The Left’s Obsession with Posturing to Indigenous Activism

Shôn Ellerton, Nov 14, 2023
Addressing the unhealthy obsession by the Left with posturing to indigenous activism and closing the gap.

Back in January 26, 2008, when I first arrived to settle in Australia from a bleak winter’s day in England, I found myself walking over Pyrmont Bridge spanning the bustling Darling Harbour in Sydney. It happened to be Australia Day, a day, I was later to learn, celebrated the founding of Australia when the first fleets arrived in Port Jackson in 1788. It was a fine summer day with a deep blue sky. Lots of people with Australian flags draped over their shoulders. Plenty of joviality, silliness, and, of course, a bit of drunkenness as well. I was told there would be fireworks later as well. In all, it didn’t feel terribly different from the July 4^th celebrations I remember when I lived in the United States.

I’m Sorry

Overhead, there was an aeroplane doing a spot of skywriting. It spelled out, ‘SORRY’, in great big white letters. At that time, I had not the faintest idea what that was all about. It dawned upon me a couple of days later that it had something to do with Australia’s indigenous people after switching on the TV to watch the morning news. In essence, that simple word, ‘sorry’, spelled out in the sky was meant to convey the message that Australians should be made to feel sorry for all the wrongs and evils the colonialists inflicted on the indigenous people more than two hundred years ago. Well, I thought that was a bit of a ‘downer’ and a killjoy, thinking to myself, not knowing just how divisive the celebration of Australia Day has been over the ensuing years. Indeed, there were whole swathes of the population who believed we should not be enjoying a nice day out celebrating the day, but rather, to flagellate ourselves with self-contempt, white privilege, and racial bigotry. As for the aeroplane doing the skywriting, I began to wonder who authorised it. As with most major cities, one doesn’t simply fly a light aircraft over the city centre and start writing out political slogans without some sort of permission. But there was a recent change of government. Unfortunately, the last of the ‘sensible’ Australian leaders under the guise of John Howard made way for a new line of self-centred, virtue-signalling, and politically-correct, woke leaders starting with Kevin Rudd.

Invasion Day

From then on, every consecutive year leading up to Australia Day, there would be this all-out assault by mainly leftist media to either move Australia Day to another day more in tune with a date revered by the indigenous community, or remove it entirely. I was later to learn that some went so far as to call it Invasion Day. There would be, and will continue to be to this day, thousands and thousands of hours in mainstream media covering indigenous activists, who, I may point out, are mainly white and self-privileged white folk, who enjoy nothing more than showing just how wonderful they are by hounding the rest of society how awful we were to invade the once-peaceful native country. The reality, of course, is that Australia had more than five hundred different groups of indigenous peoples, and I am fairly certain, that they were not all peace-loving with each other. But that technicality is, of course, not part of the narrative. These same activists also keep going on how ‘white men’ led to such gross injustices like the whole Stolen Generation episode. How ‘white men’ came to plunder the land for their own means. How ‘white men’ became rich while the indigenous people became poorer. And so on, these wide-sweeping statements all eventually leading to that encompassing and vague notion that the so-called ‘gap’ between ‘white fellas’ and the indigenous peoples is yet to be closed. The gap, of course, will never be closed because once it is closed, there should be no further reason to continue demonising the ‘white fella’.

Yes. Asians are White People Too.

One may question why I am using the term ‘white fella’ or ‘white men’. With context to indigenous peoples, the Australian mainstream news, particularly by the government-backed ABC News, it is common to hear that phrase, ‘white fella’, as the oppressor, while the victim is simply known as First Nations People. I use the term indigenous peoples and First Nations people interchangeably. The reality, of course, is that the so-called ‘white fella’ includes anyone who is not a First Nations People. It’s actually quite a clever way of seeding the binary image of lots of over-privileged lily-white people rattling around in their four-bedroom houses while the oppressed Aboriginal lives in poverty and indigence. This completely ignores the fact that Australia has a great population of those who immigrated from other cultures, many of which, are most certainly not ‘white’. Moreover, some of these imported cultures do decidedly better than those derived from those of Anglo-Saxon origin. Many Asian communities have been performing remarkably well and have established themselves as very successful Australians and yet, they still retain their culture and history.

Going over the ‘big pond’ to California, as of last year, the Japanese have credited themselves as having the highest success rate in terms of GDP per capita. In today’s ultra-left progressive communities, most Asian nations, including India, are now considered the ‘white people’. And this is, simply, because they are working harder, better at teaching their kids, better at maintaining their traditional values, and, in general, far better at steering away from political correctness. Having worked within groups of mainly Asian people in my world of data engineering, I can assure you, that Asian people, in general, don’t take kindly to the bullshit artists out there promoting their woke and leftist ideologies.

