Vikki Campion: The Greens have made a mistake by diminishing the Australian flag

The Greens’ decision to trash the national flag by moving it from the background of leader Adam Bandt’s media conference will only create division within our community, writes Vikki Campion.

If you want to make the Australian flag into our version of the Confederate flag, the Greens are going the right way about it.

When Cathy Freeman did a victory lap carrying both the Aboriginal and national Australian flags in an act of unity in 2000, Australian hearts burst with pride.

But when the Greens hid the Australian flag from view during Adam Bandt’s first press conference in the Parliamentary Blue Room as a party leader, the reverse occurred.

We had just fixed the complex issues plaguing the use of the Aboriginal flag, which stopped Aboriginals from being able to use it but, only six months later, the Greens must trash the Australian flag, seeking to transform a symbol of unity to what they believe is a racist epitaph.

After decades of issues, Aboriginal people finally have free use of their flag but now it stands to become not a symbol that unites First Nations people but the Adam Bandt flag.

Many forget that it was only in January that the Coalition government made the Aboriginal flag available for all Australians to fly, which was not possible before due to complex use arrangements enmeshed since 1995. Even Aboriginal people and organisations had stopped using it.

An Australian flag is moved to the side of the room prior to Greens leader Adam Bandt conducting a press conference.

Licence owners – including Harold Thomas, the first Aboriginal to graduate from an Australian art school who created the striking yellow, red and black design – were paid $20 million.

We haven’t even made it to the six-month anniversary of Aboriginal Australians being permitted to use it without fear of copyright breach without the Greens trying to claim it as their own.

Melbourne-based Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe was on the Select Committee investigating the Aboriginal flags licensing issues. Thorpe herself called for negotiations with Mr Thomas and the licensees to secure the copyright in the Aboriginal flag and for the Government to “uphold Mr Thomas’ rights to self-determination as the creator”.

Instead of celebrating Mr Thomas’s $13 million portion, she immediately accused the Government of “colonising” it.

“Our flag has been colonised, given this is the colonisers’ headquarters and they’ve just purchased our flag,” she told the Senate.

Senator Lidia Thorpe. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

If she read her committee report, she would know that the Australian flag is not the coloniser’s flag, which was the Union Jack but chosen out of a design competition of 32,823 entries, with five joint winners sharing a £200 prize in 1901. Far from being a colonisers’ flag, it wasn’t even the flag at Federation.

To say the Australian flag is a flag of colonisation suggests Senator Thorpe has not even made it to Wikipedia in the chronology of how the Australian flag came about.

The flag is just a few shades of dye and knitted polyester, sold for about $110, with meaning far beyond its components.

The power is imbued in symbolism, so much so that, between 2015 and 2020, the Australian taxpayer spent $6.5 million on 234,863 Australian, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags, most to be handed out from MPs’ offices to the community. More than a third of those were Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags.

Schools and community groups weren’t asking for Aboriginal flags because they supported the Greens.

Greens hid the Australian flag from view during Adam Bandt’s first press conference in the Parliamentary Blue Room as a party leaderPicture: Richard Walker

They asked for Aboriginal flags because they supported reconciliation.

Senator Thorpe has been ranting about the “colonisers” flag since she arrived in parliament. Usually, people ignore her. They are only paying attention to her now because she successfully lobbied Bandt to dump the Australian flag from where it has always stood in the Blue Room beside the Prime Minister’s suite.

On their social media channels, the Greens have switched off any comments or criticism of them but allowed comments accusing those people flying an Australian flag at their home of being “Trump sympathisers”.

Their behaviour points to a political party seeking to polarise the Australian flag, turn our symbol of unity into a symbol of racism and promote the views of those who agree with this belief.

What the Greens are doing in trying to drag Australia to their view of demonising one of our three national flags will only Balkanise people against them.

Do this, and the Australians that competed under that flag, fought under it, died defending it, had their coffins wrapped in it when brought home from war, sang the anthem to it at school parades and swear allegiance to it, will defend their ties to it.

This is a lesson the ABC must learn too. They referred to Melbourne’s Senator Thorpe as a First Nations Senator but ignored the ethnicity of Northern Territory Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a proud Warlpiri woman, referring to her instead as a “Coalition Senator”.

Was that because Senator Price was calling for a unified Australian culture instead of falling into the falsehood that our flag belonged to the “colonisers”?

The Australian flag unites Australians, no matter who they vote for. And the Aboriginal flag must remain a uniting symbol for First Nations people, instead of being used as a partisan political barb of a party that represents so few but antagonises so many.