Monthly Archives: November 2016

The problem with White Ribbon Day: Everything

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White Ribbon Day causes harm to women who have survived men’s violence.

Seeing a man like Mike Baird wearing a white ribbon, a man who ripped apart women-run services, re-traumatises women who have survived domestic violence. This is a man who, with great fanfare, announced the appointment of a Minister for the Prevention of Violence Against Women, while homicides by men against their intimate partners – that is, women who they lived with or who were trying to leave – increased by 40 per cent.

So the Baird strategy is an abject failure, with which women have paid with their lives.

Baird treats our safety from men who bash and kill women as an asset-stripping exercise. Baird and Abbott and Turnbull take women’s services, strip us of everything that has been built up over 40 years, and defund us on hyper-ideological pretences.

As a religious man, Baird then hands what is left – the social services equivalent of a shell company – to client donors, to organised religion, to Mission Australia and the Salvation Army and St Vincent de Paul aka the Catholic Church.

These are organisations which, on the evidence, should never be given responsibility over the lives of women and children. These organisations take children from mothers who have been traumatised by men; these organisations have, for centuries, been staffed by men who rape and otherwise mistreat children. And women.

In my household, where I alone have been responsible for feeding and clothing and educating and keeping safe three children, White Ribbon Day is a day to take a deep breath and remember that my society, and my government, sees us as an opportunity for a fancy breakfast and a lapel pin.

I remember back then, fourteen years ago now, wondering what it would be like to get through an entire day without thinking about safety first, without obsessing over where we had been, about what we had escaped. I remember wondering if I would ever live a day without the flashbacks every hour, the horrors every night.

But time really does heal all wounds. Through soccer seasons and camping trips and social media connections and being our fabulous selves, we have become people who are not defined by a man’s violence. Time and love and family and friends and music and having a job and education and sport and safety – all of these together healed the wounds.

Above all, safety.

Every time I unlock the front screen door, fourteen years later, there is still that tiny moment. I take a breath, and remember past fears, and give thanks for being able to walk into my front yard without checking for potential danger. It is a muscle memory thing, a bodily reminder. Moving into a house with a lockable screen door and a gate was a revelation. A gate! I could not believe how safe I felt. I had never felt so safe.

We are still safe. Due to eternal vigilance. Due to my strength and resilience, and that of my children, and to family and friends who supported us through hell and high water – where hell and high water is a euphemism for the violence and the threat of violence perpetrated by an adult man who said he “loves” us.

In those years, I completed a law degree. I enrolled in post-graduate study. I had the benefit of a comprehensive social safety net that allowed me to parent and to work. I bought the house with the gate. I have seen one child into the adult world, with two more on their way. I do this with enormous privilege, with tertiary-educated whiteness, with family support, with friends who praise and do not judge, with the universal education and universal healthcare – and income support when needed – that are the cornerstones OR SHOULD BE THE CORNERSTONES of our society.

And every year, I shed furious tears and shake with anger and pain when White Ribbon Day comes around. At this organisation made up of members who know nothing, absolutely nothing, about men’s violence against women and children. This organisation which causes trauma, by minimising and trivialising the cause, the source, the problem. This organisation which paralyses my otherwise normalised existence, which reminds me again, as though I needed reminding, how little our society cares about people like us.

White Ribbon compels women to mobilise, to donate free research, to volunteer valuable time, to combat the myths and victim-blaming which it unreflectively reproduces. White Ribbon is white patriarchy, it is men dominating the message, it is damaging and harmful to women and children. Like the organisations to which women’s services have been handed, the corporate interests and organised religion (same thing), White Ribbon does enormous harm and precious little good.

Dear White Ribbon. Please get out of the public sphere. Shut yourself down. Forever.

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The gold plated ABCC bill, or who is counting the damn cost?

Everlasting awfulness, Logic law and politics

As duly noted by headline after headline, interpersonal relationships in the Pauline Hanson One Nation (PHON) party are dysfunctional.

Yeah, we know.

If the focus must be on internal party dysfunction, maybe take a look at the governing Coalition: conservative homophobes Cory Bernardi and George Christensen; dangerous and confused racist Peter Dutton and opportunistic wingman Michael Sukkar; sadistic prosperity theology adherent Scott Morrison, who shouts from both sides of his mouth.

