Joe Hildebrand: Why a small NSW council removing the Aboriginal flag is a lesson for activists
A rural NSW council's democratic decision to ban Indigenous flags has exposed the unintended consequences of top-down progressive activism, writes Joe Hildebrand.
If any further evidence were needed that wokeness is its own worst enemy, we need only look at this week’s move by a NSW council to remove the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from public places.
The Federation Council, in the Murray River region, voted 5-4 to fly only the Australian flag on council-controlled sites and adopted a new rule requiring council permission for welcome to country ceremonies.
And all this was done after extensive community consultation on the issue. In other words, this was no captain’s call from some rogue One Nation mayor. This decision was about as democratic as it gets.
Needless to say, this has led to cries the move will deeply upset Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and, in some cases, it probably will.
The problem is it is precisely the same kind of activists lamenting the decision that were ultimately responsible for it.
Because it has been the 21st century’s top-down torrent of outrage from supposedly progressive activists that demanded all this performative symbolism in the first place, even as the practical conditions for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people – especially in the regions – remained trapped in a quagmire of national shame.
It is yet another classic case of over-privileged, tertiary-educated elites setting ever-higher ideological and political standards that ordinary people must immediately adopt or be instantly condemned as racist, sexist, ableist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic or whatever other hate crime has been most recently invented.
And then when the claims inevitably unravel, as with the Shakespearean tragedy of the Brittany Higgins case, a backlash inevitably ensues – as has happened in America under Trump 2.0 – and things end up even worse than when the activists ignited their cause and burned the whole village to the ground.
Speaking of which, let’s get back to the Federation Council, which sits on the mighty Murray in the middle of the bottom of NSW.
Its largest metropolis is Corowa, with a population of 5595, according to the 2021 census. Its other “main urban centres” – as Wikipedia generously describes them – are Mulwala (pop. 2557) and Urana, with a modest 248 souls.
This is 50 people fewer than recorded at the last census, which recorded 298 in 2016. Then, 3.7 per cent of the population were identified as Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander. Yet after one in six people having departed in the five years since, that proportion rose to 5.6 per cent.
Cynics might point to the modern nationwide phenomenon of previously presumed non-Indigenous Australians suddenly discovering they are, in fact, Indigenous.
I am not so sure. I suspect, as with many small towns, people with opportunities are moving out while the Indigenous population has no choice but to stay.
Either way, it appears that the flying of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in the council chambers has done little to alleviate the demographic struggles of that particular community.
Another fun fact about Urana, and the whole Federation Council district, is that it is a very long way from the Torres Strait – between about 2000km and 2500km if you’re ever thinking of going.
Which begs the question, why on earth were they flying the Torres Strait Islander flag in the first place?
I have not had the privilege of exploring this great region, but I suspect it was not because of local community demand. Instead, it was the ultimate empty gesture.
And yet there is clearly a significant Aboriginal population who will also have their flag removed because of some opaque tick-a-box decision that said the Torres Strait standard also needed to be included for the sake of ... what? Inclusiveness?
The result is the exclusion of the Aboriginal flag; the only other one that should have been there in the first place.
And so, by virtue of their virtue-signalling, the bureaucratic box-tickers and the activist “progressives” who drive their decisions have ended up provoking the very reversal of their so-called progress that they now decry.
It is a stark lesson in the stupidity of lecturing people instead of listening to them.
But, sadly, I suspect it is one they still won’t hear.
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Originally published as Joe Hildebrand: Why a small NSW council removing the Aboriginal flag is a lesson for activists
