It’s January in Australia and so the annual Australia Day political circus has rolled into town. It started much earlier this year, with Peter Dutton and Jacinta Nampijinpa Price working to grab some headlines before the upcoming election. Their followers have declared January is now “Australia Month” and have washed through social media with absurd lies and conspiracy theories about Aboriginal people. Yes, that crock about Aboriginal people wiping out the original pygmy race has been dug out again.

It’s a bad time to be non-white in Australia. Speaking out of both sides of his mouth, Peter Dutton has demanded an end to anti-Semitism and, at the same time, incited hatred of Aboriginal people, not just exploiting the anti-Voice surge of racism but inciting further racism against us. I agree that anti-Semitism is a scourge and must be tackled with tough laws and policing. So, too, are all forms of racism and xenophobia, particularly the rising levels of race hate against Aboriginal people, Muslims and other ethnicities, many of which have been singled out by Dutton.

In 2022, he alarmed the Australian–Chinese community when he made a shocking claim about a future war with China and compared China to Nazi Germany in the lead-up to World War II. He demonised African Australians, who he claimed so terrorised Melbourne that no one could go to a restaurant. He singled out Lebanese Australians, saying it was a mistake to take them in as refugees.

Dutton’s special brand of Bjelke-Petersen politics is aimed at dividing Australians to harvest votes from the permanently angry who need someone to blame for their miseries. Mostly, they blame Aboriginal people for their predicament, publishing their lies and conspiracy theories about us on every social media platform and sending them by email and post to those of us whose addresses they can access. Their hatred of us is pure gold for the opposition leader, because his nastiness is barely noticed by the types who flood the zone with cerebral faeces.

Peter Dutton, and now Western Australian Liberal leader Libby Mettam, have announced they will refuse to stand in front of an Aboriginal flag. They claim our flag is divisive and want “unity”. It is not just the Australian Constitution and our constitutional history that Dutton seems not to have read and understood but also the laws relating to Australian flags. The Aboriginal and the Torres Strait Islander flags are official Australian flags and have been for almost 30 years, proclaimed as such in 1995 under section 5 of the Flags Act 1953.

Dutton’s special brand of Bjelke-Petersen politics is aimed at dividing Australians to harvest votes from the permanently angry who need someone to blame for their miseries. Mostly, they blame Aboriginal people for their predicament, publishing their lies and conspiracy theories about us.

When Dutton was in cabinet in the Morrison government, a parliamentary inquiry led the cabinet to approve the payment of $20 million to buy the rights to the Aboriginal flag. The decision released the flag from the web of licences that the designer Harold Thomas had obtained by claiming copyright. Several of his licensees – none of whom were Aboriginal – had their lawyers send letters to Aboriginal organisations demanding money when the flag was used at events requiring the purchase of tickets or appeared on items of clothing. During the half-century since it was first raised, every Aboriginal protest, music event, sporting body and community service organisation had used the flag to rally Aboriginal people around a sense of hope for their future and positive affirmation of their identity in the face of relentless racism.

The buyback of the flag was the right thing to do. It means all those bodies can use the Aboriginal flag at their own cultural, sporting, music, educational and community events, ceremonies and functions without worrying they might be asked to pay royalties. A question for Dutton and Price, which no journalist has asked them, is: have you read the Flags Act 1953 and, if so, what’s the difference between the blue ensign and the red ensign? I hope to see this matter in cryptic crosswords and television quiz shows soon.

Essentially, Dutton is suggesting Aboriginal Australians are not “true blue” Australians. In a Steve Bannon-style twist of reality, proclaiming that Australian “unity” or nationhood exists only under the blue ensign, he is suggesting Aboriginal people and other undesirables do not deserve the status and benefits of Australian citizenship. His comprehension of racism is shallow, if there is any at all, except for his skill in using it to stir divisions based on race, ethnicity and religion.

