Former Liberal Prime Minister Tony Abbott appeared on an Institute of Public Affairs interview hosted by Daniel Wild.
‘Speaking of Green-Left instincts,’ began Mr Wild, ‘There is no better demonstration of where that leads than here in Victoria.’
He goes on to paint the tragic picture of a Victoria under the control of an unchained ‘radical government’ operating without an effective Opposition.
The latest development comes from the Yoorrook Justice Commission handing down 100 outrageous recommendations that left most Victorians considering their extradition options.
Mr Wild called the contents ‘radical’ and ‘extreme’.
‘It calls for the establishment of a permanent Indigenous-only Voice to Parliament, reparations payments, the exemption of Indigenous Australians from the payment of certain taxes… More land to be locked up purely for the use of Indigenous Victorians and nobody else. It is a doctrine for permanent and extreme political and legal separatism and the establishment of a two-tiered society in Victoria to be used as a boiler plate federally, if it is successful.’
Tony Abbott was asked for his view, given he served as a prominent campaigner against Anthony Albanese’s Voice to Parliament referendum which revealed that the overwhelming view of Australians in every state and territory (except Canberra) is to reject the race politics of treaties, so-called ‘truth telling’ commissions, and race-based government structures.
‘All of this would just be fundamentally unfair,’ replied Mr Abbott. ‘It would be giving one group of people a whole lot of rights and privileges that are not enjoyed by every Victorian.’
Indeed, it is bewildering that these Labor ideas haven’t fallen into the hands of anti-discrimination legislation, considering the express purpose of these recommendations is to discriminate based upon race.
Tony Abbott points out that the Voice to Parliament failed because Australians believe in equality before the law.
…and Labor’s race politics is opposed to equality.
Something that Labor, and particularly Victorian Labor, is never pressed on is how they can justify the glorification of racial privilege.
The Victorian Premier probably thinks she has gotten away with this nonsense, but it is likely no one believes any of it will come to pass. The second Victorians watch their neighbours excluded from tax on the base of race in the middle of a financial crisis is the day it will all fall apart for Labor.
A question we might ask Labor, who pays the council tax when all the non-Indigenous people leave? Do local councils go begging at the door of the state Treasury?
‘Democracy is something [Labor] only respect if it goes their way,’ said Mr Abbott. ‘They’re effectively just pushing on regardless…’ He adds, in reference to the Voice to Parliament. After all, Victorians said ‘No’. They gave the government a clear instruction, but Jacinta Allan is not listening.
It betrays the truth about the referendum that we suspected all along. The Voice was not about listening. Labor had an agenda they wanted pushed through and they tried to dress it up as a grassroots civil rights movement. Australians were smart enough to side-eye the racist mess and say, ‘No thanks, mate…’
The only astonishing thing is that it is somehow legal for the Labor state government to ignore a referendum. Not just one state, all of them.
Poor Tony Abbott goes on to point out that this provides a ‘real opening’ for the Liberal Party, forgetting of course that they were dumb enough to originally support the Victorian truth-treaty nonsense and only later backflipped. Now they look like they have no idea what their true ideological position is, which is pretty much the narrative of the focus-group-listening-tour Coalition.
Mr Abbott looks as though he wants to take the state opposition by the neck and give them a good shake back to sanity, but the mannerisms of his former Prime Ministership keep him stoic like a forensic crash investigator watching a video of train colliding with a car parked across the tracks.
‘At the heart there are radical Indigenous activists that are trying to undo 200 years of history and retrospectively refit modern Australia as some kind of series of Indigenous nations that are co-equal with the state and federal governments. So, there is this push to undo history on the part of the Indigenous activists and there’s this, I guess, guilt on the part of the mainstream Green-Left at what happened from 1788 and subsequently.’
He added:
‘We all accept that there were all sorts of misunderstandings, injustices, even occasionally atrocities in the wake of the British settlement of Australia. But fundamentally, the British settlement of Australia has been a very good thing indeed. But for the British settlement of Australia, from 1788, the people of this continent would still be living in a Hobbesian state of nature […] Aboriginal society pre-settlement was hardly some kind of Garden of Eden […] it was basically the war of all-against-all. Certainly, there was a massive amount of both intra-clan and inter-clan violence on a huge scale.’
It is not the sort of truth-telling the Labor Party wants to hear. Facts are the enemy of activists and even small things, such as the liberation of Aboriginal women from tribal oppression or the doubling Aboriginal lifespans since settlement, render the narrative of the Green-Left false.
Abbott goes on to make some good points about the need for government handouts to be always on the basis of need rather than race, but we know the Coalition, even under his leadership, maintained these unequal racist activist systems for fear of the ABC turning it into an election nightmare.
The conversation finishes on the controversial Welcome to Country, closely related to Acknowledgments of Country which litter the landscape. Every website, every email, every corporate virtue pledge, every shopping centre, every council… They all feel the need to acknowledge so-called stolen land they have no intention of giving back. They are like the mafia who cross themselves before going about their day.
The vast majority of Australians find Welcome to Country offensive, insulting, and alarming. It is not a ‘welcome’ but a declaration of racial supremacy. An ownership chant. A normalisation of an idea that underpins other horrific policies that exploit race for the purpose of land, privilege, and money. It would be like coming to your home every night, a home you paid for and built, only to find someone who never lived there giving you permission to enter the front door with a passive-aggressive smile.
According to an Institute of Public Affairs survey, 56 per cent of Australians believe the practice is divisive. It is probably more like 85 per cent.
There is a niche role for it to be performed at outback tourist attractions to a small crowd of foreigners who are genuinely being welcomed to a country they don’t own.
Daniel Wild gives Welcome to Country the benefit of the doubt as originally starting off as something ‘that was meant to be kind of polite and gentle’. Others remain suspicious.
As Tony Abbott says, ‘It has almost become a form of harassment. It has almost become a form of putting people in their place and making non-Indigenous Australians, or Australians with no Aboriginal ancestry, feel like they are effectively interlopers in their own land.’
Interlopers which the Victorian state Labor government wants to foot the bulk of the tax bill.
Talk about making Australians feel unwelcome.
Guests are welcomed. People who do not live somewhere are welcomed. The underlying assumption of a Welcome to Country is that your home, the nation you were born to, the land of your ancestors, that country is not yours. A view reinforced by activists and Parliamentarians who shout, ‘Pay the rent!’ at people because of their skin colour.
‘It’s dead wrong. It’s divisive.’
Abbott adds, ‘There is so much wrong with this. Ditto the practice of flying three flags constantly as if the flag of all of us should simply be there with the flags of some of us. It’s so wrong.’
Lately we have seen how much deeper the racism of this activist movement goes, with Indigenous activists standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Palestinian activists preaching about colonisation.
This leaves native-born Australians, whose histories and ancestors reside in this country, being lectured to by brand new arrivals who escaped a hardcore Islamic regime that despises every virtue, moral, and legal progress made on the back of British settlement. These individuals demand the racial exploitation of Australians, the pillaging of their finances, the theft of their land, the deliberate erosion of their rights, and then stand around and tell them to ‘go back to Britain’, a country most Australians have never been to. All this, after they were welcomed as refugees. If that is the thanks Australians get, they should be sent packing.
So yes, Australians increasingly despise Welcome to Country, find it appalling in its racism, and want the whole lot of ideological garbage removed from the political system before it fundamentally damages the social contract.
Flat White is written by Alexandra Marshall. If you would like to support her work, shout her a coffee over at donor-box.
