James Campbell: Why Daniel Andrews’ wink to protesters is a bad idea
This week our politicians reacted in two different ways to events in a faraway country, but organising a mass rally in the middle of a pandemic is a really bad idea. So why is Daniel Andrews not condemning it, asks James Campbell.
James Campbell
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You might have thought it went without saying that organising a mass rally in the middle of a pandemic is a really, really bad idea.
Especially if the people you are expecting to turn up are not in the best of health.
But on Saturday the streets of Melbourne and Australia’s other capital cities are expected to be crowded with thousands of people rallying under the banner Black Lives Matter.
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The trigger for this very bad idea was of course the death of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis. That would be Minneapolis in the state of Minnesota in the United States of America.
Which it also goes without saying is a long, long way from here.
There were two ways for our politicians to react to these events in a faraway country of which Australians know less than they think they do and both were on display this week.
The first was that taken by Scott Morrison, which was to try to calm things down, to point out that whatever problems we may have here in Australia, they’re nowhere nearly as bad as they are over there and surely we don’t need to be following them like sheep.
This would once have been standard operating procedure for our leaders especially as it was pretty clear by the end of last week that “strong protest” was the US media’s preferred euphemism for “riot”.
On Monday he told Sydney radio that watching the footage from America with his family had made him cringe, but “I just think to myself how wonderful a country is Australia. We have our problems. We have our faults. We have our issues. There’s no doubt about that. But when I see things like that, I’m just very thankful for the wonderful country we live in”.
He reiterated this later in the week, saying “you know, we shouldn’t be importing the things that are happening overseas to Australia. I’m not saying we don’t have issues in this space that we need to deal with. But the thing is, we are dealing with it and, you know, we don’t need to draw equivalence here. We should just be Australians about this and deal with it our way, and we are.”
Anthony Albanese took a similar line. “Certainly, there are issues here but nothing like the United States,” he said, going on to add it was “important that leaders seek to unite the nation and I think here in Australia, if you compare with what’s going on in the US ….
I just look over there, I think about, there’s more than 100,000 former US citizens who have made Australia their home and I know that many of them will be worried about what’s occurring in their nation”.
Now you might have thought the words of both men were reasonable in the circumstances, with the additional advantage of being true.
But in 2020 it doesn’t really do to point out that we may not be as irredeemably racist compared to some other places, because as a settler society we are not only the beneficiaries of the crimes of our ancestors but complicit in the ongoing genocide against the First Nations peoples of this land.
The modern, up-to-date and progressive way to behave on these occasions was shown by our Premier Daniel Andrews.
I didn’t really need to tell you that, did I?
Dan’s reaction was to repost on Instagram and Facebook a statement from the joint chairs of the First Peoples’ Assembly of Victoria which likened Floyd’s alleged murder to the death of David Dungay in Long Bay jail in 2015.
Dungay, a diabetic, schizophrenic died after being held down by prison officers and sedated. Like Floyd, he had cried out “I can’t breathe”, though according to the coroner he died from cardiac arrhythmia not asphyxiation.
The Premier’s Uriah Heep-like addition to this statement was to tell us it was “time to talk less and listen more” and that “Black lives matter. And black voices must be heard.”
As you can see there was nothing here to downplay the parallels with America. Quite the opposite.
Nor was there anything to suggest that perhaps taking to the streets was a bad idea. Again quite the opposite.
Moreover, those organising Saturday’s rallies are right if they think the Premier of Victoria is with them in spirit because the statement he reposted included this bit: “Around the country Aboriginal people are now organising protests in solidarity with those across the United States, precisely because we do understand their pain and anger.”
Of course, if he wants to, Daniel Andrews can show as much solidarity as he likes with the Black Lives Matter movement. It’s a free country.
But leaving aside the stupidity of giving such a giant, encouraging wink to the rally at the same time as trying to keep everyone at home because of that pandemic thing we’ve been hearing about so much lately, what struck me about Andrews’s solidarity was his utter failure to acknowledge that if Victoria’s police force and prison system were such hotbeds of murderous racism it doesn’t say much for the Australian Labor Party which has been in power
in this state for all but four of the past 20 years.
James Campbell is a Herald Sun columnist