Worlds apart but the ABC can’t see it

Most of the population would have given hardly a moment’s thought to the street protests. Picture: Che Chorley

It is a pity that people cannot eat online gestures, buy a house with Twitter hashtags or be awarded degrees for other people’s virtue signalling. If social media sanctimony could generate clean electricity, the global warming threat would be over; if it could feed people, hunger would be a thing of the past; and if it led to action rather than words, the living-standard gap between Indigenous Australians and their fellow citizens would no longer exist.

But slacktivism does not deliver much. It fuels an increasingly wide and shallow media cycle, creates a pandemic of smugness, and leaves serious issues confused, conflicted and unresolved.

This past week, armies of online warriors and social media poseurs posted images of the Aboriginal flag, spread the “always was, always will be” slogan, and associated themselves with the hashtag changethedate. Even if this were a broad and powerful community movement — rather than a fashionably febrile digital meme — all it could ever do is push politicians to change the date of our national day.

What would that do? Deny the nation, deny history or force those who seek to condemn our national project to organise their protests around another calendar entry. It is an exaggeration to say this debate does not matter; but it matters little. And to the extent it dominates discussion of our national priorities and steals the oxygen that should fuel debate about Indigenous disadvantage and potential remedies, the focus is self-defeating.

“I’m a white Australian. I care about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people. I want a treaty and Indigenous voices in parliament. I support changing the date,” was a typical Twitter post, rounded off with hashtags for Invasion Day, changethedate and “always was, always will be”.

A hundred characters or so punched out on a smartphone or keyboard, and you can have instant public virtue, the selfish comfort of moral superiority and get back to your barbie.

An abundance of good intentions translates into so little action. Some people proudly proclaimed they were celebrating Australia Day but added a change the date hashtag, seemingly for protection, or at least as a necessary qualification in order that their pride be tolerated.

I do not want to be divisive in retaliation — of course many people mean well, and there are plenty who are active in Indigenous affairs and committed to these causes. There is also a legitimate debate to be had about our national day and our unresolved history.

But where would you place this debate in a list of priorities for Indigenous people? Would it make the first page? Whose life would be improved by changing the date? There are far more compelling challenges for Indigenous advancement and for national improvement.

Many will see this annual cacophony less as a reflection on the issue but more a manifestation of the digital media era.

Most of the population marked Australia Day as they normally would — at beaches, parks and backyards with family and friends — and would have given hardly a moment’s thought to the emotive digital media campaigns and some of the street protests they fuelled.

But the popular media, especially green-left media, is driven by social media; it follows in the slipstream of Twitter’s polarised inanity. Such media skews ever further from mainstream issues and positions, creating a distortion in public debate and, increasingly, a chasm between the public’s preoccupations and those of the political/media class.

Especially at the public broadcaster, this means that serious examination of Indigenous grievances, disadvantage and proposals is overwhelmed by juvenile activism and sloganeering. While ABC journalists were losing themselves in a sea of hashtags and internal ructions over the use of “Invasion Day” as an alternative title, they ignored a paper prepared by an Indigenous researcher detailing chronic social problems in remote Indigenous communities.

Worlds Apart: Remote Indigenous Disadvantage in the Context of Wider Australia, was released to the media the day before Australia Day, and its title was obviously too long for a hashtag. It was compiled by Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, a Warlpiri-Celtic woman from Alice Springs, Coalition federal candidate at the last election, deputy mayor of Alice Springs and director of the Indigenous program at the Centre for Independent Studies.

The CIS issued a media release on Monday and received no inquiries or requests for interviews from any of the ABC’s three television networks, four radio networks, 53 local radio stations, seven digital stations, hundreds of websites, podcasts, programs or many newsrooms staffed by hundreds of reporters.

The only ABC interview about this report was conducted by Centre for Independent Studies executive director Tom Switzer, who hosts a weekly, half-hour program, Between the Lines, on Radio National — one of a couple of tiny, hidden, non-left oases at Aunty.

Price’s paper was reported in The Sydney Morning Herald. “The living conditions, education, employment and life expectancy of regional and remote Indigenous communities in Australia are more comparable with those of developing nations,” Amelia McGuire wrote. And it was covered in this paper, with Paige Taylor writing: “A nationwide analysis of crime and disadvantage in Aboriginal communities has concluded ‘high rates of domestic violence are one of the key factors that separate remote Indigenous communities from the rest of Australia’.”

The paper used extensive data to highlight the appalling difference in education, employment, health, crime and domestic violence outcomes in remote Indigenous communities compared with the rest of the nation.

“The dire situation presented by this data stresses the need for effective policy interventions more than ever before,” Price’s paper concluded. “Interventions that are not targeting communities because of their Indigeneity but because of the host of problems besetting them that should be unacceptable in a country like Australia.”

With its focus on the brutal reality of alcohol-fuelled violence and broken communities, this paper and discussion around it can firmly be slotted into the category of unpalatable truths. But this was not Price’s only difficulty in being heard. She advocates from the wrong side of the ideological fence — the conservative-proof fence — and she rails against the preoccupation with symbolism in much of the Indigenous debate. Her suggested path forward for remote communities is to forget race and tackle the failings.

This does not suit the ABC narrative. Price is seen as a dissenting voice and seems to be shunned for it; never mind that she is informed, articulate and Indigenous.

An ABC Alice Springs story posted on Facebook on Tuesday reported the local citizenship ceremony, attended by Price as deputy mayor, without making any reference to Australia Day. When Price commented on the story, asking “but what day is it today?” she was met with abuse from ideological enemies, include more than one racist reference labelling her a “coconut”.

So on this site that day, the public broadcaster was censoring any reference to Australia Day while hosting racist slurs against an Indigenous local politician. This is the twisted world of ideological posturing and identity politics gone awry.

One ABC online story about Indigenous coverage quoted radio presenter Mikaela Simpson. “It’s important that black stories, voices and messages are told by black people,” she said. We can all see some sense in that, I suppose, but try turning that around; imagine if someone said white stories should be told by white people.

And where is the diversity in the Indigenous views presented at the ABC? Price is an Indigenous woman and the ABC is not interested in her story, primarily because of ideological positioning — the one factor allowed to override Aunty’s relentless focus on identity.

Price responded for this column, saying that given the ABC’s eagerness to highlight the plight of Indigenous Australians “through the eyes of offended and hurt inner-city protesters because of Australia Day” she thought they might also be interested in her report and the disparity it identified. She said it seemed the nation’s most marginalised were “out of sight and out of mind” to the public broadcaster, despite suffering the “highest rates of crime and domestic violence and the lowest rates of school attendance, education attainment and life expectancy in the nation”.

No individual or organisation can have all the answers in this complex area. Journalists and presenters do not have to agree with Price’s perspective to see the value of discussing the facts she compiled and the prescriptions she favours. “I despair for our most marginalised when they can be so easily ignored by our taxpayer-funded broadcaster, the peddler of woke ideology and shallow divisive symbolism,” Price said.

Her paper’s title, Worlds Apart, seeks to highlight the chasm between the nation most of us inhabit and the appalling conditions of many remote communities. But it just as easily might describe the gulf between the hard arguments and actions needed to overcome Indigenous challenges and build proper representation and reconciliation, on the one hand, and the polarised sloganeering and superficial media debate on the other.