It is dissonant (at best) to ignore ongoing internal government strife while simultaneously and enthusiastically projecting Turnbull as an innocent yet besieged ‘moderate’.

Take a look at the National Party backbenchers who voted against their senior Coalition partners this week. Or the Nat ministers who exited the chamber rather than be seen to abstain. Looks like a governing Coalition in strife, no?

No, because we take what the governing leaders say at face value. Floor-crossing is all good, Nationals leader Barnaby Joyce assured airily, gurgling about individual rights. No problem. No, he will not say whether he supports the position of the no-shows, although he is completely free to, should he choose to be accountable to the electorate.

What’s that Skip? Accountability? Westminster principles, you say?

Nothing to see here, confirmed the boss. Turnbull was supposed to be speaking, statesmanlike, on free trade discussions at the Peru APEC meeting. But instead, he was side-lined from his own agenda by the racist rabble in his own ranks. As usual.

By a stroke of luck, the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection had once again cleared the air for Turnbull to wax lyrical on our successful multicultural nation while carefully conflating migration with a non-material terror threat.

Just kidding. This is what passes for strategy in the Liberal Party ideas room these days.

Dutton did the usual thing, went on Sky News, made nasty racist remarks about refugees. He defamed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese Australians, presumably including much loved parents and grandparents who have passed away. He did this by implying that Lebanese Australians who arrived here in the 1970s are responsible for 21st century terrorism in Australia, which has not in fact occurred. Dutton referred to charges, not convictions: like the plod he is, our man remains wilfully ignorant of basic principle such as innocent until proven guilty and all equal before the law.

Dutton’s implied premise is that ethnicity is a determinant of criminality. This is the worst kind of social Darwinism, and does not stand up to basic scrutiny; although it does remind us that science can be, and has been, racist. Dutton defamed a dead liberal Prime Minister in the same breath, but whatever. Turnbull was probably not a Liberal during the Fraser years anyway.

A nasty and harmful routine

This bad cop-worse cop show that Dutton and Turnbull routinely perform is getting old. It goes like this. Dutton says something grossly racist. Turnbull is asked to repudiate it. Acres of column inches, volumes of airspace, open up for Turnbull to play his besieged moderate character.

Our diversity is our strength … we must guard against extremism, Turnbull lectures paternalistically, for the purpose of appearing pro-multiculturalism while conflating migrants with terror threats.

Malcolm loves this stuff. He must. Why else would Dutton be sent out to perform the opening scenes of the act every other week?

Hard to say.

The smart money is on another atrocious MYEFO. Such cynics. Causing actual harm to actual Australians is obviously better governance than addressing yet another looming MYEFO mess. Has this Coalition government passed a budget since regaining power in September 2013? Three years and two months ago? Why do you ask?

Everything old is news again

Speaking of racists, the story of embattled Senator Rodney Culleton looms large for all the wrong reasons. What does it matter that he and his leader are not talking to each other? Surely this is a last order issue. Perhaps the fourth estate is holding to account those federally funded extremists who deny climate change and peddle race hate on our coin?

Nope. The Culleton case does matter, but not because of internal PHON disunity. Along with bankrupt builder and former Senator Bob Day, Culleton matters because his status as a Senator is potentially unconstitutional.

This is costing us an enormous amount of money.

The cost has blown out as a direct result of the government seeking to secure the Culleton vote for its double dissolution (DD) bills despite what they did or did not know about the validity of his election. The bills had to be voted down earlier this year, to give the PM his bold, Turnbullesque double dissolution announcement. Nine months later, the bills can not be allowed to be voted down, because that would deprive Malcolm of oh who knows. Some triumphalist nonsense.

It is all about Malcolm. And it is costing a small fortune (or what is a very large fortune to most of us).

The phony grounds for the DD election are at stake, the election in which the government lost 14 seats and still claims to have a mandate. Naturally, no amount of taxpayer funds is too great, no plotting or dealing too dodgy, up to and including accepting the vote of potentially ineligible Senators. The alternative would be…well. The alternative would be more egg on the face of Malcolm, to which he is presumably becoming accustomed.

