Dutton should learn from his history and tread gently on welcome to Country ceremonies

Two years ago, 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 said.

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. It is around these ceremonies that the Coalition, and others, are choosing to pit questions of practicality against symbolism.

The standard-bearer of this campaign is the opposition’s spokeswoman for Indigenous Australians, 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, in which this spending was described by turns as “shocking” and “staggering”, Price dismissed its products as “mere symbolism”.

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.

Welcome to Country ceremonies have drawn political focus. Credit: Anna Kucera

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 club also revealed late last year that it was reviewing its approach to welcomes while committing to keeping them at significant events. A recently elected councillor on the NSW Mid North Coast this month failed in an attempt to discontinue the organisation’s Indigenous welcome to and acknowledgement of Country practices.

When Herald 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.”

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.

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