By Peter Brown
The Right-Wing Outrage Over a Welcome to Country
On the first day of the new parliament, you might expect the national conversation to focus on issues that genuinely affect people’s lives: the cost-of-living crisis, a healthcare system under pressure, housing affordability, our climate future, or the economic fragility that continues to haunt regional Australia.
Instead, social media – and particularly the right-wing echo chambers – lit up over one thing: the Welcome to Country.
It’s a cultural gesture that has been part of Australian public life for decades now, an act of respect to the traditional owners of the land. But for a noisy segment of the population, it has become a recurring target of grievance. A symbol, they say, of division. A performance. A burden.
And so, the outrage machine roared to life. Commentators, culture warriors, and anonymous avatars took to their keyboards to denounce what they see as “wokeness” run amok. Sky News panellists lined up to call it divisive. Right-wing influencers ranted about “virtue signalling.” Social media trolls called for it to be scrapped altogether.
Meanwhile, in the real world…
• More than 26,000 Australians are experiencing homelessness on any given night.
• Nearly half of Australians are struggling to pay essential bills.
• Remote Indigenous communities still lack access to clean drinking water.
• A record number of Australians are skipping medical appointments because they can’t afford them.
• And we’re entering a new era of geopolitical instability, energy transition, and climate reckoning.
But sure. Let’s talk about the Welcome to Country.
This is the strategy: stoke division where there is none. Create outrage where there is tradition. Turn a moment of respect into a political wedge. It’s easier than talking about wage theft or the housing crisis. It’s safer than addressing structural inequality. And it’s far more profitable – especially for those whose business model depends on perpetual culture war.
There’s a kind of cowardice in this outrage. It avoids the real work of democracy: listening, reflecting, and finding solutions. Instead, it turns ceremony into spectacle and weaponises Indigenous identity to score political points.
What’s really being said when conservatives attack the Welcome to Country is this: “We don’t want to talk about justice, or history, or inclusion. We want you to be quiet.”
But Australia is not quiet. And our history will not be silenced.
If this is the biggest concern of the Australian right in the first week of Parliament, it says more about their priorities than it does about the ceremonial words that open a sitting day.
There’s work to be done – serious, urgent work. The kind that requires leadership, not tantrums. Substance, not sideshows.
Until then, we can only hope the next Welcome to Country also includes a line for the uninvited guests in the culture war – and a gentle reminder that being loud isn’t the same as being right.
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Basically unfit to be heard, that paddock of Murdoch, B Joyce, Hanson types, subbies, lowies, primitives, neanderthalic nongs, bowelbrains, knuckledragger drongo dregs, our NSDAP’s. So much to be done, so little time and talent…
The ceremony of the turning of the Backs as adopted by One Nation cultists is a cultural gesture as are the Welcome to Country and Smoking Ceremony only with One Nation it is practised by a lower order of homo semi-erectus and is normally accompanied by the donning of a red scarf to denote the red neckery of One Nation adherents.
As part of their cultist culture, One Nation adherents are also known to speak in tongues which together with their arrested intellectual development on the evolutionary pathway makes them unintelligible to normal homo-sapiens hence their policies are usually classified as gibberish.
It takes all sorts !
If sentimentalists in our Parliament prefer to cling to the rituals of opening prayers and affirmations to a King who resides elsewhere then there can be no objection to acknowledging the First Nations of Australia in our Parliament. To protest in this disrespectful manner is un-Australian and un-parliamentarian. After all, our elected representatives are under oath to represent and respect all Australians.
Meanwhile the NT govt has given up on providing safe drinking water for Aboriginal communities.
The Pauline Hanson gang, who were too radical for the likes of disturbed Mark Latham, hang onto their racism like a security blanket. they are the white-winged racist nutters of Australian politics.
Then even Labor censured one of their own in the Senate re. Palestine, but mute on One Nation Senators’ disrespectful behaviour?
Australians are very confused on moral & ethical compasses?
Meanwhile Albanese did much the same thing with Mehreen Faruqi and the Australian Greens at the very same time and place… I don’t see the difference! Well that is except one is a domestic and the other is foreign affairs, frankly both are wretched and the latter is particularly complicit and insulting given the present day gravity and outcome, not to mention an equally large population of Australians who are horrified on both.
While we may well and should focus on domestic matters such as cost of living, we should not be turning a blind eye to cost of lives, deliberate and targeted destruction of an entire population and pretend it has no validity or currency, continue with the status quo, words and impotent soft diplomacy –
MALA FIDES
One Nation insulted our Parliament, all Indigenous peoples of Australia and all Australians. One Nation should be sanctioned not Australian Greens Senator, Mehreen Faruqi for standing up to her duty on behalf of Australians on basic human rights and Israel’s genocide in Palestine, which Labor are notoriously, criminally soft on.
We have not sanctioned Israel, we continue to provide arms manufactured in Australia and maintain progressive trade relations with Israel. Words are not enough, sanctioning one or two Israeli politicians is not enough and I question the effectiveness and severity of those sanctions – If it is just disallowing entry to Australia, that’s totally ineffective… so bloody what!
Netanyahu and his cabinet are war criminals and there is an international warrant for his arrest which Australia must honour as full member and signatory of the UN, IJC and ICC. Our allegiance to the USA and Israel is now ipso facto redundant, void and obsolete.
Labor must stop this war on the Australian Greens who speak in good faith for the majority of fair minded, poorly represented Australians, Australia’s international and humanitarian obligations, and what is right.
SANCTION SANCTION SANCTION ISRAEL, DO IT ACROSS THE BOARD SEVERELY, DO IT NOW.
Don’t expect anything but sternly worded platitudes from Abalone…and the Pimp for the USA, Marles…or the Foreign Minister…all full. of. shit.
“Something is drastically wrong with the moral compass of a nation when it legislates to make bigotry a right.”
Be as humane as you possibly can.
nemo mus musculus,
the infamous Jacinta has long touted how grateful NT Aboriginal people are for the government providing them with a tap. What more do they want???