But men like Malcolm do not think like that.

Recall that in the tedious, dying days of that 8-week campaign, the Treasurer started shouting false and nasty claims about welfare recipients. Again. This is par for the course. Identify any group in society already oppressed, violated, impoverished and disempowered by the state – as well as by the dominant social classes which benefit from state oppression of others – and the Liberal Party will hitch its wagon to further crushing their life circumstances.

This is a government that demonises children who care for sick parents. Why?

I mention this because internal Coalition campaign polling would have shown One Nation gaining momentum. It is axiomatic that the Liberals tell lies to woo (back) One Nation voters. It was the Liberal Party that first pre-selected Hanson. The Liberal party created her name recognition. They gave her a platform. John Howard accommodated her racism for base political gain, no matter the cost. Turnbull, Morrison, and Dutton are doing so too.

But there is trouble in dystopia.

Hanson’s brand of sexist racism and xenophobia has always attracted nasty opportunistic men. We have been here before. Hangers-on like David Oldfield and John Pasquarelli rode her coattails to government salaries, before crashing and burning in a blaze of incompetence. Hanson and a new loopy-bloke coterie rise phoenix-like from the ashes.

A few sums

And all the while we fork over millions to fund this vicious brand. We pay these people to hate on welfare recipients, to tell lies about Aboriginal people, to whip up anti-Islam sentiment.  From 11 Queensland parliamentary salaries in the 1990s, to four Australian Senate salaries now, One Nation does not come cheap.

Queensland MPs are paid $166,621 base salary. Those 11 Queensland MPs would have cost $5.5 million in today’s dollars. Think what that funding could do for Queenslanders escaping domestic violence. These are people who claim that governments pay ‘more’ to Aboriginal welfare recipients on the basis of their Aboriginality, a blatant lie. Yet all this cash was for nothing – except it created a latent platform for One Nation to return.

Today, on top of Australian Electoral Commission per vote funding ($1.6 million in 2016), the cost of PHON senators begins with base salaries of $190,550 (three years for three of them, six for Hanson). That amounts to $2.85 million, to which we can add at least another $1.5 million for entitlements and other costs (at $100K per senator per year). Add in time spent spreading hate and climate change denial on our national broadcaster.

And tell us again about welfare recipients, Scott.

Imagine if Aboriginal women who have a clear vision for treaties, land management, the arts, migration, social justice, health (to name a few), were speaking instead of Hanson and Roberts sitting on high-platform panels. This barely happens. While across Australia, Aboriginal people are doing this work: Aboriginal rangers, caring for country; Aboriginal lawyers working for justice; Aboriginal doctors, artists, academics, journalists.

And what we get in the public domain is One Nation. Backing an inquiry into racial discrimination law, pushing onto an NBN committee. The NBN. Hanson. Appointed with Turnbull’s blessing.

These people add nothing to the social good. They cost us tens of millions of dollars. In return, we get further damage to what social cohesion Australia can claim. It is because of this massive cost and damage, rather than any mealy-mouthed accommodation and normalisation, some cup of tea, that One Nation has to be taken seriously.

The cost, the damn cost, and the legal dimension

Culleton is now before the High Court, which is far from cost-neutral. This follows a murky trail, the seeking or circumventing of legal advice on the eligibility of Culleton or was it Bob Day, by Attorney General George Brandis. Former Solicitor-General Justin Gleeson reportedly sought further QC advice on the matter – which again, is not cheap (my post on the AG abomination re the SG here).

All this came under scrutiny in the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee, which – did I mention? – is not cost neutral. Senate Committees cost thousands of dollars, in transcribing and livestreaming and approvals, in the time of highly qualified and highly remunerated individuals. As though SG Gleeson or chair Louise Pratt could not be doing something more useful than mopping up the mess made by the Commonwealth Attorney General’s misleading claims? (Full findings on Brandis misleading parliament: here).

Whether Culleton was legally elected under s.44 of the Australian Constitution is yet to be determined. Only the High Court has jurisdiction to decide this, irrespective of Culleton blustering, embarrassingly, about recognising it. This is no more Culleton’s decision to make than it is for the Solicitor General to determine – rather than advise the government on – the legality of Culleton’s election to the Senate.

