Adam Goodes is a victim of the Aboriginal grievance industry. For 18 years he played Australian football to adoring crowds. In the last couple of years he has been booed. What happened?

It started to go wrong for Goodes when he was used as a poster boy by the Recognise movement. That movement is determined to paint this nation as racist in a cynical attempt to rewrite the constitution to gain rights for one race, Aborigines. This is racist.

The AFL and other football codes, which were doing a good job of integrating Aborigines into the mainstream by using their football talents, were also inveigled to play the recognition game. They then hired cultural keepers: their jobs were to highlight difference, to demand respect for Aborigines irrespective of their football skills. One had to be an identity footballer. Over time the identity outweighed the footballer.

Plastered on every football field boundary are the advertisements for the political cause of Recognition. Patrons have been sold a political message. Right in the middle of their weekend recreation, to which generations of Australians have been devoted, came constant messages that they had a problem. But, they did not; they welcomed every football player of every cast and creed so long as they were talented. Adam Goodes was one such player. For sixteen or so years they cheered his skills. That these officials would hold their own patrons in contempt for booing Adam Goodes, who was to them no longer a mere footballer but a footballer of identity, is appalling. Aboriginal players have been applauded in all codes for decades. The only thing that changed was the politicisation of race in football. Berating patrons will not fix this. The only way to fix this is for Goodes to return to the field, play football and stop the moral lectures and the war dance aimed at opponents. These faux gestures of Aboriginal solidarity, taught to him by the hired guns of the Aboriginal industry and embraced by the AFL as a recruiting tool, are worthless. The last few weeks are a precursor to a referendum on recognition. It will not go down well because Australians are sick of being told they are racists. They are not. You are not sitting at the back of the bus, Adam, you are a wealthy footballer who was made Australian of the Year. Unfortunately, you used the position to wrongly berate your fellow Australians.

Waleed Aly on ABC Offsiders regarded Goodes war dance as an expression of his culture and the crowd reaction as a measure of its ‘discomfort’. The discomfort arose, Aly argued, because ‘minorities don’t mind (he meant, don’t know) their place’, that ‘they are something other than compliant’. It could be that they came to the football to watch football, to be entertained by footballers, not political actors. Adam Goodes did forget his place, he used football stadiums as a soapbox. Goodes was there to entertain the mob as he has for 18 years. They did not pay good money to be insulted.

Goodes expressed his dismay at Australia Day because, for him, it is a day when Aboriginal Australia was invaded. Indeed it was Adam. A bedraggled group of English and Irish slum dwellers were sent to a place where civilisation, as it was then conceived, did not exist. In the ensuing settlement Aborigines were harshly treated, as were most of the settlers, but slowly they built a nation that had not existed before. There was no Australia before European settlement. There were no Aboriginal nations. A dance does not a nation make. One angry Aborigine does not a race make.

Goodes is an advocate for Constitutional recognition. He has reminded voters that s. 25 of the Constitution reads that ‘the states can ban people from voting based on their race.’ He claimed, in an interview with the Adelaide Advertiser, that it is ‘very racist towards indigenous people.’ In fact, the mention of race had as much to do with the general disquiet whites had to all other races, especially Chinese. The section has never been used. It is irrelevant in an Australia that is so open that Aly can grace screen, print and radio and say whatever he likes and not fear that he will be treated badly, other than for the content of his remarks. He will never be hauled before a tribunal as someone of non-Anglo descent to justify himself. Which is not to argue that racism does not exist in Australia. It does, especially among new immigrants against those groups for whom there are historical enmities. Every race, culture and ethnic group carries an historic grudge. In the places from which they come the grudge festers. In Australia the grudge heals. Of course, for Aborigines, they are home and they cannot physically escape the old enmity. But they have escaped in reality. They live in a liberal democracy, something their forebears did not create. Keep the spear dance Adam, it is only possible to play that game in a nation that others built.

Why should anyone be proud of his or her race? Think about it. If I were to declare that I was a proud white man I would castigated. But Australians are meant to accept being a ‘proud’ Aborigine is as a good thing. It is neither good nor bad.Goodes chose to ‘identify’. His father was Anglo, his mother Aboriginal. If the whites oppressed the black, then Adam has a struggle internally: he is both the oppressor and the oppressed. I understand the difficulty, but don’t blame society.