After the racists and their fellow travellers ‘won’ the Voice to Parliament referendum vote by lying to the Australian populace in support of the No campaign1-3, it was predicted by many people that this would embolden said racists and that they would start attacking things such as ‘Welcome to Country’ ceremonies.
It did not take long. Former Prime Minister, Tony Abbott wrote in The Australian (where else?): “Meanwhile, if the people’s vote is to be respected, it should mean abandoning, or at least scaling back, recent concessions to separatism: such as flying the Aboriginal flag co-equally with the national one (as if Australia is a country of two nations) and the routine acknowledgement of country by all speakers at official events (as if those whose ancestry here stretches beyond 1788 are more Australian than everyone else).”
In March 2013, when leader of the opposition, Tony Abbott said in parliament: “Australia is a blessed country. Our climate, our land, our people, our institutions rightly make us the envy of the earth; except for one thing – we have never fully made peace with the first Australians. This is the stain on our soul that Prime Minister Keating so movingly evoked at Redfern 21 years ago. We have to acknowledge that pre-1788 this land was as Aboriginal then as it is Australian now and until we have acknowledged that, we will be an incomplete nation and a torn people. We have only to look across the Tasman to see how it all could have been done much better. Thanks to the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand two peoples became one nation. So, our challenge is to do now in these times what should have been done 200 or 100 years ago: to acknowledge Aboriginal people in our foundation document”4 (i.e. the constitution).
Before the election of 2013, Abbott promised he would be: “…a prime minister for Aboriginal Affairs. The first I imagine that we have ever had.” Abbott has often spoken of his transformative friendship with Aboriginal leader (and former ALP national president) Warren Mundine (I think it was Mundine who was transformed into a liar of mammoth proportions). Abbott declared in 2014 that he was on a “…personal mission to help my fellow Australians to open their hearts, as much as to change their minds, on Aboriginal policy.” However, in the months after his election, he didn’t devote a much time to this issue. He did set up a pet Indigenous Advisory Council headed by Mundine, but in turn sidelined the elected National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples by defunding it in the budget5,6.
If the coalition were elected to government in 2013, Abbott ‘promised’ to spend a week a year in an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander community7. As he was only Prime Minister for two years, that promise would have led to a grand total of two weeks in indigenous communities. He didn’t keep that promise. Anyone who has followed politics over the last decade or so will know what Abbott’s promises and his pronouncements are worth. This profoundly stupid man is now clearly trying to ingratiate himself with the new far right Liberal Party by convincing them that he hates the same things they hate.
As if to emphasise the bastardry and bigotry unleashed by Liberal support for the No vote and the failure of the referendum, a One Notion MP in South Australia has said she would attempt to have the legislation instituting a state-based Voice to Parliament repealed. On top of this, the Queensland Liberal-National Partyhas withdrawn its support for a pathway to a treaty, five months after voting for it, and Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk caved in — saying the next step would be ‘truth telling’ and that a path to a treaty with First Nations people was “a long way off”8.
It is clear that the racists have been emboldened by the failure of the referendum, and their Liberal Party will continue to use division as a political tactic, as they have done since the Howard government was elected in 1996, and this has been aided and abetted by the Murdoch media. The fact of the association between the Liberal Party, racists and the Murdoch media needs to be made very clear and very often.
Sources
- https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2023/oct/14/albanese-wanted-to-end-two-centuries-of-silence-but-we-said-no-and-failed-our-first-nations-people
- https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/the-3-big-lies-of-the-no-campaign
- https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/sep/21/the-astonishing-lies-of-the-no-campaign-burn-like-lurid-rockets-in-our-sky-we-must-not-go-saying-no
- https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2013/april/1365550307/robert-manne/abbott-steps-reconciliation
- https://theconversation.com/abbott-is-quietly-failing-on-his-pm-for-aboriginal-affairs-promise-26948
- https://blotreport.com/2023/09/17/the-voice-to-parliament/
- https://www.reconciliation.org.au/turning-promises-into-actions/
- https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-10-21/indigenous-leaders-week-silence-politics-reduced-voice-address/103003780
Them’s mighty fine words from Tones. A true statement from the heart (/s /i), if not the conscience of a reasonable man. This begs the question: who wrote them? Based on what we’ve seen of ‘political Abbott’ for years – and moreso since his humiliation, firstly at the hands of his Liberal mates and then later his electorate – it’s way out of character. Did George Pell tell him it was penance for his sins, or that it might help take some of the heat off the Catholic church as abuse accusations were slowly unfolding?
