Nothing welcome about failure to address Indigenous plight

The renewed violence in Alice Springs and the disruptions to Anzac Day services in Perth and Melbourne linked with the welcome and acknowledgement of country highlight the lack of action on Indigenous issues since the failed 2023 voice referendum.

Apart from a commitment to housing, there has been precious little in the election campaign from both major parties to tackle the massive challenges on the Indigenous front. It seems to be all too hard.

What is needed is a genuine commitment to improve the lot of our most disadvantaged Australians free of finger-pointing, attempted pointscoring and power-grabbing. Our leaders could take a leaf out of the late Pope Francis’s book on problem-solving and get serious about confronting this national tragedy.

Peter Kennedy, Mt Lawley, WA

Peter Dutton was spot-on in the fourth debate to link the proliferation of welcome to country ceremonies to Anthony Albanese’s failed voice referendum. Albanese refused to agree with Dutton that welcomes were overdone and said it was up to others to make choices. Really? A Prime Minister who repeatedly cites his respect for the result yet does nothing to show he heard 61 per cent of us reject separatism is not providing leadership, but spectatorship. Indeed, on referendum night, Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price stood in front of one flag, while Albanese stood in front of three. Dutton has since formalised his one-flag policy, noting we are “a country united under one flag”, while Nampijinpa Price has consistently said there would be fewer welcomes to country under a Coalition government. (Perhaps the opposition’s campaign mantra should have been “less is more”.) Nonetheless, showing her willingness to walk the talk further, Nampijinpa Price has noted, with great insight, that a measure of her success in government will be the abolition of her role. Bring it on.

Mandy Macmillan, Singleton, NSW

Even Peter Dutton is wrong in confusing first the plain acknowledgement of country appropriately made at the beginning of parliament (although perhaps too often at other times) and, second, a welcome to country. The latter wording is a problem because it is ambiguous, at its best meaning welcome to a particular traditional countryside, a tribal land, but objectionable when (deliberately by some) taken to mean welcome to our country of Australia.

John Bunyan, Campbelltown, NSW

Without incurring the wrath of God, is it possible to ask whether welcomes to country at the dawn services were paid gigs?

John Sumner, Deviot, Tas

Our national void

There is a hankering in the air. Oft-repeated yearnings for the glory days of politics fill these pages. There is a hunger for solid policy, stirring oratory, for truth, integrity and vision. A thirst for leaders with the honesty, courage and wisdom our nation so keenly needs.

Oh for a leader with the honesty to challenge climate catastrophism, and declare net zero not only unnecessary, but ruinous. Oh for the honesty to tell us that the pre-election, taxpayer-funded, money-spraying competition will not end well, and that the best cost-of-living relief is not a subsidy, but a strong economy and a sane energy policy. Oh for the honesty to admit our welfare system is a tangle of well-meaning, unintended consequences, and ultimately an intergenerational poverty trap. Oh for the courage to reform it. Oh for the courage to call out multiculturalism and acknowledge that this policy, seemingly benign at inception, has in reality legitimised the creation of tribal groups, fractured our national unity and weakened our Australian identity. Oh for the wisdom to say that in nurturing a sense of difference for our Indigenous people, in creating a plethora of separatist bodies, we have funded their descent into misery. Oh for the courage to challenge the anti-Australia, anti-Israel mantras, the trans mania, the false narratives. Oh for the courage to declare that activist organisations – whether the Environmental Defenders Office, the ABC or the universities – will not be funded with taxpayers’ money. Oh for the wisdom to defend not just our physical nation, but to defend, uphold and nurture our culture – for it is our very marrow.

Honesty, courage and wisdom. Integrity and vision. Sorely missed.

Jane Bieger, Mount Lawley, WA

‘Marxist’ energy folly

Dale Ellis and David Bidstrup (Letters, 28/4) have got it dead right with their critiques on the renewable energy industry, and thanks for publishing them. It’s hugely expensive, environmentally destructive and unreliable, and cannot provide the energy density that we need. No number of technological advances can alter these facts. The sooner that politicians start acting in our interests and not genuflecting to Marxist ideology the better.

Helen Dyer, Ferndale, WA