The transcript of Culleton addressing Chief Justice French is not just excruciating but enraging. Hearing the Chief Justice schooling a racist oaf like Culleton contradicts every basic principle I teach to future lawyers.

Where I come from, first year tutorials are run by income-insecure post-grad students in overcrowded classrooms; and incur HECS debts which burden many students, particularly women, into middle age. Yet this blustering fool, who we pay $200K pa to air his rough-n-ready racist views on the national stage, a man riding the coattails of the most outspoken hater in Australian politics, refuses to reach into his pocket for a lawyer. He gets a one-on-one tute from the Chief Justice while handing us the bill, while hating on the poor.

Disgusting.

Who knew what, about the potentially unconstitutional election of Culleton, is yet to be fully exposed. What we do know is that Turnbull and Brandis will disregard cost and throw any amount of other people’s money at dubious political strategy for dubious political gain.

And it may yet all amount to nought. To money down the drain. Wasted, by a profligate government which touts itself as superior economic managers to their predecessors. Their predecessors who, by the way, recession-proofed Australia from the GFC.

Post-truth indeed.

Despite Culleton and the shadowy role of the Attorney General, chewing up resources across the most expensive political and legal processes in the country, despite the cost, the damn cost, who is counting the cost? If Culleton is ousted, by law or by volition, we may never know.

The disappearance of Senator Bob Day

Many would say Who cares? And fair enough too. Day is gone. By all accounts, Day is a charlatan and a spiv, a man who rips off home builders and leaves tradesmen unpaid, while seeking high office, while indulging in dodgy deals, quite possibly in breach of s 44(v) of the Australian Constitution.

But Day does matter, because he is a type, he is a pattern; and those who unashamedly courted his vote are still running the country.

Like Pauline Hanson, Day is a former Liberal party candidate. Having failed there, Day was elected as a Family First candidate. He failed there too – as mentioned, he is now gone from the Senate. He is also a bankrupt building company founder – on any measure, a failure. So a man whose public profile alone amounts three ignominious failures. Yet the government tapped Day to herd up cross-bench votes to get its bills through the Senate.

Talk about reward for merit in a liberal democracy.

And here is a government which actively wooed this bankrupt building boss to shepherd in the Senate vote for the Australian Building and Construction Commission Bill 2014 which massively empowers building bosses to disempower workers. The law will result in on-site, legally sanctioned, government-endorsed deaths of construction workers, most likely the youngest workers with the fewest employment options.

Yes, it will. Tell us again about youth unemployment, Scott.

As has been analysed at length on this site and by independent media, the government productivity claims for the ABCC are not merely erroneous but disproven. Academic and bureaucrat economists have demonstrated that the false claims arise from errors in an Econtech (now part of KPMG) report (Allan, Dungan and Peetz, 2010).

Yet still Turnbull wrote to His Excellency:

‘The government regards this bill as of great importance for promoting jobs and growth, improving productivity, and also promoting workplace safety through taking measures to deal with widespread and systemic criminality in the building and construction industry.’

What Turnbull says to Cosgrove, along with 13 pages of legal advice (from George Brandis!), does not change the findings that the claims are wrong.

Nevertheless, the Prime Minister made the claims, in writing, to the Governor General; who duly repeated the falsehoods when he recalled the parliament, presumably misleading it.

Which brings us to where we are today

Turnbull is now negotiating and compromising on a bill that he refused to negotiate without a double dissolution election which delivered Culleton to the Senate, potentially unconstitutionally; an 8-week campaign, most of it paid for by the public; and a loss of 14 seats, which he calls a mandate.

As I write, news came in that a government bill failed in the Senate because Hanson and PHON colleague Brian Burston, on whom the government was relying to get the legislation through, failed to show up to vote. Presumably these two people were sorting out their internal party problems. This presumption is based on audio: the Hanson and Burston audio grabs on Culleton. He had some personal issues. He needs to better communicate.

Oh never mind, said the government. The bill will be presented again in the morning. Like running the Senate is a game. Or cost neutral. Which – did I mention? – it is not.

How many services could have been provided for the cost that One Nation meetings just cost the Australian people in wasted Senate time? And will again tomorrow? How many life-saving dialysis sessions, how many life-changing literacy classes, how many places to escape from violent men?

