I’m booing on the inside because it’s my country too. By Peta Credlin in The Australian.
If the voice referendum is defeated, Professor Marcia Langton said back in April 2023, that’ll be the end of welcomes to country.
It was meant as a threat, but many Australians took it as a promise: vote down the proposal to give Aboriginal people a special say over how we’re all governed, and that will end all the separatist practices that have grown up over time. Like race-based treaties, flying three flags rather than just one national flag, and welcoming people to lands that supposedly belong to some of us more than to all of us.
But when the voice was duly defeated, because most Australians hated the idea that race would be enshrined in our Constitution, instead of listening and learning, the activist class and the green-left establishment redoubled their efforts to achieve by bureaucratic stealth what they’d failed to achieve at the ballot box.
That’s why people are angry and why substantial numbers have now started to audibly reject welcomes to country, most notably at the official Anzac Day dawn service at Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance for two years running. Not because they’re anti-Aboriginal or innately disrespectful but because they don’t want to be reminded of division on what should be a day of unity.
And many more, who would never stoop to interrupt something sacred, as I said in a post that has now been watched over 200,000 times, are “booing on the inside”.
Especially when the “welcome” is anything but.
After all, who would welcome anyone to their home or an event with a lengthy rant designed not to include but exclude? … The problem, when Aboriginal people welcome us to “their” country, is the inference that everyone else is no more than a guest. Maybe that’s OK if the event is at a remote community or a facility catering especially for Aboriginal people. But on Anzac Day, any suggestion that people who’ve served our country in uniform might be here only on sufferance borders on the sacrilegious.
Yeah!
The day after delivering the Sydney dawn service welcome, Ray Minniecon said: “If I came into your home, I’d expect you to acknowledge that this is your home, this is your house … and … we’re there to, to show the deepest respect to the host … You’re on our country, you’re in our land, just acknowledge it and respect … whose land you’re on … It’s not that difficult to understand for me.”
I’m sorry, Ray, it is for me. Because your land is my land too and your country is my country just as much as it’s yours. After all, Credlins have been here for 172 years, worked hard to build this nation and have sent four generations to war to defend it, so being Australian is all we know. I suspect that millions of Australians felt that way over the Anzac weekend and the conga line of politicians denouncing anyone who booed as “disgraceful” or even “un-Australian” would have just reinforced popular resentment towards the political class.