The So-Called Gap

Back down under. During the last fifteen years since Rudd’s ascension to power, there has been an unrelenting scourge of self-promoting, indulgent, and condescending messaging by our left-wing mainstream media in the name of social justice and equity, a term not to be confused with equality, to constantly remind us that we need to ‘close the gap’ between First Nations people and, I suppose, what we can only define as non-First Nations people. If you’re a regular listener of parliamentary debate on the radio, as I am, no doubt you would have stumbled upon many discussions on closing the so-called gap. Yet, I bet you’d be hard pressed to know what that gap actually is and how to bridge it. The only two aspects of the gap which are time and time again raised are those relating to the fact that more Aboriginals are incarcerated than non-Aboriginals per capita and that Aboriginals have, in general, a shorter lifespan than non-Aboriginals.

Let’s look at these two facts in more detail.

High Incarceration and Charge Rates Per Capita

There is no doubt that Aboriginals have a relatively high rate of incarceration per capita. Having worked as a data analyst in the Australian judicial system, one of my tasks was to work out the percentage of those First Nations people who have been charged by the police. Although it is not entirely the same as finding out the incarceration rate, the charge rate is strongly correlated. From the perspective of the justice system, First Nations people comprise of those who identify as any combination of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. There are metrics put in place to prove if somebody meets the criteria of being a First Nations people, but in practice, the police seldom challenge those who merely identify as being a First Nations people. This is understandable given the inordinate amount of leftist media coverage hell-bent on conveying the narrative that they are racist, right-wing thugs. Police are, understandably, reluctant to use force, or even make themselves seen in those Aboriginal communities where crimes are being investigated into.

This is especially true after the incident leading to the death of Kumanjayi Walker back in 2019, when a constable by the name of Zachary Rolfe got stabbed by Walker with a pair of scissors while he was resisting arrest. Rolfe fired a shot killing Walker in an act of self-defence. His charge was, unbelievably, expedited by his superiors before a detailed investigation was commissioned into the incident. The mainstream press, of course, turned on the full woke factor leading to mass protests in the name of Walker’s unjust death. Rolfe was charged with murder and convicted in a show trial, much like George Floyd’s, but, thankfully, was acquitted later in 2022. It would be wrong to downplay Walker’s death, of course. It is a tragedy for any family to have to endure a loss of life, however, we must not forget the dramas that later ensued for Rolfe, his family, and, of course, the police in general who, in this particular case, failed to practice due process by attempting to protect the superiors and throwing the duty officer ‘under the bus’.

Returning on the task of coming up with the percentage of indigenous people charged in the system, I very quickly realised that this was not an obvious and straightforward thing to work out. I was given no methodology as to how to do so and I had no less than eight different sources of data to work with. All of them differed in many ways. For example, with the data coming from the police, it’s not uncommon for the same person to be charged on multiple times and claiming that he identifies as a Torres Strait Islander on one occasion and next time, he claims to be an Aboriginal. The police tend not to prod too deeply into questioning the validity of the claim on grounds that they are only allowed to ask the person being charged how he or she identifies as. Without any formal methodology, I assumed the worst case scenario. In other words, if the same person identifies as an Aboriginal and next time does not, I take the former case. The overall result was nearly fifty percent of those being charged either being Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islanders. I reported my findings to my internal clients who issued out the reports in the public domain. They asked if I could alter my methodology to make it so that the result comes up around the twenty-five percent mark. I assume they were being pressured by their own superiors not to rock the boat by spitting out very high percentage rates over what was determined the year before.

The upshot is this. Considering that I altered my methodology to simmer down the overall results, it is clear that indigenous people are charged by the police more per capita than non-indigenous. At least in South Australia and the Northern Territory.

Shorter Lifespans

The second fact, by means of which I make the statement that indigenous peoples tend to have a generally shorter lifespan, is not all too surprising. Poor diet, drugs and alcohol are significant physical factors in reducing the overall lifespan of a person. Then there are the mental factors which contribute to a reduced lifespan such as loneliness, depression, and abuse. Whilst working on the above project, I was reliably informed that many of the wandering Aboriginals in the city and suburbs are those that are either cast out of their own communities, heavily under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or severely mentally impaired. They are the ones camped out in the city’s central parks amongst scattered litter or screaming at the top of their voices down the high street as if in some state of delirium. And yet, there is this push to continually ‘narrow the gap’, and we, somehow can’t help these wandering souls. I don’t know if it’s because of a lack of care or just poor administration, but I can guarantee that if you advocate anything of the sort that the Aboriginal community has a problem with crime in their local communities, it will be you that will be accused of being a racist.

