Open letter to Cody Walker: Your mouth’s closed but you’re still whining

We pay actors to stand in front of a camera and play pretends. We pay sportspeople to run around after a ball or jump over things. They are not paid their mega-bucks to shoot their yaps off and lecture and browbeat us all with their half-witted opinions.

Some are learning the hard way the truth of the adage, “get woke, go broke”. American football and sports broadcaster ESPN lost, big-time, when they embraced the hissy-fits of overpaid whingers like Colin Kaepernik. Undeterred, a handful of Australian rugby players are trying for their little moment of attention, too.

Just in case all that praise and attention from the ABC, The Guardian and your sport’s politically correct hangers-on has gone to your head, let me try to tell you as honestly and kindly as I can what I think of your refusal to sing our National Anthem at the big game last night. I reckon that I might be speaking on behalf of the great majority of your fellow Australians in doing so.

Basically, you should be deeply embarrassed.

Their arguments for refusing to sing the anthem are the usual roll-call of right-on nostrums. Not least the baloney about “world’s oldest living culture”. Like every living culture on earth, modern Aboriginal culture is the result of a process that has been going since the first Australopithicenes started banging the rocks together.

Your argument for justifying such gross bad manners is that Aborigines have an old culture, rather than the Anthem’s “young” one, and that you are not or have never been “free”. What a crock of meretricious , shallow, unreflective posturing that ‘argument’ is…

Aborigines are an ancient people. But so are Britons and Greeks and Indians and many others who make up the Australian nation. Advance Australia Fair is a National Anthem. It is not a racial, ethnic or a tribal anthem…Australia is no longer among the youngest but it was when the Commonwealth came in to existence and when the Anthem was composed. When we speak of the Australian people we are using that expression to identify those who live within it and who owe it loyalty and obligation…

You may have grown confused by listening to those who…talk of Aboriginal peoples or “First Nations”. Despite the necessary use of the plural, they think that once the concept of “a people” is invoked all must defer to it, even when based squarely on racial profile…

Instead, the proponents of treaties and constitutional “recognition” are addicted to the very racist mindset they continually decry.

Aboriginal inhabitants of this continent were manifestly never part of a nation, as that word is understood in our language…an Aboriginal “nation” would not be a strictly geographical entity, and that this must entail nationhood being interpreted in a racial sub-group sense instead.

Do you really want race to be a determinant of nationality, Cody? Did you and your mates think this through before last night’s ready-for-our-close-up grandstanding?

…You object also to the “free” part of the lyric as well? Well, Cody, freedom is a relative notion. In Australia, as in most former British colonies, our freedoms are grounded in the common law…You can choose to sing or not sing. I can say what I think about your choice. Neither of us suffer any legal penalties for that. When you can’t even bring yourself to mumble the word ‘free’, against  which nation’s standard are you comparing our own liberties?

In fact, when it comes to a very real and prominent issue of freedom that has gripped Australian rugby, Cody Walker and his pals have been notably silent.

Why wasn’t the issue of the denial of Izzy’s religious freedom the object of your grievance? Instead you drew attention to yourself at last night’s huge public event for phony imagined grievances.

No answer, Cody? Your silence speaks volumes, most tellingly about yourself.

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