Flagging Division
# 577
There’s a lot to be said for being overseas on Australia Day. Tuning in from the Middle East, I could see the smoke from a new set of salvos being fired in the culture wars as Opposition leader, Peter Dutton, AKA. the Boiled Egg, showed us what he has learned from a well-thumbed copy of the Donald Trump Playbook. Lesson One: Appeal to the patriotic sentiments of the masses. Lesson Two: Political success attends he who dares to say the unsayable. Lesson Three: Project an image of uncompromising strength and dismiss your opponent as woke and weak.
Perhaps I’m mis-remembering, but a couple of decades ago Australia Day was hardly more than an excuse for a day off, a trip to the beach or a barbie with friends. I don’t recall seeing young people wandering the streets draped in the Australian flag, with smaller versions transferred onto their faces, or possibly tattooed on their torsos.
The upsurge of populist nationalism associated with the day Captain Arthur Phillip planted the British flag at Sydney Cove is a disturbing development that almost makes one feel nostalgic for that habitual Aussie complacency on political and cultural matters. The warm devotion we once felt towards Great Britain is long gone, swept away by waves of migration from all over the world, and a growing sense of Australian uniqueness. Somehow, in recent years, that sense of uniqueness has been transmuted into an ugly expression of nationalism, which is a menace wherever it appears.
It's perfectly natural that we should feel a love for the place we were born and bred, but this kind of instinctual patriotism should not be confused with nationalism, which implies an allegiance to an ideological construct: the state. Patriotism appeals to the spirit, but nationalism is fundamentally political, always ready to draw up battle lines between us and them.
It's not coincidental that nationalistic celebrations of Australia Day seemed to escalate as Aboriginal activists began campaigning to get the date changed, rechristening 26 January, “Invasion Day”. Frankly, from an Aboriginal point of view, it would be perverse to celebrate the day your country was claimed by a foreign power, or the countless historical acts of violence and humiliation that followed. Neither are the protests anything new. In 1938, the Australian Aborigines’ League declared 26 January a “Day of Mourning”.
If all this unhappiness could be cured by moving Australia Day to another date, it should be expedited post-haste. Yet we know this would not be the case. Those opposed to the move argue that a perceived victory over the date of Australia Day would embolden activists to seek further concessions and reparations. There’s a degree of paranoia in this thought, like John Howard believing the apology to the stolen generation would result in crippling lawsuits, but it can’t be dismissed.
In opposition to the ugly white nationalists we’ve seen the rise of an ugly brand of activism. The inflammatory deeds and statements of a minority have been entirely counterproductive, throwing red meat to the tabloids – and nowadays, let’s face it, almost every major Australian paper is a tabloid.
The resounding defeat of the Voice referendum sent clear signals about the nature of public opinion on Indigenous concerns. From the minute the Opposition took up the ‘No’ case, it was obvious the vote was lost. There may have been a good deal of misrepresentation and confusion, but the ‘Yes’ case was poorly framed and marketed. Where there is vagueness – “What’s the point of this? Why do we need it? Who’s going to be on this committee?” – there’s a natural drift towards conservatism.
The final straw arrives with stupid acts of vandalism such as the damage inflicted on an unobtrusive sculpture of Captain Cook in Randwick. The statue has stood since 1874, a sad reminder of the heroic status the great mariner once enjoyed when he was being hailed as the “discoverer” of this country. None of the reports I read even bothered to identify the sculptor - Walter McGill.
Had the vandals ever looked into Cook’s life and character. they might have realised that he had an open, sympathetic attitude towards native peoples he encountered – at least until his final days in Hawaii, when he underwent a personality transformation, becoming angry, bitter and violent, most probably due to chronic illness.
The Cook that landed at Botany Bay on the First Voyage was the upright, restrained leader who tried to make peaceful contact with the Aboriginal tribes, firing volleys only as a last resort, with no intention to kill. Put Cook alongside almost any other explorer of that time, and his humanity seems remarkable. If ever they catch the dimwits who vandalised Cook’s humble effigy, they should detain them in cells until they’ve read Cook’s Journals, Beaglehole’s massive life of Cook, and Christopher Heathcoat’s small tract, The Compassion of Captain Cook. The faster they read, the quicker they get released, having received the benefits of a little knowledge. I know this would never happen, because being expected to read a book would be considered cruel and unsual punishment nowadays. Most offenders would prefer 100 lashes.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to understand that acts of vandalism or ugly stunts like Lydia Thorpe’s rudeness to King Charles, are guaranteed ways of stirring up negative reactions in the general public. Declaring a “Day of Mourning” seems a much more powerful statement than destructive expressions of anger.
