Smoke screen

The reaction to the torching of Canberra's Old Parliament House by Aboriginal protestors is evidence of the woke-ward drift of both the media and the police force. By Nick Cater.

Perhaps the ACT Ombudsman was on to something when he criticised Canberra police for their lack of cultural awareness in a report last March. The charred entrance to Old Parliament House suggests the difference between an Aboriginal smoking ceremony and criminal arson is not well enough understood.

Smoking ceremonies can take many forms, but they are seldom preceded by the ritual of climbing on someone else’s shoulders to nobble security cameras, as demonstrators did late last year. Nor are they ignited with carefully prepared bundles of sticks laced with accelerants laid against heritage wooden doors.

These nuances apart, we might have hoped the local constabulary could at least have recognised the distinction between the Old Parliament House carpark, where tacit approval had been granted for a smoking ceremony, and the semi-enclosed portico of a heritage-listed building, where it had not. The preservation orders on the 1927 building are taken so seriously that an Action Proposal Form must be completed to Blu-Tack a notice to the wall. No such paperwork is required, apparently, if you simply want to torch the place.

More concerning than the passivity of police, however, is the cluelessness of the virtue-seeking vandals and their well-wishers who appeared blind to the advantages of democracy over tyranny. In a liberal democracy you are free to celebrate history or to criticise it. “But first of all,” as French President Emmanuel Macron put it recently, “you must learn it.”

The woke-ward drift of Australia’s police forces that allowed last week’s demonstration is a symptom of a greater cultural insensitivity, a dismissal of the liberal inheritance that has made Australia one of the most stable and prosperous places on Earth. Police are no longer content to serve as citizens in uniform, ensuring the observance of laws with the willing co-operation of the public. They are now required to be moral crusaders, mindful of the over-representation of minority groups in the criminal justice system. They must recognise that those who might once have been crudely labelled as perpetrators may actually be victims.

It is in this progressive spirit that ACT police are formally instructed not to interrupt sacred smoking ceremonies when attending the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. They appear less sensitive to the sacredness of Old Parliament House, and the importance of the Museum of Democracy the building now houses. Cultural insensitivity, it seems, is not just a problem for minorities.

The responsibility for the arson attack remains unclear and its motives hard to unpick. Efforts by ACT police and the Museum of Democracy to reach good-faith agreement with Aboriginal leaders in preparation for the Tent Embassy’s 50th anniversary on January 26 have been less than satisfactory, since it is not entirely clear with whom the authorities should be negotiating.

The governance structure of the Tent Embassy has never been clearly established and the claim that it represents the spontaneous voice of Indigenous people is questionable. Neville Bonner, the first Indigenous voice in parliament, claimed in 1972 that 90 per cent of Aboriginal people in Australia would be against the encampment. “As I understand it, one has an embassy in a foreign land,” he told the Senate. “I deny emphatically that I or any other Aborigine is a foreigner to this wonderful land of Australia in which we live.”

Today’s activist firebrands share little attachment to the Aboriginal culture and traditions Bonner wanted to uphold, judging by their cynical weaponisation of a sacred ceremony. The aims they are pursuing, and the underlying philosophy that drives them, are equally as murky. What concessions were they trying to extract? What reparations were they demanding and from whom? Details like these, once essential to the civil rights movement, are no longer required.

“Seems like the colonial system is burning down,” tweeted Victorian Greens senator Lidia Thorpe cheerfully in response to the fire. “Happy New Year everyone.”

The Guardian adopted an even stranger line to excuse the inexcusable. An otherwise peaceful protest had been hijacked by “a complex network of anti-vaccination and conspiracy groups” that were responsible for “spreading misinformation in Indigenous communities during the Covid-19 pandemic”. These so-called sovereign citizens, The Guardian claimed, were “a fringe conspiracy group rooted in anti-Semitism and organised around a haphazard collection of pseudo-legal beliefs broadly grouped around the notion that modern government is an illegitimate corporation”.

We must await a police investigation to discover if there is any truth in The Guardian’s whopper conspiracy theory, which quickly gained traction on left-wing social media. Shadowy far-right forces have become the bete noire of the woke left in recent years and the sovereign citizens sound not dissimilar to the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers supposedly incited by Donald Trump to lead an insurrection a year ago in Washington.

In the immediate aftermath of the January 6, 2021 Washington protests, The Guardian and its woke competitors in Australia devoted acres of space to condemn the alleged affront to liberal democracy, and continue to hark back to it today. By contrast, the arson attack in Canberra was badly underplayed in the local media, an error that is only partly excused by the skeleton staffing of newsrooms over the Christmas period. The judgment that ranked the ugly events on the steps of Old Parliament House behind endless stories about a waning pandemic is more than troubling.

These, after all, were the steps Bonner climbed to become the first Aboriginal senator in parliament in August 1971, two years before Senator Thorpe was born and five months before the proclamation of the Tent Embassy on the other side of King George Terrace. Bonner sympathised with the grievances of the Aboriginal protesters, but decried their methods as demeaning. In 1973, Bonner confronted hundreds of Indigenous protesters marching toward Parliament House. “That is Australia’s Council of Elders,” he told them. “You would not dare walk into an Aboriginal Council of Elders, so why should you want to march into that one?”

True reconciliation, if it is ever to be achieved, demands leaders with the intellect and moral courage of Bonner and other leaders able to rise above the unserious world of identity politics. It requires people who recognise the ideals celebrated by the Museum of Democracy are the solution, not the cause, of the grievances to which lesser politicians cling.