Peta Credlin: Why Erin Molan can change troll laws
Sports journalist Erin Molan struck a chord for me when she spoke out against the online trolls and nameless haters who cause so much grief. For too long, we’ve allowed people who abuse others online to have the upper hand.
Opinion
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Last Thursday, sports journalist Erin Molan struck a chord for me when she spoke out against the online trolls and nameless haters who cause so much grief.
The case of NRL coach Anthony Seibold, who has been subjected to vile and threatening abuse against himself and his young family, prompted her spray and I want to support what she said, and more.
For too long, we’ve allowed people who abuse others online to have the upper hand.
We tell the victims to let it just wash over them; the “sticks and stones” sort of response; or to get off Twitter, or Facebook, or whatever the latest troll weapon of choice might be.
For adults like Seibold, his only real recourse is expensive legal action under Australia’s defamation laws that are light years behind what’s needed in the online age.
I’m all for robust debate and no one, no one, could accuse me of having a thin skin.
But this is much worse than most of us think. And telling victims to just cop it and letting perpetrators go unpunished costs lives. It really does.
It’s a federal responsibility and I want to see real change in the laws here, not the weak responses to date.
I’ve told Erin to sign me up. I’m prepared to draft them myself if I have to.
WHY GOVERNMENT SHOULDN’T BUY THE ABORIGINAL FLAG
A lot has been written and said about the Aboriginal flag over the past few days and much of it is way off the mark.
It can’t be flown, we’re told, unless a company run by non-Indigenous people are paid a fee. Wrong. Anyone can fly the flag; it’s only commercial use that requires a fee and only because the flag’s Indigenous designer sold the copyright years ago and has been making money off his design ever since.
(Yes, I bet you weren’t told that were you?)
I can understand why people think it’s odd that this weekend’s AFL Indigenous round — that rightly celebrates the magnificent contribution Aboriginal players have made to the game — has gone ahead without any use of the Aboriginal flag. But before the Prime Minister forks out the $25 million-plus we’re told the flag might be worth commercially, to “Free the Flag” as the activists demand, it’s worth learning a few facts because, as I discovered working on protocol matters in government, things are not as they might seem when it comes to this flag.
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Since proclamation by the Keating government back in 1995, the Aboriginal flag as we know it has had official status under the Flags Act as “the Australian Aboriginal Flag”.
It’s not a national flag — people often get that wrong — it’s an “official flag”, and there’s a difference because a nation has only one “national” flag and that’s how it should be.
But it’s what happened after the Australian Aboriginal Flag was proclaimed that lies at the heart of this current dispute.
Despite it being freely flown and used as an activist flag before made “official”, in 1997 a Luritja man, Aboriginal artist Harold Thomas, took an action to the Federal Court to assert copyright over the flag he said he designed, back in 1971.
He won, and while he’s granted permission for the flag to be flown, any commercial use requires permission and a fee.
Over the years, Thomas has entered into a number of commercial licensing agreements, and organisations, like the AFL, have to pay the licensing company to use the flag on things like footy merchandise, while he gets royalties from the licensing company.
And, it seems, it’s one of these commercial licensing agreements — in this case with WAM Clothing — that’s led to the flag’s banishment from any official part in this year’s round.
An Indigenous man commercialising his own copyright, and now taxpayers must pay it out? See what I mean? It’s not as simple as you might have been told.
Many Aboriginal people — wrongly, in my view, but passionately nonetheless — argue that their country has been stolen from them. How can we be sure that they won’t see any government acquisition of “their” flag as just another expropriation, of what’s theirs?
And if taxpayers buy the Aboriginal flag, won’t this just be then used as an argument to try to make it a “national flag” — not just an “official” one — with more pressure on governments to fly the Aboriginal flag, jointly with the national flag everywhere, all the time?
I fully support the Aboriginal flag flying high on days of special significance, like Sorry Day, or NAIDOC week, but not all the time, because only one flag represents all of us.
Where important symbols are concerned, we should be very careful about change, however well-intentioned.
It’s a pity the Aboriginal designer didn’t just gift the flag to the Aboriginal people it represents and honours.
If he now insists on being bought out, after 23 years’ worth of income from the flag to date, then surely it should be bought by an Aboriginal entity. There are plenty of them, many with considerable income — it could even be a joint purchase by well-paid Indigenous footballers.
If Indigenous people want to be more in charge of their own destiny — and that’s a good thing — then taking ownership of their flag, for all Aboriginal people, might be a good way to start.
THUMBS UP: We mightn’t have a COVID-19 vaccine yet but the fact that we now have a deal in place with the most likely option and that it will be made available to every Australian is good news when we need some. Well done Prime Minister and Health Minister, Greg Hunt.
THUMBS DOWN: Premiers playing popularist politics over borders is hurting businesses and families. Lock out Victoria, I get that, but the rest of the country must start to get back to work, and some sort of normal.