Dutton should Welcome a chance to land on the right side of history

Two years ago this week, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton stood up in parliament to “say in an unscripted way” that he was sorry for having boycotted then-prime minister Kevin Rudd’s 2008 apology to the Stolen Generations.

In the years immediately after his boycott, Dutton justified it by citing his longing for practical results. “I regarded [the apology] as something which was not going to deliver tangible outcomes to kids who are being raped and tortured in communities in the 21st century,” he said in 2010.

By 2023, his views had apparently changed. “I failed to grasp at the time the symbolic significance to the Stolen Generations of the apology,” he told members of the Stolen Generations gathered in the public gallery to mark the anniversary.

Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, who will lead the opposition’s efficiency drive, has raised the cost of government-funded Welcome to Country ceremonies.Credit: Alex Ellinghausen

As it happens, 2008 was also the first year that a Welcome to Country ceremony was performed as part of the opening of federal parliament. And it is around these ceremonies that the Coalition, and others, are now choosing to pit questions of practicality against symbolism.

The standard-bearer of this campaign is the opposition’s shadow minister for Indigenous Australians and government efficiency, Warlpiri-Celtic woman Jacinta Nampijinpa Price.

“I don’t believe that we should be spending $450,000 a [government] term on Welcome to Country when that isn’t actually improving the life of a marginalised, Indigenous Australian,” she told the ABC late last month.

In more right-wing corners of the media landscape, where this spending was described by turns as “shocking” and “staggering”, Price dismissed its products as “mere symbolism”. “Welcomes to Country may well have their place, but we cannot place them at the top of our priority list when everyday Australians are struggling to pay their energy and grocery bills,” she remarked to Sydney’s Daily Telegraph.

Price may only have held the government efficiency portfolio since January 25, but we suspect she already knows that items at the top of a federal government’s priority list attract rather more money than $450,000 a term. So what is the “place” of Welcomes to Country?

With the increasing emphasis on “social cohesion” in our politics, some commentators have identified Welcomes to Country as a source of division, one that seeks to cement a hierarchy of belonging in this geography, with Indigenous Australians at the top. On a different note, Age columnist, former footballer and Larrakia man Mathew Stokes has asked whether the form and content of Welcomes is appropriate to certain events, while nevertheless insisting upon their worth.

The Melbourne Storm rugby league team also revealed late last year that it was reviewing its approach to Welcomes – a stance also backed by Price – while committing to keeping them at significant events.

Earlier this month, a recently elected councillor on the NSW Mid North Coast failed in an attempt to discontinue the organisation’s Indigenous welcome to, and acknowledgement of, country practices.

When our reporter Natassia Chrysanthos spoke to Kamilaroi elder Len Waters in the aftermath of the council vote, he acknowledged that the quality of Welcomes varied, but insisted their purpose was to bring people together. “It’s a very ancient tradition, no different to turning up to church and saying the Lord’s Prayer,” he argued. “No matter how good or bad it is, the most important thing is it was done.”

Biripi man Jeremy Saunders said in a video that Welcomes are “about love … living together and appreciating the beautiful place that we are in”.

There can be little question that arguments over what Dutton called “the symbolic significance” of such ceremonies are affected by the wider zeitgeist, where a backlash against certain types of historical acknowledgment has seen “Black Lives Matter” pitted against “All Lives Matter” and in which some of those espousing one-nation politics seek out and fuel social disputes. The row over Australia Day – which is certainly not an ancient tradition and has only been a public holiday since 1994 – is a case in point.

The other oft-cited objection to Welcomes is that the money would be better spent elsewhere, given the acknowledged failure of Closing the Gap measures and the nation’s cost-of-living crisis.

One wonders how those advancing this argument would react if similar objections were raised over the estimated $552 million of federal, state and territory money spent over the four years of the Anzac centenary.

As author and Iraq veteran James Brown noted at the time: “We’re spending millions on monuments which catalogue every death in World War I, yet until last year no one was tracking the number of returning modern veterans taking their own lives … $88 million from the Defence budget spent on a museum in France is $88 million not going towards weapons training or personnel costs.”

In the end, it should not be a question of either/or: as a nation we should be able to take practical steps and chew our symbolic gum at the same time. But it’s worth noting that when the federal government finally did move to address the needs of our veterans, the sums being disbursed were in the billions.

Australians as a whole rejected the Voice to parliament, a proposal aimed at making a practical difference, and more recently the Productivity Commission’s view that power-sharing and self-determination were needed to meaningfully improve the lives of Indigenous people was rejected by the same shadow minister who isn’t interested in “mere symbolism”.

Our discussion on Welcomes could prove a litmus test of exactly where Indigenous Australians sit in our nation today. It is to be hoped that Dutton’s mistake in 2008 is not about to be repeated.

Start the day with a summary of the day’s most important and interesting stories, analysis and insights. Sign up for our Morning Edition newsletter.