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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27900 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 30, 2025

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The continuing saga of Aboriginal issues in Australia!

You may recall that in 2023 Australia had a referendum on changing the constitution to attach a permanent Aboriginal advisory body to parliament. That referendum was rejected around 60-40. We discussed it here at the time, and since then I've been keeping an eye on the issue. Since then, many state governments have stated their intention to go ahead with state-level bodies, or even with 'treaty'.

'Treaty', in the context of Aboriginal activism in Australia, is a catch-all term for bilateral agreements between state and federal governments and indigenous communities. Whether or not this is a good idea tends to be heavily disputed, with the left generally lining up behind 'yes', and the right behind 'no'.

Anyway, I bring this up because just last week, in Australia's most progressive state, Victoria, the Yoorrook Report was just published.

This is the report of a body called the Yoorrook Justice Commission, a body set up in this state with public funds whose purpose is to give a report on indigenous issues in the state. They call this 'truth-telling' (and indeed 'Voice, Treaty, Truth' was the slogan of the larger movement for a while), though whether or not the publications they put out are true is, well, part of the whole issue.

Here is the summary of their report.

You can skip most of the first half - the important part is their hundred recommendations, starting from page 28 of the PDF, all beginning with the very demanding phrase 'the Victorian Government must...'

This puts the Victorian government in a somewhat difficult position. They love the symbolism of being progressive on Aboriginal issues, and indeed are currently legislating for a more permanent indigenous advisory body to parliament. However, the actual recommendations of the Yoorrook Report are very expensive, very complex, and in many cases blatantly unreasonable, at least to my eyes. Some examples would include recommendations 4 (a portion of all land, water, and natural-resource-related revenues should be allocated to indigenous peoples), 21 (land transfers), 24 (reverse burden of proof for native land title), 41 (recognise waterways as legal persons and appoint indigenous peoples as their representatives, like that river in New Zealand), 54 (decolonise school libraries by removing offensive books), 66-7 (universities must permanently fund additional Aboriginal support services and 'recompense First Peoples staff for the 'colonial load' they carry'), and 96 (establish a permanent Aboriginal representative body 'with powers at all levels of political and policy decision making'). Needless to say the recommendations taken as a whole are both expensive and politically impossible, especially since even Victoria rejected the Voice 55-45.

Possibly from Yoorrook's perspective the idea is just to open with a maximal demand that they can then negotiate down from; or possibly it's to deliberately make demands that cannot possibly be satisfied so that there will remain a need for activists in this space. From the state government's perspective it's tricky, because they will want to appear responsive and sympathetic, but not want to actually do all this. I predict that they will accept a couple of the cheaper, more fig-leaf recommendations and ignore the rest, maintaining a status quo where we engage in symbolic acts of recognition and guilt but nothing more, and the Aboriginal rights industry, so to speak, continues to perpetuate itself.

If the Victorian Liberals (the state branch of our centre-right party) were more on the ball, I might have expected them to politically profit from this and make a good bid at the next election, but unfortunately the Victorian Liberals are in shambles and have been for some time, and the recent smashing of the federal Liberal party at the last election doesn't make it look good for them either.

Is it possible the body writing this is full of true believers who actually think they’ll get all this crap?

Very likely. Also they could be stupid drama queens with poor judgement.

For example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidia_Thorpe

In a June 2022 interview, Thorpe said that the parliament has "no permission to be here [in Australia]" and that she’s a parliament member "only" so she can "infiltrate" the "colonial project." She added that the Australian flag had "no permission to be" in the land. Aboriginal, conservative senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price denounced Thorpe's comments as "divisive" and "childish," and called for her dismissal from the parliament.[37]

In August 2022, during her swearing-in ceremony, Thorpe added the words "the colonising" in the required Oath of Allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II, saying

"I Lydia Thorpe do solemnly and sincerely affirm and declare that I will be faithful and bear true allegiance to the colonising Her Majesty Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Australia, Her heirs and successors according to law."[38]

Thorpe was immediately criticised by fellow senators. After an instruction by Labor the President of the Australian Senate Sue Lines and interjections from others that the oath must be taken word-by-word, Thorpe recited the pledge once more, this time omitting the two words.[39][40]

On 16 April 2023, footage emerged of Thorpe in a verbal altercation with men outside a Melbourne strip club.[41] Thorpe was filmed telling a number of people they had a "small penis" and were "marked". She claimed the men provoked the altercation by harassing her.[42] The manager of the club claimed she provoked the incident by approaching white patrons, telling them they had "stolen her land;" he announced he was banning Thorpe from the club "for life."