Perhaps Tone has different personas depending on his target audience? Peter “east coast elites” Dutton must have picked the habit up from somewhere close to home. Or perhaps the lovable ex-Warringah rep is just another radical, conservative “christian” hypocrite – like his Prosperity Pentecostalist mate Morrison – caught with his pants down so to speak?
There’s another couple of alternatives:
(1) Tone had a brain fade when he approved those stateman-like words in 2013.
(2) He’s simply changed his mind – by 180 degrees apparently.
The latter is quite simply so highly improbable that you’d have to believe if fairy tales (the irony) to swallow it. The former though is a common enough event with reactionary arch-conservatives so remains a distinct possibility. Who will ever forget Abbott’s exquisite impression of a stunned mullet during the “shit happens” interview (admittedly an appalling Ch7 beat-up): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wT9XS_TvzQ&ab_channel=sc0217 ? Or Jacinta’s Price’s outrageously ignorant claims about generational trauma at the Press Club, which could be summed up as “I’m indigenous and if it didn’t happen to me or me dad then it didn’t happen full stop”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRLu772IuY0&ab_channel=SBSNews ?
Jon,
Abbott himself admitted that he goes the way the wind blows (I think that was in reference to his backtracking on ‘climate change is crap’ speech). Like Morrison, Trump, Johnson and sundry other RWNJ conmen, they spout what they believe suits the moment. They rely on pet journalists, and the short attention span of the average punter, coupled with the latter’s fear of anyone unlike the person they see in the mirror every morning. They haven’t quite adapted to the world wide web yet, which never forgets anything. So, you can find whatever they said in the past and see how constant the lies are. It shows how they are completely without any principles. All they care about is money and power.
Abbott disgusts me. Some politicians become wiser, more decent, after their political careers end. Fraser, Hawke, Rudd, Turnbull are examples. Abbott has become even more stupid, and appalling. I would not have thought it possible.
Certainly the No campaign was not exactly a “truth telling” exercise and there have been numerous racist remarks since. The less said about Abbott the better. However, the referendum result was quite definitive and there is no escaping that. The Yes campaign was run very poorly with lack of detail and explanation as to how everything would work. It was assumed, because the Yes case was based on a good idea, that everyone would simply vote that way; however, whether we like it or not, you have to sell your story, particularly given the history of referendums in Australia.. The campaign reminded me of the abysmal Liberal Party effort at the SA state election in March last year. I am not a Liberal voter, but they actually had a reasonable story to tell, but you would not have known it from their pathetic campaign efforts. A similar remark applies to the Yes campaign.
Jim,
I think the main problem was not so much the tenor of the positive part of the Yes campaign, but the fact that they did not counter the lies told by the No campaign. The detail was everywhere to be found; all you needed to do was look, as I said in one of my earlier posts on the referendum. Everyone is wise after the event and I think the problem was that the Yes campaign did not go aggressively after the lies of the No mob. As Ray Martin said “‘If you don’t know, vote No’; what a f*****g stupid slogan is that.” That needed to be said more often along with other targeted ridicule.
Dear Admin,
There is nothing new about my comments; I made very similar remarks to an old school friend back in early August. If a goose like me could see what was happening, then it should have been clear to the Yes organisation a lot earlier. Coming back to the No campaign, it reminded me of the “Reds under the Beds” campaigns of the fifties and early sixties where if you were not a coalition supporter then you were a communist. It was stupid then, and stupid now, but unfortunately quite effective. Mind you the ALP at the time were having major internal problems.