Indigenous empowerment the real issue, not Australia Day’s date

Too often journalists on the left seem unaware of political and social positions other than their own.

Too often journalists from news organisations on the left seem unaware of political and social positions different from their own.

Yet journalists on the conservative side of issues are seldom affected by blindness to progressive pieties. They have to understand left “group think” to argue against it. Think this newspaper’s Chris Kenny and his heavy consumption of ABC news. Or Herald Sun and Sky News columnist and presenter Andrew Bolt, who is always well briefed on The Age and ABC radio and TV current affairs presenters and their foibles.

In last week’s column I argued many young journalists on Twitter had no real understanding that the Melbourne African gangs story had been a real thing since the mid-noughties. They felt comfortable denying its existence and claiming it was all a Coalition-News Corp beat-up and driven by racists.

Same with the past month’s debate about Australia Day. Yet again the ABC has given a platform to self-identifying mixed-heritage Aboriginal activists to claim January 26 is offensive to all Aborigines.

Imagine the shock inside the ABC when federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs, NT senator Nigel Scullion, told Kim Landers on ABC AM on January 19 that no Aboriginal person had ever raised the date of Australia Day with him.

A former ABC staffer from Queensland with a strong reporting background before becoming North American correspondent for five years, Landers should have known better than to object. While the ABC has been up to its elbows pushing the proposed change for years, many prominent Aboriginal writers, politicians and intellectuals have written in favour of the status quo.

Pieces this year and last by Anthony Dillon, Warren Mundine and Jacinta Price focused on the need for real action to lift First Australians from poverty and disease before worrying about celebration dates. But activists in paid not-for-profit organisations, the law and academia don’t really need to worry about living conditions, education and health outcomes of Aborigines in regional Australia. For my money the most honest piece in the latest round of national soul searching was by Price, an Aboriginal councillor from Alice Springs, near the heart of First Peoples’ disadvantage. The daughter of prominent former NT politician Bess Price, Jacinta wrote what few who chose their Aboriginal identity above their other heritage are prepared to admit.

“I am half Warlpiri and a mixture of Irish, Scottish and Welsh ... Like the rest of the world our history is complex — and never as black and white as is portrayed by those who cherry pick to push an ideological agenda ... We celebrate on January 26 because it marks the beginning of what we now call Australia.”

Mundine, who wrote in The Daily Telegraph on January 24 about Jack Patten’s speech in 1938 at the 150th anniversary of Governor Phillip’s arrival, says indigenous people overwhelmingly feel “anger sadness and grief about the chain of events that started on January 26, 1788”.

He argued for a national holiday for all on the last Friday of every January and for Australia Day to be celebrated on January 1, the day in 1901 Australia became a federation.

But Mundine has for years urged activists to focus on economic empowerment rather than symbolic battles.

Dillon, a lecturer in Health Sciences at the Australian Catholic University in Sydney, wrote on The Conversation website on January 25 that Australia Day could be both a day of celebration and a day of reflection and remembrance of those who had fought for Aboriginal recognition.

“I respect people’s right to mourn ... However I question ... those claiming to be upset ... (by) what one set of my ancestors did to another set of my ancestors. Why do I not see them upset by injustices committed by Aboriginal people against other Aboriginal people today?”

Like Price’s, these are the words that may not be spoken by people like me, lest Section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act be brought down on our heads, as was done to Bolt in 2011.

Adam Spencer, hosting The Drum last Thursday night, seemed perplexed when Aboriginal community leader and Noongar elder Robert Isaacs also supported the status quo. Could our ABC be out of touch with the 70 per cent of Australians who support January 26, according to a Guardian Essential poll on September 4?

Local councils in inner Melbourne have been keen to get on the bandwagon. Last year two — Yarra and Darebin — dropped references to Australia Day and were subsequently stripped of their right to conduct citizenship ceremonies. Moreland dropped references to Australia Day but managed to keep the citizenship ceremony.

Fremantle Council started the trend in WA in 2016, voting to hold its citizenship ceremonies on the 28th. It was forced to back down after a backlash from business. It held a One Day In Fremantle celebration with high-profile musicians yesterday, two days after Australia Day. Isaacs has been a vocal critic of Fremantle’s posturing on the issue.

Not all left media joined the ABC. The Sydney Morning Herald, a barometer for opinion on Sydney’s leafy north shore, advocated for the status quo in its editorial of January 20. Its resident north shore red bandana-wearing republican Peter FitzSimons argued for change both in his columns and in a debate sponsored by Tom Switzer’s Centre for Independent Studies. Good on FitzSimons for showing up in intellectually hostile territory.

But on ABC radio current affairs programs, The Drum and in wider news reports, journalists tried hard to disprove Scullion and find anyone who had indeed discussed the national day with him. Failing to do so, it trotted out a range of Aboriginal activists to brand January 26 Invasion Day. In its defence it did interview Jacinta Price on January 9, before the Scullion story.

A friend of mine intimately connected to the Aboriginal world gave me his one-sentence assessment, and it again sails close to Section 18C. “As everyone in the NT knows, the extent of an Aboriginal person’s engagement with the Australia Day debate is in inverse proportion to their genetic Aboriginal ancestry.”

Best contributions to understanding Australia Day go to this paper for its momentous six-part series on the First Fleet by Trent Dalton and to a piece published on January 26 by the doyen of Australian history, Geoffrey Blainey, on misconceptions about white settlement. Brickbats to all the morons who keep defacing statues of Captain Cook. This is about Governor Arthur Phillip people.

For all the annual fury, Australia remains one of the most successful democracies on earth. Ours is not a country of bloody revolution as former editor David Penberthy pointed out in The Daily Telegraph on Friday.

Citing centuries of Spanish war against its indigenous people, “Penbo” quoted from the country’s national monument to a siege by Hernan Cortes of Aztec leader Cuauh­temoc: “It was neither a triumph nor a defeat, but the painful birth of the nation that is Mexico today.”