Michaelia Cash backs plan to ditch welcome to country, Indigenous flags

The highest-ranking Liberal woman MP behind Sussan Ley is part of a party push to ditch welcome-to-country ceremonies and Aboriginal flags from official events, putting Michaelia Cash at odds with the Opposition Leader on Indigenous symbolism.

Michaelia Cash has backed a plan to scrap welcome to country ceremonies and freeze out the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from official proceedings.

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The highest-ranking Liberal woman MP behind Sussan Ley is part of a party push to ditch ­welcome-to-country ceremonies and Aboriginal flags from official events, putting senator Michaelia Cash at odds with the Opposition Leader on Indigenous symbolism.

Senator Cash, from Western Australia and the opposition’s Senate leader, on Thursday was swift to back publicly two motions prepared for the Liberal Party of WA’s state council this Saturday which demand the Aboriginal ­welcome-to-country speeches be stripped of “official status” and only commonwealth and state flags appear at government events.

The push comes as Anthony Albanese uses vanquished Liberal leader Peter Dutton’s opposition to Indigenous symbolism to attack the depleted opposition as out of step with mainstream Australia.

Ms Ley has said she is “happy” to stand alongside Aboriginal flags and has given her support to acknowledgements of country in the right “time and place”, even congratulating Indigenous participants at the opening of parliament this week and making her own odes to elders. But Senator Cash said she supported the motions to take Indigenous symbolism out of public life, and welcomed them being debated at the WA Liberal Party council.

“It has been my long-held belief that there is one national flag and we should all unite under it,” Senator Cash said.

“Formal commonwealth recognition should only be given to flags representing official jurisdictions or government institutions. On the welcome-to-country issue my position is consistent with the motion.

The motions – especially with Senator Cash’s support – signal a push from conservative figures across both the parliamentary party and the lay party for the Liberals to focus on their base.

The Australian revealed this week that the state council would also consider a motion – endorsed by Canning MP Andrew Hastie – for the party to formally abandon net-zero climate targets.

All three motions are expected to pass at Saturday’s meeting.

Opposition Leader Sussan Ley during question time at Parliament House. Picture: NewsWire / Martin Ollman

Mr Dutton had pledged to stand in front of only the ­Australian flag at his press ­conferences and had described welcome-to-country and acknowledgment-of-country ceremonies as “overdone”.

Ms Ley began her first major speech as Opposition Leader with an acknowledgement of country, before stating that there was a time and a place for the declarations.

Speaking at the official opening of parliament earlier this week, Ms Ley delivered her own acknowledgment of country and said the welcome to country that preceded her should “set the tone as we ­re-commit ourselves to the taking of practical action to improve lives and expand opportunity for Indigenous Australians in every part of our great country”.

The welcome-to-country and flag motions are understood to have support from a large group of WA Liberal MPs.

Mr Hastie sells A3-sized ­‘Together under one flag’ bin stickers through his website and has questioned the inclusion of welcome to country ceremonies at Anzac Day services.

The welcome-to-country and flag motions have been prepared by the party’s policy committee, which is chaired by former federal Liberal candidate Sherry Sufi.

The welcome-to-country motion says the Ley opposition should adopt a policy that suc h ceremonies and acknowledgments “should not hold official status”.

“While they may originally have been well-intentioned, they are now often divisive and tokenistic and do little to improve the lives of our most disadvantaged Australians,” the motion says.

The net-zero motion put forward in WA is set to be echoed at the Liberal National Party’s convention next month, while the NSW Nationals in June passed a motion to abandon the net zero commitment.

Liberal Party sources in WA told The Australian that the net-zero, flag and welcome-to-­country motions were the product of the party’s dominant conservative faction “trying to flex a bit of muscle”.

One source said that the three issues raised in the motions were all matters that party moderates wanted to avoid.

“They don’t want to talk about those – no question,” the source said.

There has been ongoing conjecture around the future of Ms Ley’s leadership, given her narrow win over Angus Taylor in the leadership ballot and the departure from parliament of three MPs who voted for her.

One Nation senators in parliament this week turned their backs during the official acknowledgement of country in the Senate, with Indigenous Australians Minister Malarndirri McCarthy on Thursday criticising their ­actions as “a deliberate decision to disrespect First Nations ­Australians”.

“You’d think they’d have learned lessons from the election, [(Senate) president, you would think that they would have heard the clear message from the Australian people in May,” she said.

“The politics of culture wars were rejected. The politics of disrespect and nastiness were rejected. The politics of punching down on First Nations people were rejected. And we just had three years of people in this place trying to do the opposite of that.”