Few Aboriginal people would be offended by him and his acolytes refusing to stand in front of our flag. It would be offensive if they did, after all Dutton has said about us. What is deeply offensive is his stance on the dual-naming of defence bases, which he first cancelled when he was defence minister in Scott Morrison’s government. In 2019, the Australian Defence Force and the Department of Defence adopted the dual-naming policy as part of a three-year reconciliation plan, a measure of respect by the ADF and the department for the history of Indigenous contributions to Australia.

In November last year, Defence announced the addition of Wiradjuri names to two bases in southern New South Wales, Yalbiligi Ngurang at RAAF Base Wagga and Gabuga at Blamey Barracks in Kapooka. Karen Barlow, chief political correspondent of this newspaper, reported a Defence statement that said the initiative highlighted “longstanding links between Defence and First Nations communities by acknowledging the important role that First Nations people have and continue to play in the defence of Australia”.

The Department of Defence’s base renaming program is under joint party review, with a decision to be made this year. Barlow’s report suggested this review followed the election commitments announced by Dutton and Price to remove the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags from future prime ministerial press conferences, to reduce Commonwealth funding of Welcome to Country events for federal departments, and to abolish the First Nations Ambassador role in the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

Over the previous two years, senators including Alex Antic, James McGrath and Hollie Hughes put questions on notice and in budget estimates hearings to ask how much taxpayer money is spent by federal departments on Welcomes to Country, smoking ceremonies and Indigenous “reconciliation matters”. Jacinta Price had declared her opposition to them as “activism” – part of her campaign to be the minister for Indigenous Affairs should the Coalition achieve government.

Dutton’s attack on Aboriginal placenames at military sites is a foul attack on the thousands of Aboriginal men and women who have served in our defence forces since the Boer War. Not since Victoria’s Returned and Services League president, Bruce Ruxton, stopped Aboriginal veterans from marching as a group in the Anzac Day parade in 1985 has there been such a sickening act of disrespect for those who were willing to sacrifice their lives for this nation. Thousands served and hundreds died fighting for their country, enrolling in the army at the height of the Australian Wars on the frontiers, even though they were legally excluded from doing so. They were told by the likes of Ruxton that Aboriginal people had never fought for their country.

Famously and offensively racist and homophobic, Ruxton did not confine his contempt to Indigenous Australians. He prevented gay servicemen from laying wreaths on Anzac Day, accusing them of denigrating the day of remembrance. In 1987, ahead of a visit by Nobel Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu, he described the Anglican bishop as “a witchdoctor” whose visit was intended to “breathe hatred”. He was opposed to Black South Africans being allowed into Australia, “because they did not assimilate as well as whites”.

This is the treasure-trove of ugly, divisive lies about Aboriginal people on top of which Dutton lays his posturing. Ruxton was hysterical when Cathy Freeman draped the Aboriginal and the Australian flags around her shoulders in her victory lap for winning gold in the women’s 400 metres at the Sydney 2000 Olympics. It’s not a world away from Dutton’s rhetoric. Bjelke-Petersen and Ruxton would be proud of the opposition leader.

Many in the media regard Dutton’s announcements about “woke” Aboriginal matters as trivial and diversionary – tactics to draw voter attention away from the “real” issues of high interest rates, mortgage stress and cost-of-living pressures. I’m not so sure. Dutton’s track record tells us that these announcements are neither trivial nor tactical but rather the substance of what he is taking to the 2025 federal election. They are central to his political identity.

https://youtu.be/8BBPiXL2UFY

Dutton’s proposed measures for Indigenous affairs will save the federal budget a few million dollars, while adding to the billions needed to address the accelerating impacts of decades of dysfunctional Indigenous affairs policies and programs. Dutton drops words such as “unity” and “values”, but what do they mean when he spends the rest of his time dehumanising Aboriginal people. He has no vision for our country. He does not inspire unity. He does not inspire hope and optimism. His is a small, nasty view of the world.

Humiliating Aboriginal people, ripping away our dignity and a sense of equality, belittling our historical contributions to Australia – all of this will have terrible consequences. Of course, with Dutton, the cruelty is the point.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on January 25, 2025 as "Dutton’s cruelty is the point".

https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/comment/topic/2025/01/25/duttons-deliberate-australia-day-cruelty#mtr

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