Firm, evidence-based calls for action are to be preferred to fatuous grandstanding, because – unless you’re Donald Trump - a successful political campaign always has to appear more reasonable than those who stand in its way. Today, with rightwing populism on the rise, every brazen, foolish act provides fuel for the opposition. As for the Greens councillor who called the vandalism “a painful reminder of the devastating impacts of colonialism”, let’s call this a painful reminder of the way the Greens are rendering themselves progressively more unelectable.
A mark of the new empowerment felt by the right, was the Boiled Egg’s statement that he would ban the Aboriginal flag from official events, saying we should be gathering under “one flag” on Australia Day. I’m not sure if he’s understood that our official flag – surely one of the most boring in the world – features a prominent display of the Union Jack, sending a perpetual message to the world that we’ve never severed our colonial ties.
Dutton claims that displaying multiple flags is a recipe for social division. The solution is simple: we should adopt the red, black and gold Aboriginal flag as our official emblem. At least it’s striking and original. Rather than fostering division, it would be a practical symbol of national unity. It was particularly startling to find Jacinta Nampitjinpa Price, the Opposition’s Shadow Minister for Indigenous Australians echoing her leader’s vilification of the Aboriginal flag. It seems that in some cases bile is thicker than blood.
We can all agree that Albo is not an excitement machine and Labor has been disappointing in many ways, but there has been a clear commitment to responsible government in a manner that was unknown to Scott Morrison, and I’ve yet to see much from his successor that isn’t simple bluster and point-scoring. The policy of putting nuclear power plants everywhere is utter pie-in-the-sky, based on the Coalition’s ideological unwillingness to accept the science of Global Warming.
It gets even nastier and more calculated when we find the Egg becoming more hard-boiled, extending his negative approach into Andrew Tate territory, telling us that young men are fed up with being overlooked; or that DEI policies are letting women take away jobs that should rightfully belong to men. All this is playing to the masses, but although it may appeal to the MAGA crowd in the United States, it’s hard to see it having much traction in the inner city electorates taken by the Teals in the previous election. Dutton needs to win back these seats if he is to form government, and he seems to be going out of his way to alienate these crucial voters.
Finally, after all the blather about “division”, it’s extraordinary that the Opposition Leader refused to attend the official Australia Day ceremonies in Canberra. This is wedge politics in its purest form, implying that a standard piece of symbolism is so infected with wokeness that he will shun it like something unclean.
Such manoeuvres are painfully shallow and obvious. They serve as a distraction for a policy vacuum that is being filled with stunts, complaints, confected outrage and copycat Trumpism. It’s dumb, but it seems to work, especially when it has the heft of the Murdoch media empire on its side.
In the current political climate, Indigenous activists need to avoid giving more fuel to the Coalition’s culture war agenda. The Australian’s gloating report on numbers dropping off at ‘Invasion Day’ rallies is a taste of things to come, filled with ‘sensible’ comments from Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine – calling on people “to be proud of the Australia they know and love” - and raving, angry nonsense from an activist named Paul Silva, demanding that government be abolished and the land returned to Aboriginal people. To call this a false comparison is the merest understatement.
Next comes a long discussion of speakers from the “Palestinian resistance” who took part in these rallies and the “Neo-Nazis” who crashed them. The overall impression is one of chaos, as Aboriginal protests become identified with the Anti-Semitism the Oz has been calling out so vociferously for months. Ultimately, left and right wing extremists are viewed as equally dangerous, with the Coalition’s message of unity acting as the voice of reason.
This was why it was nice to spend Australia Day in Saudi Arabia, taking in the second Islamic Arts Biennale, which is the subject of this week’s art column for The Nightly. The Saudis obviously have a big job ahead, polishing their image with the rest of the world, but they are making mighty efforts. Regardless of how we might view HRH Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, his massive investments in infrastructure, health, education and the arts have made him a popular ruler at home. An event such as the Islamic Arts Biennale is a cultural statement that serves a genuinely unifying purpose, showing the opposite side of Islam to the one we meet so often in the media. No matter what your religious or political convictions may be, no-one could see this show without recognising its quality and importance.
The film column looks at another ambitious project - Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist, a three-and-a-half-hour epic set to make a big impression at this year’s Academy Awards. It’s a flawed film, but its successes far outweigh its problems. For a young actor-turned-director whose previous efforts were hard to love, The Brutalist is a miraculous achievement. It’s good to discover a few positives, while so much of the world races at breakneck speed towards the abyss.