Shielding our Aboriginal Communities from Prying Eyes

Those supporting the so-called gap are also those who strongly promote the idea of preserving but not protecting the Aboriginal communities. Let me just point out, in general, what kind of people these are. They are mostly youngish, middle-class, white, college-educated, and affluent people, mainly women (for some strange reason), who live in Australia’s big Eastern cities. These are our indigenous activists. I daresay that most of these very people have never trekked into the rural pastoral land to visit an Aboriginal community let alone leave the comforts of everyday suburban life. Many of these people have been educated as children to cherish and admire the Aboriginal way of life. We do so by organising field trips to our abundant array of museums displaying our indigenous culture. We proudly show off our indigenous culture during live events and celebrations. Our schools and institutions continually acknowledge the indigenous peoples as the rightful landowners. And so on.

Looking through rose-tinted glasses on how the indigenous people live is a common affliction for those hermetically sealed in suburban comfort. The iconic image of the proud alpha male warrior replete with brightly coloured streaks of paint, native dress and a spear, hunting animals while the women and children are happily at home learning how to do things with the land is often immediately conjured in the mind of an urban indigenous activist. I might be exaggerating a little, but it is certainly not what the reality is. The somewhat, more realistic image, is quite different. I’ve been to a few indigenous communities in South Australia and the Northern Territories during my time as a mobile phone tower engineer. Many are completely off limits to non-indigenous people, not because of wanting to protect them, but to shield us from what happens within these communities. Some communities are better than others. For example, the little town of Narrung on the shores of Lake Alexandrina in South Australia is a reasonably tidy town which caters to some hundred or more indigenous peoples. However, some of the outlying towns in the more remote areas, for example, the APY lands in northwest South Australia, are riddled with crime, in a state of disrepair, and with poor community services. A 2016 poll of the Anangu suggested that many want more Anangu people to be trained as proper police, however, to this day, the APY lands are beset with high crime rates due to lack of proper policing. These are the towns which are, in general, off limits to those not living there. Not because we want to give them space from outsiders, but rather to prevent the curious to find out what the conditions are like. After all, such findings would make bad press.

On the subject of remote towns, even non-Indigenous towns like Andamooka along the desolate shores of Lake Torrens, an ephemeral lake usually dried up around the year, has its own special way of dispensing justice. On one of my mobile phone site visits, I had quite the scintillating conversation with the Mayor’s secretary who made interesting comments about what one might find at the bottom of some of the open opal pits scattered around the area. Indeed, when I commented that a proposed tower would need official planning permission from the government, the response by the mayor at the time was aloof and comical.

‘Don’t worry about all that. Ed won’t mind!’

Ed being the next door neighbour. Now imagine what form of justice is dispensed in some of these remote indigenous communities which are far more remote than Andamooka. Nowadays, Andamooka is more connected to society having new infrastructure set up to connect with its nearest town, Roxby Downs.

Jacinta Price, Warren Mundine, the Seething Left, and the Voice

Crime and sexual abuse are most certainly very problematic issues within remote Aboriginal communities. It has been a message conveyed many a time by Senator Jacinta Price and Warren Mundine, both of indigenous origin. They have been lambasted by the indigenous social activist warriors because they don’t follow the Left’s virtue-signalling binary and unworkable narratives. The Aboriginal Elders hate them because they proposed a campaign to audit funding given to the Aboriginal community. Such an audit will, of course, might trace misappropriation of funds leading to the pockets of the Elders rather than properly funding the community. They have especially been hated by the seething lefties during the mad path of attempting to enshrine The Voice in the Constitution by Anthony Albanese, the Prime Minister, which failed after nearly half a billion dollars of public money was spent on it.

Price and Mundine were extremely active in dissuading the public that The Voice will achieve any constructive outcome. They pointed out that The Voice would only create a division between two sets of people. The indigenous and the non-indigenous. During the lead-up to the referendum vote for the Voice, which was polling strongly in the ‘NO’ direction, the media, which is decidedly left-wing in general, was making its last ditch efforts to bring the people to the ‘YES’ side. They had happy smiling people playing music with ‘YES’ shirts on them. They sport little children with a sad look on their faces holding up ‘YES’ signs. They tried, to the best of their abilities, to keep the coverage of Price and Mundine to a minimum. They even syndicated their coverage to the international press with a strong emphasis on how voting ‘YES’ will make Australia a better place. They were so successful, that even The Daily Telegraph, a conservative British newspaper, denounced the ‘NO’ result as a failure of Australian politics.

