone but I reckon the opening of parliament is one occasion where a welcome to country is entirely appropriate, along with the other ceremonial traditions.

And either way, turning your back on anyone who is speaking is just plain rude. Likewise, voters do indeed want political parties to be focused on bread and butter issues instead of abstract virtue signalling, so why go on about it at all?

Why is the Liberal Party even wasting time arguing about this stuff when it has so many more vital policy questions that it needs to resolve if it is to remain relevant to mainstream voters?

Likewise the decision to publicly abandon Net Zero isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just neither here nor there.

It is highly unlikely the target will be met even under the government’s current push so even arguing about it is a moot point.

All that matters is what happens on the ground.

It is almost a form of right-wing virtue signalling, which, rest assured, is every bit as useless and performative as the left-wing version.

The way to avoid the trap of empty symbolic gestures is to ignore them and focus on the issues that really matter to people, not endlessly argue over them or try to whip up outrage by publicly decrying them.

That’s just another empty symbolic gesture of its own.