While holding the justice portfolio for the Greens party and serving on the joint parliamentary law-enforcement committee, Thorpe was in a relationship with Dean Martin, ex-president of the Rebels outlaw biker gang. Martin had been president of the Rebels in Victoria, and had been charged and pleaded guilty to liquor offences in 2013.[50] As a member of the committee, Thorpe became privy to confidential briefings about motorcycle gangs and organised crime. She had not disclosed the relationship, which was only revealed when her staff, who became aware of the relationship in mid-2021, notified party leader Adam Bandt's office and an independent parliamentary authority.

It just keeps going, it's a national disgrace that this individual is still a Senator. But this is the intellectual calibre of many in the indigenous movement, not totally unrepresentative:

On 21 October 2024, Thorpe heckled King Charles III by shouting "This is not your land, you are not my King" and making claims of genocide against "our people", after he finished an address at Australia's Parliament House, as part of his royal visit to Australia. As she was escorted away by security, she was heard yelling "Fuck the Colony".

In the aftermath of the incident, she was asked about the oath she had recited and signed during her swearing-in process, in which she had sworn allegiance to Queen Elizabeth II and "her heirs". Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.[71]

Simon Birmingham, leader of the opposition in the Senate, announced that the coalition is considering "legal opinions" on the validity of the senator's constitutional duty of affirmation. Thorpe, subsequently, revised her claim, stating that, when she was being sworn in as a senator, she "mispronounced" heirs as hairs, "without meaning to do so", and did not do it deliberately. In the statement, she added that "they can't get rid of me," pointing out she's "got another three and a half years [of service in the Senate]."

Thorpe claimed she had instead said "her hairs". Constitutional law expert Anne Twomey stated in response that the signed oath would have stated "heirs", and that the presiding officer could exclude Senator Thorpe if they believed a valid oath had not been sworn.

Does Australia not include a portion of their oath which reads "that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion" or something to that effect?

I mean yes oaths are just words which are just hot air until someone decides they mean something, but still. For example, on US federal forms, the point is not to catch the honest (e.g., on the US citizenship form the question which reads "Have you ever been a member of, involved in, or in any way associated with any Communist or totalitarian party anywhere in the world?") but to punish the dishonest. The Honest Communist who reads that question and checks the box marked "yes" is not the target of the form, because he does not exist. The Dishonest Communist who checks the box marked "no" is the target of the form, because then three years later when it comes out that yes he was a member of the Marxist International Domestic Workers Political Activism Party (of Lenin) of Farlandia, you can yoink his citizenship for lying on the form.

In this case the context is also that most senators dislike that oath and took it insincerely. If you look at the recording of Thorpe swearing the oath and making a fuss, the other senators in the room were rolling their eyes. One commented, "None of us like it", and a minister afterwards called the oath "archaic and ridiculous".

Australian parliamentarians are legally required to swear an oath to the Queen (as it was at the time; it's now the King) when they take office, but it is safe to say that very few of them actually believe the oath or take it remotely seriously. This is from 2016, but over half of them support a republic (yes, this is significantly out of step with popular opinion, politicians as a class are often unrepresentative), and I think it's fair to say that on a plain reading of the oath, bearing true allegiance to his majesty and his heirs and successors would be incompatible with wanting to abolish him.

But none of them take it seriously. We are not a nation that takes oaths seriously.

