The Greens with their cynical and shallow virtue signalling are as predictable as ever with their perennial guilt trip and call for moving Australia Day, citing the equally perennial and tedious meme of dispossession, theft, “ongoing genocide” and “slaughter”.
There is not a single aboriginal person alive today that has been dispossessed of anything and there’s not a single NON indigenous person alive today that participated in any such dispossession.
Officially, eighty percent of indigenous people live ordinary, working lives just like all other Australians in the cities, suburbs and regional towns across Australia and the remaining twenty percent in remote areas that have fallen behind are the beneficiaries of taxpayer largess to the extent of the Closing the Gap program with a budget of $33.4 billion a year.
There is still a long way to go and more work to be done but the generosity and intent is the exact opposite of what The Greens would have us believe.
Apart from seeking relevance, the main objective of Richard Di Natale and The Greens with their call to move Australia Day, is to defy the views and the values of the majority of Australians, sow discord and dissent and to dismantle and destroy the Australian project one brick at a time.
I recall listening to a couple of pampered and educated aboriginal elites moaning and whining on ABC radio on the occasion of similar beat-up back in 2017 about Australia Day, the first fleet in 1788 and Captain Cook in 1770 and I found their position perplexing to say the least.
Both, I’m guessing, would have been in their late 30’s, one a presenter on Radio National the other a lecturer at UTS, so hardly doing it tough. What you might think of as aboriginal elites.
But despite the obvious advantages they had accrued both in terms of education, well-paying careers and a life in the suburbs like most other Australians, these two exuded a “what have the Romans ever done for us” air of bitterness, resentment and ingratitude.
“We were invaded, there’s no doubt about that” one of them said.
I’m thinking, what’s with this “WE” business?
Whether you think Australia was invaded or not, is hardly the point.
Given that those events happened 230 years ago, how is it possible for someone in 2017, born in the last 35 years or so and living a life lightyears removed from the hunter gatherer existence and a life described by Thomas Hobbes of indigenous existence generally, as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” to be so conceited and narcissistic, as to place themselves and make themselves central to the people and the events of 1788, as part of the “we”?
And furthermore why would anyone want to?
It seems to me that the sub-text of what they were saying was along the lines that they would have preferred some fictional, romantic and idealised Rousseau-ean, noble savage existence as a hunter gatherer.
In effect, like many aboriginal activists they were pining for an existence that never actually existed except in philosopher Rousseau’s fertile imagination.
I’m thinking, why don’t you two quit your navel gazing, shelve your attitude and the chip on your shoulder for a minute, take a quality of life stocktake, and take a look around you?
Everything you see, roads, buildings, educational institutions, the Rule of Law, and all manner of opportunity and advantage even your own comfortable existence all flows directly from the events of 26 January 1788 and the arrival of the First Fleet.
If you think for one minute that Australia was going to sit down here and a coloniser (French, Dutch, Portuguese or the British) weren’t going to move into the neighbourhood, then you are either deluded or have been hitting the Kool-Aid.
What they don’t seem to understand is that all they’re doing with their ungracious and bitter attitude, is undermining the decency and goodwill of average Australians and more specifically, the prospects of a yes vote at any future Constitutional Recognition referendum.’