The Redfern Park speech contained some words which should be engraved on the footpaths outside the homes of every Australian who voted “No” in the Voice Referendum of 2023.
If it isn’t reasonable to say that if we can build a prosperous and remarkable harmonious multicultural society in Australia, surely we can find just solutions to the problems which beset the First Australians, the people to whom the most injustice has been done.
…the starting point might be to recognise that the problem starts with us, the non-Aboriginal Australians.
It begins, I think, with an act of recognition. Recognition that it was we who did the dispossessing. We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life.
We brought the diseases and the alcohol. We committed the murders. We took the children from their mothers. We practised discrimination and exclusion.
It was our ignorance and our prejudice. And our failure to imagine these things could be done to us.
With some noble exceptions, we failed to make the most basic human response and enter into their hearts and minds. We failed to ask, how would I feel if this were done to me?
As a consequence, we failed to see that what we were doing degraded us all.
The reason I (and most people who aren’t green haired devils in melbourne) don’t give it much credence is because any subtle effect of being Indigenous is overruled by other brown/black/asian people who are also impacted by the same issues and often coming from worse situations improving their lives drastically simply by working hard, studying hard, and doing their best to integrate.
You live in Australia, not Africa, playing the victim card only works for so long, people get tired of hearing about it.
Hence the no vote:
You can’t blame whitey when literally every demographic is represented in that 60% no vote and there wasn’t even a no campaign, all the pink haired melbourne devils like /u/Taleya’s running around screaming if you don’t vote yes you’re racist!!! somehow didn’t seem to impact the majority of the electorate that again, includes whites, blacks, browns, asians, and everything in between.
I can’t help but feel you haven’t read the article posted or my comments. You’re not addressing any of the points raised and instead just seem to have a bee in bonnet about the referendum which is at best tangentially related.
I do understand the fatigue of this being an ongoing issue but that doesn’t really change the situation.