But thankfully and logically, the people voted ‘NO’, and the ‘YES’ crowd sulked for the next week and everything went quiet being replaced by news of the atrocious terrorist attack on October 7^th in Israel by Hamas.

I would like to point out that the sensible proposals set out by Price and Mundine to launch a probe into crime and also to conduct a spending audit within the Aboriginal communities were disappointingly rejected by Albanese’s government.

Crime and the Travelling Courts

Anyone following the court cases within South Australia may learn that most, if not all, of Aboriginal court cases within the remote regions are suppressed. In other words, the public are denied access to them. Think about this for a moment. In Australia, the public have the right to enter a court room to listen to a criminal case trial being held, although, there are some cases involving minors, for example, which are suppressed to the public. However, it is common practice to suppress almost all cases involving those in these remote indigenous communities. There are travelling courts, or circuit judges, which go from remote town to remote town. Having worked side by side with some of those in the Courts, some of those who were involved with the circuit judges have recounted, without giving away any specific details of names of course, what it was like in these communities. Many of these problems, as mentioned earlier, were trying to be addressed by honourable characters like Price and Mundine.

Activists want our Indigenous People to be Museum Pieces

The leftie social indigenous activist wants nothing better than the indigenous community to be kept as literal museum pieces. They don’t want the indigenous people to thrive and integrate with the rest of us. That is absolutely the last thing they want. This reminds me of the Indian reservation in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, in which an Indian community near Taos, New Mexico had been set up as a walled community where the ‘savages’ where kept for the curio of the modern people who created their own dystopian and clinical neo-caste system comprising of alphas, betas, gammas, deltas and epsilons with alphas at the top of the order. If you share the sentiment that Aboriginals should integrate with the rest of Australian society, the lunatic left will bombard you with accusations that you are being a white colonial oppressor that wants nothing more than to destroy native culture. They consider this act of assimilation nothing more than trying to re-enact the Stolen Generation. Reference to the Stolen Generation is often the go-to clause when the leftie wants to cite so-called white injustice. It doesn’t matter if being assimilated means taking part in a more successful and affluent life. The activist wants their affluent life but feeling smug by pretending to feel guilty by being ‘privileged’ and telling other people that they should be feeling ‘privileged’. They couldn’t give a damn about the welfare of the indigenous peoples. They just want them to keep them in living museums for the curious, just like in Aldous Huxley’s book.

Assimilation is a Bad Word

This brings me on the topic of assimilation, and it is one which I find quite astonishing in terms of flagrant uncaringness. As mentioned above, the social indigenous activist does not want the Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders to be fully integrated into society. Take for example, the question of child adoption. Did you know that you simply can’t adopt an Aboriginal child without satisfying a set of criteria? The crazy and absurd Aboriginal Child Placement Principle prefers people who have an appropriate cultural relationship with the child. This is utterly mad and absurd. Giving a desperate child a loving home comes second place to those lunatics who make these preposterous decisions as to who is worthy of being a parent and who is not based on cultural background.

Many societies have learned how to assimilate with each other from varying cultures and backgrounds. Why can we not do the same with our indigenous communities? No doubt, indigenous peoples want to enjoy the comforts of modern life like the rest of us. They want good careers. Good education. Good health service. And so on. For many living in those isolated indigenous communities where access is restricted to the public, it is not terribly easy to engage with the outside world. What happens within these communities is often strictly kept within these communities. They often have their own law and order, some of which may not align with our own. It is certainly difficult to enforce law and order in these communities due to their remoteness and restrictive access requirements.

Imagine being raised in such a community. A community ruled by the Elders where their law is the set of rules you are bound to. A community so cut off from the outside world that visiting a city could be a confusing and frightening experience. There’s no wall or fence stopping someone from the community to seek ‘civilisation’, but there is a mental one. If one is raised from a young age in such a community, leaving it may be difficult on two accounts. First, the fear of the unknown and being unprepared. And second, the stigma placed upon that person on abandoning the community for a better life. If you are raised as a child and told over and over that you should stay in the community, it may not be as easy as just sticking your thumb out to hitchhike to the city.