(I would not single out Australia in this respect - I think the West in general has largely given up on oaths. My favourite example of this, actually, is that becoming an American citizen requires a person to explicitly renounce any other citizenship or allegiance, and yet large numbers of people become American citizens while retaining prior citizenships. Nobody cares.)

I think back in the day it was so manifestly obvious that swearing an oath meant you had to stand by it they never encoded such a section. In any event she could say 'i take this obligation freely and sincerely' in her usual overtly insincere and obnoxious manner. Root problem isn't solved. In the 1930s a fair few Wehrmacht officers felt restricted from plotting against Hitler because they swore an oath to him. It was not on! People would go around saying 'my word is my bond'.

In any event she did sign the paper so she formally ticked the box. Oaths are just box-ticking these days, no more meaningful than terms and conditions for free software, no more meaningful than the King's Champion who used to ride up, throw down a gauntlet and challenge anyone who disputed the new monarch's right to rule in single combat. He's still there of course, just holds a standard now.

For what it's worth, at least, Thorpe only got in because she was on a bizarre Greens senate ticket, and there is no way in hell she is getting re-elected.

I do think that after she refused to take the senatorial oath, and then, when pressed, said it in an obviously insincere way (and admitted that insincerity on the record afterwards), she should have disqualified herself from taking her seat. There is a valid procedural issue there - she is verifiably not in good faith.

Lidia Thorpe is the whitest black person I’ve ever seen, and I’m old enough to remember Rachel Dolezal.

Do the noble Aboriginal people not have some kind of paper bag test they can use to keep these carpetbaggers out?

No, because there's no umbrella Aboriginal organisation that can police that. It's not like the Maori in New Zealand, who do have their own government-like organisation that can assess who is and who is not Maori.

In theory it's the three part test (descended from Aboriginals, identifies as Aboriginal, is recognised by the Aboriginal community), but as it's hard to apply in practice, most of the time it's just self-identification. This has led to absurdities like people with only tiny amounts of Aboriginal ancestry, who look and sound exactly the same as Anglo people, identifying as a proud Aboriginal man or woman.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

I raise you Michael Mansell.

Confident that they could, and so never having asked if they should, Australian eugenics scientists continue to pursue their goal of creating the whitest oppressed black person to ever live.

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics. I often found that strange, since it’s not typically the case with cross breeds of any other sort - any geneticists amateur or otherwise on themotte care to enlighten me why this is?

I could be wrong, but my understanding is that the majority of white-passing "aboriginals" simply have negligible or <10% Caucasian ancestry. At that point, what's surprising about the fact that they look white?

Hapas just look white. 90% of the Cherokee just look white. Most white-hispanic babies look white. White middle easterner crosses too, but in fairness middle easterners are pretty white looking already(although I know a Maronite/Italian couple whose kids look, on average, whiter than either of them). Even the white/black crosses you're probably thinking of look more white than the popular portrayal; America's definition of 'black' just encompasses people of mixed ancestry. There are other countries, like South Africa and much of Latin America, where that's not the case and they're not perceived as looking black.

I don't think the the concept of more or less recessive phenotypes is particularly valid in the first place. Sure, hair and eye color are pretty much Mendelian, and I've noticed a few other discrete traits that seem to be pretty dominant/recessive (Hapas always seem to have the epicanthic fold and Blasians usually have darker skin than the median of their parents), but most traits seem to average out. The American understanding of White features being "recessive", particularly to Black features, probably derives from the existing admixture in the Black population (thus creating a broader range of "Black" phenotypes) and general cultural norms of hypodescent (the "one drop rule").

Interestingly this is at least partly because Australian Aboriginal genes are even more recessive than white genetics.

Looked this up but couldn’t find anything on it. If it is true might be a quirk of their archaic human ancestry.

I have at least heard the idea from Aboriginal people directly, though the way they framed it to me was in terms of having 'weak genes'. That said, I do not rate the scientific literacy of the person who told me that at all, so I have no idea if it's actually true, or just an excuse one might tell oneself on seeing one's pale skin.

Thanks for the info!

Very interesting stuff.

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