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26 January 2009
Australia Day - the PC-class campaign revs up
Aboriginal activist Mick Dodson was no sooner named Australian of the Year than he began attacking Australia Day itself. Australia Day, the day that celebrates the arrival of the First Fleet as the beginning of the Australian nation, signalled "the end of life as we knew it". Mick Dodson and his fellow activists, sitting on the shoulders of Australia's dominant political class, regard the 26th of January 1788, the arrival of the First Fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Phillip, as 'Invasion Day'.
Who could be surprised at yet another hijacking of an Australian commemorative day to push the political campaigns of Australia's all-powerful PC-class?
Dodson was in the familiar weaselling* PC-mode, inviting people into a dialogue about the significance of the 26th of January 1788. Surely we're mature enough to discuss it, he said? But we all know what PC-class dialogue entails, don't we?
It means feverish manoeuvring and the manipulation of the political and legal system by PC groups behind the scenes; it means a barrage of propaganda through compliant and supportive media groups; it means the PC commissars in the educational sector gearing up for more indoctrination of its captive youth audience; it means the unrelenting bashing of the ordinary citizen's ears until he cries out for mercy. Yes, I've said it all before. Note in this case that Dodson is a professor of law at the Australian National University.
Dodson was doing the rounds this morning of the television and radio shows. As I watched him on Nine's Today show I wondered yet again what it is to be an "aboriginal", what it says about someone when you describe him as "indigenous", and what aboriginal culture actually is. Prime Minister Rudd is reported in The Age as asking people "to consider the significance of indigenous Australians as the oldest continuing culture in human history".
Let me leave aside the constantly repeated claim that Aboriginal culture goes back forty thousand years. (I am ready to believe that there is evidence of human habitation on the land mass between geographical co-ordinates that we unthinkingly call Australia. But it is a far more controversial claim to say that the evidence of human habitation forty thousand years ago points to the same culture and same racial group that were found when Captain Cook and the Dutch explorers stepped ashore on that land mass.)
But accepting that claim, how does someone like Dodson, or the more radical Michael Mansell, fit into that "continuing culture"? The short answer is they don't. Dodson and Mansell are foremost examples of people radicalised by radical European political philosophy. The "rights" rhetoric that Dodson was pouring out this morning (and daily into the ears of his students) is straight from the salons of 18th century Paris, Berlin, Geneva and London. Mansell's rhetoric and activism leaves the stench of rotting Marxism in the air. These two, and those Aboriginals like them, have nothing in common with the full-blood Aboriginal still living the stone-age way of life that Captain Cook saw.
Talking about full-blood Aboriginals, I am indelicate enough to insist on asking what it is to be Aboriginal racially. Take Mansell, for example. He's like a splash of chocolate in a glass of milk. Indeed, the majority of Aboriginal activists promoted in the media are more or less like this. But what's my point in saying this? The point is that in Dodson and Mansell - and those like them - we are dealing primarily with a political faction that has generated a self-serving definition of aboriginality, and not (primarily) with people representing a racial or cultural group. The obvious question, then, is whether their political views and ambitions promote and ensure the welfare and well-being of people who are indisputably indigenous, culturally and racially - and whose interests they say they're fighting for.
Since Aboriginal people were granted citizenship in 1967, billions of dollars have been poured into the "aboriginal problem" and governments have generated all manner of policy to deal with it. For example, the Whitlam government, uttering pious platitudes about equal employment rights, forced station owners in the outback to pay "underpaid" Aboriginal stockmen the normal rate for such farm work. The stations owners were not economically able to meet the wage bill. But rights are rights, and principles are principles are principles, aren't they? One can't transgress the abstract principle written in black and white on paper archived in a government building in the national capital.
The aboriginal stockmen, hitherto happy with the work they were very good at, were told they did not have to put up with such injustice. They drifted into the nearest town where they became acquainted with the dusty gutters - which they nightly observed at close quarters. This story has been extended and multiplied times without number up until this very day. While Dodson and his pals were doing very well, thank you very much, ordinary Australians witnessed year in, year out, scenes of utter hopelessness and despair among aboriginal communities. And they asked why. Why didn't someone do something about it? Why didn't Aboriginals do something about it? And they were told to shut up and not be racist.
In the final year of the Howard government, the desperate circumstances in some aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory became so extreme that John Howard, copping abuse every time he tried to do something effective about the problem, despaired at last of the self-appointed leaders doing what they should be doing. He moved to formal concrete government intervention. Screams of discrimination and racism followed. To its credit the Rudd Labor government has maintained that formal intervention.
Mick Dodson, Professor of Law at the Australian National University, was this morning deploring the racism of that intervention. It was shocking that the practical concrete steps to stop alcoholic abuse, violence, sexual abuse, disease and general human degradation suspended the Racial Discrimination Act, and failed to meet our obligations under the United Nation Convention. Oh, no, transgressing abstract formulae was not at all right. What would he tell his students?
I don't think Professor Dodson's world came crashing down when Captain Arthur Phillip landed the men and women of the First Fleet on the sandy shore of a harbour that came to be known as Sydney Cove of Sydney Harbour of a mass of land that came to be known as Australia. You see, before Captain Phillip landed with a community of people whose main stock was a centuries-old system of law, government and social organisation, there was no Australia. There was a land mass, sparsely populated by diverse nomadic tribal groups, that could not in the appropriate sense be called a country or nation. A country or a nation is nothing if it is not a coherent moral and social incorporation with a distinct self-sufficient system of government that is coincidently joined to a particular time and space.
Prof Dodson is a citizen of the nation called Australia, brought up to enjoy the benefits of civil society. Those benefits are in reality his civil rights. People in Australia who are unable to or are prevented from enjoying the benefits of civil society are being denied their civil rights.
A final point is that if the settlement established in 1788 was an invasion, then invasion has been the way of populating of the world. But there is a clear distinction between settlement and invasion. China was invaded by the Japanese in the 1930s; A land mass in the south seas was settled by people of the British Isles who brought and established their system of government and social organisation. They called the union of the incorporation and the particular land mass Australia. The charge of invasion by Dodson and his faction is merely a political weapon aimed at a political objective.
There is a lesson, though, in this for Australians. Weakness and loss of confidence in one's political and social organisation - and its historical development - is an invitation to those who have contempt for us and think they can do better.
Dodson urges rethink on offensive date of our national day
*acknowledgment to Don Watson for this classic self-defeating PC word-weapon
Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
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