Closing the Gap through Miscegenation

Another topic which the social indigenous activists absolutely hate is miscegenation, which is the act of mixed-race marriage. In their binary world of indigenous and non-indigenous, the continual dilution of indigenous blood from generation to successive generation means that, ultimately and theoretically, there will be no difference between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. This, of course, has already happened within many European countries where mixed-race marriages have gone on for hundreds of years. Take an example in the country of Wales. There are no distinctive indigenous rights for those of Celtic origin once under the realm of 15^th century king, Owain Glyndwr, from those who are not. Many view them as being the original indigenous peoples of Wales. The English and Welsh, despite their sporting rivalry which still persists today, have mixed sufficiently enough to render the posturing of indigenous rights ineffective. However, there is fierce pride to this day by the Welsh on their native history. Much like Aboriginal history, it is revered, the difference being is that there are no living Welsh indigenous natives residing on reserved plots of land and communities cut off from the non-indigenous folk. No doubt there are some unhinged left-wing activists in Wales who would love to bring back separate communities to those who were once indigenous hundreds of years ago.

Want to close the gap? Let Nature take its course through successive generations of miscegenation. This can only be achieved by removing the divide so vehemently defended by the Left between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples. Once that is achieved, there will be no issue of closing the gap, because everyone will be so heavily mixed in the melting pot that there can be no distinction who is indigenous and who is not. The Left, of course, reject the idea of assimilation and maintain that the indigenous peoples be kept in an eternal living museum.

Acknowledge the Land but Keep Ownership of it

We must make our way to this absurd practice of ‘acknowledging the land’. It is nigh too often to hear this cringeworthy statement prior to a public speech or even before a presentation in a private company. Such companies wish to join in the virtue-signalling crowd to obtain social brownie points. An acknowledgment speech might go something on the lines of ‘We acknowledge that we are on the land of the Kauna people who have been its custodians for thousands of years’ or some such similar statement. OK. If so, go give your title deed back to the indigenous peoples. As that never happens, this damned posturing and overly smug arrogance should stop right now.

I’ve heard board members of companies preaching this acknowledgment through national online Teams or Zoom meetings. On which land are you acknowledging and why are you assuming that we, those listening in on the call, all wish to acknowledge it? Keep your political leanings to yourself without posturing to others how they should think. One doesn’t have to read an article such as this one, however, to force others to listen to forced political dogma prior to a meeting that one needs to attend is not acceptable.

These land acknowledgments are seldom heard by the indigenous peoples themselves, most of which, couldn’t care less about them because they don’t mean anything. I guarantee you that any indigenous person who trespasses on government land after such a speech took place on it claiming that we acknowledge the rightful ownership of the land to the indigenous people, will be taken away and charged under the law. This acknowledgment posturing must be incredibly insulting to the indigenous peoples.

Conclusion

Year after year, there’s this dead-set determination by radical lefties to keep the so-called gap open because without it, there’d be nothing to complain about. Well, at least until they find something else instead. In a nutshell, the whole indigenous debate has been promulgated and pushed along by greedy left-wing politicians eager to expand the number of committees, each requiring more public money to fund. The activists are there to be their armies, most comprising of eagerly excitable and malleable individuals without any capacity to think for themselves. Personally, I loathe activists of all ilk as they have nothing better to do than to cause disruption and mayhem.

The recent protests by the ‘YES’ supporters of the Voice were, by far, more vicious and provocative than those of the ‘NO’ campaign. The ‘YES’ activists were caught many time on video spitting on faces of those in the ‘NO’ campaign and hurling verbal abuse and yet, those in the ‘NO’ campaign held their ground strongly without resorting to physical and verbal violence. Even the Prime Minister had to retract various divisive statements towards those who rejected The Voice campaign. Throughout history, any protest by the Left has been more violent and disruptive than by those by the Right. Some may disagree on this principle by reflecting on Nazism during WWII, however, it must be said that Nazism is, in fact, a form of far leftism.

So, to conclude. If we want to have a better integrated society with all Australian people as one, we will need to tear down these barriers which are constantly being put up by the leftist brigade who want nothing more than to perpetuate the ‘struggle of the indigenous people’, to parody a phrase from Karl Marx. We need to learn how to accept people from all cultures without being forced to be made aware of them. We need to adopt the principle of one law for one people rather than sneaking in additional clauses to our legislation to cater for those of a different race. We need to eradicate the restrictions which prevent those from adopting children of indigenous origin needing a good home and loving parents. And finally, we need to stop making distinctions of those who come from different races, cultures, or backgrounds.