It’s pretty much official, now: we’re sick to death of the ‘Welcome to Country’ and ‘Acknowledgement bullshit’. Now for the corporates and the HR Karens to get the message.
The whole, made-up, rigmarole is something Australians have suffered through in polite silence for long enough. We’ve had a gutsful of being ‘welcomed’ to our own country and paying some pasty-faced box-ticker in a possum-skin cloak with the price tag still hanging off it for the privilege. We’re sick of it at footy games, on plane flights and especially at work meetings.
The first rumbling of discontent came at this year’s Anzac Day dawn service, where a number of people booed a grotesquely inappropriate Welcome to Country. Still, the chattering classes got to hold their noses and sneer at that one, because the instigator was an alleged neo-Nazi.
But the gloves really came off this week, with the news that, not a ‘neo-Nazi’ or ‘white supremacist’, but a true-blue Aussie working bloke had taken a stand and won. Street sweeper Shaun Turner, like most of us, was fed up to the back teeth with the bullshit. Unlike the rest of us, though, he decided that the time to politely suffer in silence was over. Hit with another interminable ‘acknowledgement of country’ at a simple workplace meeting, Turner told the meeting, “if you need to be thanking anyone, it’s the people who have worn the uniform and fought for our country to keep us free”.
“It’s getting out of hand and people are losing it, it is now being done at the opening of a postage stamp… I don’t need to be welcomed into my own country.” The HR Karens duly clutched their pearls and Turner was sacked – but this week he won his unfair dismissal case and became the toast of the nation.
Well, the HR Karens and Aboriginal Industry troughers can go and have another attack of the vapours: a new poll shows just how fed up we are with the garbage.
A survey of 1005 Australians conducted by independent marketing research firm Dynata on behalf of the conservative Institute of Public Affairs last month found that more than half (56 per cent) of participants agreed the practice has “become divisive”.
Only 17 per cent disagreed with the statement, while 27 per cent said they were unsure.
Surprisingly, 48 per cent of those aged 18 to 24 – a demographic often thought to be more progressive than generations past – did not believe the ritual to be a unifying one.
How can it be ‘unifying’, when it’s literally telling everyone else that this is not their country and never will be?
IPA deputy executive director Daniel Wild said the survey results were proof “Australians have had an absolute gutful” of the “divisive and pointless” tradition.
“Even younger Australians, who the political class insist are left-wing and woke, by a two-to-one margin believe Welcome to Country performances are divisive,” Mr Wild said in a statement accompanying the findings.
“And they are evenly split on the performances at sporting events and Anzac Day ceremonies, further underscoring how divisive it is.
“Commonsense, working class, mainstream Australians understand something that the highly credentialed elites do not: Australians do not want to be divided by race, and we do not want or need to be welcomed to our own country.”
Can we also stop calling it a ‘tradition’? It isn’t: it was made up out of whole cloth in the mid-1970s. Its origin ex nihilo is so well documented that calling it a tradition is simply a lie. The anthropological evidence is clear, too: while there were some scattered traditions meant to ensure that different clans didn’t simply start spearing each other on sight, there was nothing that even remotely resembled the so-called ‘Welcome to Country’.
Still, it’d be kind of funny to watch politicians adopt one of the few rituals recorded: smearing newcomers with armpit sweat.
[Wild] also took aim at Opposition Leader Sussan Ley, who opened her National Press Club address on Wednesday by acknowledging the traditional owners of the land and maintained that while it should not become a box-ticking exercise, there is “a time and a place” for the declaration and Welcome to Country ceremonies […]
Her words were a marked departure from the stance of her predecessor Peter Dutton, who omitted Acknowledgement of Country statements at major events and speeches during his election campaign, said the practice was overdone and went as far as to say he didn’t support Welcome to Country ceremonies on Anzac Day.
Mr Wild argued Ms Ley’s stance was also “at odds with modern Australia”, and accused her of “[failing] to state who the purported traditional owners of the National Press Club are”.
Particularly notable is the number of Aboriginal Australians (who aren’t on the ‘Welcome to Country’ gravy train) who are fed up with it, as well.
Former South Australian AFL player Tyson Lindsay [said…] “I talk to my elders about it and they say it is not acceptable, every time we hear it we cringe now … There are too many real issues facing Aboriginal people to be worrying about these empty symbolic gestures.
“I am looking for real change for the good of rather than symbolic tokenism.”
Prominent Indigenous leader and businessman Warren Mundine said he was sick of the practice being hijacked for political purposes.
In another instance, an Aboriginal group in Queensland bluntly told the local council to stop the nonsense.
The chattering left will, of course, dig their heels in and keep trying to beat us over the head with their fabricated nonsense. Looks like we’re going to do a whole lot more booing.