Of course the racism, the hating on welfare recipients and women escaping domestic violence, the abuse of process, the piteous nodding from the national broadcaster – all these things are top-order issues; and these are real costs.

At the same time, the hypocrisy, and the lies, and the harms – these are not unrelated to the financial cost, the eye-watering financial cost. The money. The dollars. Just quietly, I want what I pay in tax to go on universal healthcare and education. Carers. The unemployed. Women and their children escaping violence. Not Senate games. Not schooling idiots in the High Court. But maybe that’s just me.

Who is counting the costs?

First principles of property law: the right to exclude

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If you have not seen the footage of Murandoo Yanner banishing Pauline Hanson from the Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair, it is well worth the 26 seconds.

The weekend this clip was posted, I was preparing my first ever property law seminar, Basic Concepts in Property Law. Serendipitously, the High Court case of Yanner v Eaton [1999] HCA 53 was on the reading list.

Yanner is a winner

Mr Murandoo Yanner, a Gunnamulla man ‘of the Gangalidda tribe’, appealed against a fine issued by Mr Eaton of the Queensland Police Force. He won in the Magistrates Court,, however Eaton won an appeal to the Queensland Supreme Court. Yanner then appealed to the High Court. Mr Eaton was joined by four Attorneys-General. The appeal was allowed, which is the mild-mannered way the High Court has of saying that Yanner won his case.

The decision amounted to recognition by the common law of Yanner’s rights under the Native Title Act 1993 (Cth). There was also a message for those four Attorneys General:

  1. Order that each of the Attorney-General of the Commonwealth, the Attorney-General of the State of Western Australia, the Attorney-General of the State of South Australia and the Attorney-General of the Northern Territory pay to the appellant the additional costs incurred by him by reason of the intervention of that Attorney-General, such additional costs to be taxed.

This is one of those slap-downs that nobody ever says is a punishment because the law gets to define things. Costs orders send a strong message to the parties, and costs orders against four Attorneys General are as strong a message as any from the High Court. But we are not allowed to say the order is a punishment or remedy, because punishments and remedies (fines, jail terms, damages awards, injunctions) are issued under a different curial function to costs orders. This itself is determined by the High Court, by which all other courts are bound.

In lay terms, four wrists were slapped. A fifth wrist was too, when the entire seven-judge High Court bench doubled down and ordered Eaton to pay Yanner’s costs in the Queensland Supreme Court too.

The message from Mr Yanner, in exercising the right to exclude Pauline Hanson from the Cairns Indigenous Arts Fair on moral grounds, was as unambiguous as those costs orders.

The recording cuts in as Yanner is saying ‘Aboriginal people’ and he continues ‘and now you’re kicking the Muslims around. Go, go’ he says, waving Hanson and her entourage away. ‘You’re just a racist,’ Yanner tells her. ‘Disgraceful. You are a woman lacking moral fibre. You are intellectually dishonest, and you’re not welcome here.’

Hanson turns around and leaves. As she does, cheers and applause can be heard from people off-camera.

The direction to leave the premises, the reasons given, and the cheers and applause, all contain important lessons in basic concepts of property law. Especially when the clip stars the man whose spectacular 1999 High Court  win is also prescribed reading. And especially when there are considerable numbers of young Muslim Australians enrolled at my university.

But would it be proper to show in week one? I messaged a mate doing his PhD at Melbourne Uni, a Ngunawal man whose judgement I trust absolutely, and who has also taught undergraduate law classes. Should I show the Yanner clip? I asked. What will it add to the lesson? he replied. Right to exclude, moral grounds for exercising right to exclude, community consent and consensus, I said. Go for it!! was his wise reply.

And yes, it was Ahmed who came up after class, grinning broadly, and asked is that the Yanner from the case the High Court case? Is that the same man??? It felt so good to smile back and say yep, that’s him. He’s a strong Aboriginal man and stands up for Muslims too.

