Genocidal attitudes masked in the trappings of patriotism

Dec 14, 2024
The Australian flag and Australian Aboriginal flag fly side-by-side at Bondi Beach, Sydney in early summer. This image was taken on a windy day in the late afternoon.

The decision by Australia’s federal Opposition leader to avoid standing by the Aboriginal flag is a dangerously divisive and cynical move.

In case he has not noticed the current Australian flag includes the Union Jack which symbolises an extremely controversial period in our history. Senator Lidia Thorpe recently drew attention to the negative impacts of colonisation. Millions of Australians are descended from British people sentenced to transportation as a way of allowing England’s ruling class to stifle the social unrest arising from the impoverishment which arose from the protection of their privilege. Millions have Irish descent and for them the Jack represents theft of land, repression and refusal to acknowledge responsibility for Britain’s crimes against Irish people.

Millions of Australians believe in a republic and are appalled by the inequality implicit in the monarchy. Many millions have ancestry derived from numerous countries outside the Anglosphere. According to Census figures gathered by the Australian Bureau of Statistics 20% speak a language other than English at home.

Australia is a polygeneric society, yet Mr Dutton apparently thinks we should be monocultural. Conservatives across the Tasman have decided to play this racist card in seeking to abandon the Treaty of Waitangi. Perhaps Mr Dutton likes the look.

Let there be no talk of Australians dying beneath the Jack-dominated flag. It is time we shed the idea that military disasters are deeply ingrained in our lives. This is not normal life but sheer militarism. Besides, many Indigenous people died before this flag. Those that killed them were, not standing under it, but used it to mask their cowardly genocidal attitudes in the trappings of patriotism.

We no longer sing God Save the Monarch at official gatherings. Nor should we fly the flag with the Union Jack in the corner. We do have smoking ceremonies and welcome to country. We should be proud of these generous gifts from First Nations peoples. We should stand proudly under the black, red and yellow of the Aboriginal flag and treat it with respect.

Perhaps the Coalition thinks that any recognition of Indigenous identity is an easy target for Dutton’s hysterical cries of division. While the loss of the ‘Voice’ referendum might have encouraged it in this view, surely most Australians would now recognise that the real division was created by the Coalition. Let us hope that Labor’s sycophantic attitude to the British monarchy does not give the Coalition scope to peddle this divisive nonsense.

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