Remember when Marcia Langton promised us that there’d be no more Welcome to Country if the Voice referendum failed. As if to prove that threatening us with a good time isn’t a winning strategy, the Voice was dealt the biggest defeat of a referendum in Australian history. The No vote was so overwhelming that even the ABC called the result within an hour of polls closing in the eastern states.
Yet, the bloody WTCs didn’t ease up a bit. If anything they’re getting worse. Australians who have long politely put up with the bullshit are growing increasingly stroppy and openly booing them, to the pearl-clutching horror of the establishment elite.
Banning the WTC at schools and government events is probably one of One Nation’s single most popular policies. Unlike most politicians, too, One Nation MPs are putting their money where their mouths are.
Three One Nation senators turned their backs during the Acknowledgement of Country on the opening day of the spring parliamentary sittings.
Queensland Senator Malcolm Roberts, New South Wales Senator Sean Bell and Western Australia Senator Tyron Whitten faced away as Deputy Senate President Slade Brockman delivered the Acknowledgement of Country in the Senate chamber.
The trio turned back around when the Senate moved to the Lord’s Prayer.
Pauline Hanson was absent that day, but the gesture was pure Hanson: no lectures, no press releases, just a quiet refusal to play along with the ritual.
Hanson has made the policy crystal clear. If she were prime minister, there would be no Welcome to Country in schools, no Acknowledgement in government departments and no three flags. She has been turning her own back on the parliamentary version for three years and says her senators share the view that Australians have had a gutful.
“I do not believe in having Welcome to Country ... in government departments I wouldn’t have a Welcome to Country,” Hanson said.
“I wouldn’t be having it in schools or the education system. I’d shut that all down and I’ll tell you another thing too, there won’t be three flags.”
For curious Kiwi readers, the ‘three flags’ refers to the Albanese government’s insulting practise of backdropping every event and press conference with not just the Australian flag, but the Aboriginal flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag (the one that looks like a bum chucking a brown-eye). Often set up in ways contrary to Australia’s flag laws, which dictate that the Australian flag must always be placed in the position of prominence.
Responding to criticism after a similar protest in parliament last year, Hanson said many Australians had grown frustrated with the practice.
“They’re tired of being made to feel like outsiders. Tired of tokenistic rituals shoved into every meeting, every ceremony, every public event, while real issues like the cost of living and housing are brushed aside,” Hanson said.
“These divisive performances aren’t about respect any more. They’ve become a political routine that divides rather than unites.”
The response from the Indigenous Affairs Minister was the usual script. Malarndirri McCarthy whined and moaned and accused the senators of deliberately disrespecting Aboriginal people. She then delivered the obligatory plea for respectful debate, the kind that always seems to run in one direction only. Notably, McCarthy has never publicly castigated Aborigines for turning their backs on then-opposition leader Brendan Nelson.
What the elite never grasp is that the growing irritation is not about ‘respect’. It is about the relentless insertion of a political performance into every public space while housing, cost of living and basic competence are treated as optional extras. The ceremonies have long since stopped being about acknowledgement and become a party loyalty test: participate or be labelled a bigot. Most Australians simply want them gone from the compulsory parts of civic life.
One Nation’s senators did what few others will, but a great many Australians want to: They treated the ritual with the same polite contempt most of the country now feels. No shouting, no walk-out theatre: just a turned back and a return to the Lord’s Prayer. In a parliament addicted to empty gestures, that counts as substance.
The pearl-clutching will continue, of course. The rest of us will keep noticing that the people who promised the ceremonies would fade after the Voice defeat are the ones most determined to keep forcing them down everyone’s throats.