Contrast the current political leadership and its shadow partner Pauline Hanson with the characters in this story:

  • An strong message from our highest court to four Attorneys General and a police officer (in the form of a costs order);
  • Unambiguous grounds for exercising the right to exclude a person from a specific place (you are intellectually dishonest and you’re not welcome here);
  • Collegiate support from a First Nations man to gather the courage and show a radical clip to 160 property law students in week one (What does it add?.. Go for it!!);
  • A young Muslim man empowered by a First Nations man (is it that Yanner? The same man? Yes!)

The Dunlop analysis

The dominant political news this week is yet another ugly announcement on asylum seekers. Its point would be lost without what Tim Dunlop refers to here as Turnbull being aided and abetted by the political media.

It is worth quoting Dunlop’s bullseye prediction at length. On Hanson, to whom Turnbull should, but like his predecessor Howard will not, say ‘you are intellectually dishonest and you’re not welcome here’, Dunlop notes:

“Pauline Hanson’s One Nation can no longer in any way be considered maverick, independent, anti-establishment, anti-elitist, or in any other way marginal to the political process and the political class. They are now well and truly an establishment party, legitimised by the Turnbull Government. This will be part of Turnbull PM’s lasting legacy. The resentment and anger that has always driven Hanson’s politics is now being assuaged by this courtship and legitimisation. She has got what she has always wanted: a seat at the table, an invitation to all the best parties, and the ability to entrench her own exceptionalism.”

This prescient observation is preceded by Dunlop’s equally accurate assessment of how the Turnbull capitulation will be packaged for the punters:

“This calming of the waters will be aided and abetted by the political media who long for a new “settlement” and the triumph of what they still insist on calling centrism. Or sensible centrism. Turnbull’s capitulation to the right and abandonment of everything he once allegedly held dear will be reinterpreted as pragmatism, sold as success, and be offered as evidence of his rising stocks. The “sensible centre” will be, as is nearly always the case, rightwing.”

Now picture any news coverage from the past two days. Any broadcast, any social media news feed, any bulletin, any hourly update, the latest headlines, any online news site, or op-ed, or analysis, or print edition. Has there been unambiguous condemnation of the racist hate and petty wedge politics gurgling from our political leadership?

Another Coalition regime, another week, another race-hate bait day

The story is that the Prime Minister and his Minister for Immigration and Border Protection are going to table a bill which, if passed, will outlaw people who have sought asylum in Australia from ever entering the country, based on one mode of transport – boat. This is the mode of transport by which Turnbull and presumably Dutton’s forebears, as well as every single person prior to the commercial aircraft industry, reached what is the largest island in the biggest ocean on earth.

Until around 60 years ago, for around 60,000 years of human occupation of this giant archipelago, there was no other way to get here.  The boat obsession (as I have written before), is unreal. It is obscene. It is the right to exclude on racist steroids.

Yet Malcolm Turnbull and Peter Dutton, like Tony Abbot and Scott Morrison before them, are choosing, for reasons of their own aggrandizement and absolutely no other cause, to disseminate yet more racist hate across the country.

Naturally, given the message makes for such compatible bedfellows, Pauline Hanson took credit for the government decision. Like Abbott and Morrison and Turnbull and Dutton, bigotry and hate-mongering are her favourite pastimes. Oh that we could turn the tables on all of them like Murandoo Yanner did, and say ‘you’re just a racist. Now you are kicking the Muslims around. Go, go… you’re not welcome here’.

The right to exclude a person from a territory

You come on my land, I sue you in trespass. Of course, there is no action in trespass if I invite you on to my land (the police are particularly sleazy and tricksy with this one. Be warned). Similarly, the law on country requires asking permission. The right to exclude is rarely needed when people have respect, and abide by the rule of asking permission.

Legal systems regulate human behaviour across a society. All cultures have rules about leaving our own place and entering neighbouring land. The English law, which is based on the English value of land as a source of wealth, emphasises the right to use and enjoyment, the right to exclude others, and the right to alienate – to transfer your interest in land to another (such as by sale or succession).

Obviously no-one would ever accuse the English of being internally consistent – they trampled across the world with their guns and bibles, breaching their own rules with vicious abandon. This differential application of their own principles is both a source and a product of deeply racist imperial violence.

But on this continent and her islands, for 60,000 years and counting, the central value is that the land is the source of the law (Black 2011). To harm or do wrong by the land is to harm or do wrong by the society. Before crossing a border, a person with authority to speak for country must give permission. The visitors are then welcomed to country. As in many cultures, this is a public ritual which endorses or verifies individuals’ actions.

This is not a complex proposition. In white law, depending on the type of land (public, private, rented etc) permission to enter is required, whether from the owner, tenant, caretaker, ranger, or other official. We might enter a park without authorisation and be issued with a notice or a fine. We might ring a doorbell, or knock on wood, bring a bottle, wait to be offered a seat. ‘Come in!’ we say ‘Please, have a seat! Can I get you a drink?’

These are host and guest norms for what we conceptualise as the private sphere; just as trespass and permits govern the wider social, or public, space. The norms and rules are shared with and taught to all members of a society.

In short, every culture on earth has systems of rules and norms for human interactions in different spaces. Australia is home to the oldest continuing culture on earth. This is one reason that Welcome to Country is not some token ritual or nod to political correctness, as many seek to portray. A Welcome to Country is the continuation of host and guest traditions established over 60 millennia.

So who is welcome here?

It is telling, then, to see how the bad-cop-worse-cop trash talk that passes for public debate these days is playing out. Hanson took credit for the government hate-mongering on refugees, adding ‘refugees are not welcome here’.

Right on script, Turnbull was given all the air time and column inches he wanted to intone gravely, in his favourite paternalistic voice, what a great country this is for resettling refugees. The most successful multicultural nation, he lectures us, with added erasure of First Nations people here, who have been developing multicultural protocol across 300-700 nations since megafauna roamed the earth.

Never mind the millions of words, the how many reports, including from the UN Committee Against Torture, the Senate Inquiries, the shameless bullying (and probably illegal inducement to leave) of Human Rights Commission President Gillian Triggs, the rapes, the murders, the self-immolations, the forced birth, the staff who sexually abuse children, the billions and billions and billions of dollars to corporate donors which run our ‘off-shore detention centres’.

‘Refugees are welcome here’ Turnbull lied, disgustingly, and his media cheer squad cheered. He must have some special plan up his sleeve, they hinted, in their increasingly desperate delusion that Turnbull is not really like this.

First Nations, legacy media, and the political leadership

But Turnbull really is like this. He really, really is.

Our crimes – a crime scene since 1788 as First Dog On The Moon, depressingly but accurately, put it this week – can not be sprinkled with fairy dust by a Stockholm syndrome legacy media who depend on leaks and tips rather than do their job (Andrew Welder’s searing analysis of dysfunctional media dynamic here).

Some future third-country settlement will not make the list of our gross human rights violations magically disappear. Who even thinks like that?

Well, political columnists from the Guardian to Fairfax to the ABC do, for a start. Which leaves only the independents like New Matilda and Independent Australia for anyone of basic human decency to read. Thank goodness for new media, because when it comes to Malcolm Bligh Turnbull, the fourth estate – whose duties include mediating the conversation of the demos ie between the public and political leadership in the modern nation state – has been derelict indeed.

The Yanner message is a lot clearer than the Turnbull-Hanson lies.

“I have been engaging with Indigenous communities and First Australians throughout all my time in public life and before that, but particularly as Prime Minister,” Turnbull lied, disgustingly, on his Abbottesque tour of remote communities this week. And the media cheer squad cheered, creating the impression of community consent and consensus that cheering creates.

When Murandoo Yanner asserted the right to exclude Pauline Hanson from premises on grounds of racism and intellectual dishonesty, the crowd clapped and cheered, showing community consensus; and Hanson, knowing the rules, left. She then took to the media to blather about alcoholism, just as Turnbull did in Yalata yesterday, because they both know how these things operate in the media and public spheres too.

What a repulsive pair. In their castles of sand, telling their mountains of lies, exercising the right to exclude people from this Aboriginal land, people who are fleeing persecution including wars in which we participate, and all to the manufactured sound of a falsely-constructed consent.

The unambiguous message to the Turnbull-Hanson cabal should mirror the one that Yanner delivered: You don’t care about Aboriginal people. Now you are kicking the Muslims too. You are just a racist. Go, go. You are lacking moral fibre. You are intellectually dishonest and you are not welcome to keep spewing your racist hate across this country.