Showing posts sorted by relevance for query australians for honest politics. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query australians for honest politics. Sort by date Show all posts

Sunday 6 January 2013

A Short Primer For Tony Abbott's 'Australians for Honest Politics Trust'

 
Australian Opposition Leader Tony Abbott often talks of the perceived character failings of other politicians. Here is one instance where his own character can be called into question.
 
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The Australians for Honest Politics Trust was created on 24 August 1998.
This trust allegedly raised approximately $100,000 with the aim of funding one or more civil court cases seeking deregistration of the political party One Nation and the removal of the Member for Oxley Pauline Lee Hanson from the Australian Parliament.
 
Ms. Hanson, a former member of the Liberal Party was disendorsed as a party candidate during the 1996 federal election campaign, entered Parliament as the independent Member for Oxley once election results were declared and, later formed Pauline Hanson’s One Nation with David Oldfield and David Ettridge. This original One Nation Party was registered on 4 December 1997.
 
On 3 & 6 July 1998 Tony Abbott wrote to Queensland Electoral Commissioner Desmond O’Shea objecting to the registration of One Nation. On 8 July the Electoral Commissioner wrote to Mr. Abbott for a second time rejecting his objections and reasons.
 
On 10 July 1998 Terry Sharples commenced civil proceedings in the Queensland Supreme Court formally challenging the registration of One Nation. On or about 11 July Tony Abbott hand wrote a letter to Sharples promising words to the effect that Sharples would not be further out of pocket because of this court case.
 
On 5 July 2001 criminal charges were brought against Ms. Hanson and David Ettridge and they were sentenced to three years gaol for electoral fraud (apparently with no mention of parole) by Judge Patsy Wolfe in the Brisbane District Court on 20 August 2003. Their convictions were quashed on appeal on 6 November 2003.
 
At least six recorded judgments appear to be associated with activities of the Trust’s creators:
 
Sharples v O'Shea & Anor [1998] QSC 171 (31 August 1998)
"One might readily infer that Mr Abbott was as much motivated by party political considerations relating to the next Federal election as he was in the Queensland Electoral Commission inquiring into assertions of misrepresentation and fraud "because of the public interest in the matter".
 
Australians for Honest Politics trustees were:
 
The Honourable John Murray Wheeldon – former member of the Labor Party, former Labor Party senator from West Australia, former editorial writer for The Australian (deceased 2006)
William Peter Coleman – former editor of The Bulletin and Quadrant, former Liberal Party Member for Fuller in the NSW Parliament, former Member for Wentworth in the Federal House of Representatives
The Honourable Anthony John “Tony” Abbott – former journalist with The Bulletin, former Workplace Relations Minister in the Howard Government, current Leader of the Federal Liberal Party and Leader of the Opposition
 
There were allegedly twelve donors to this trust and the following individuals have been identified in various media reports as being donors:
 
Trevor Kennedy - former Consolidated Press Holdings chief executive and new member of Gutenberg Investments group (contribution said to be in the vicinity of $10,000)
Harold Clough West Australian businessman reportedly a major Liberal Party donor and, treasurer of the Lavoisier Group, a director of Clough Limited, on the board of the Institute of Public Affairs and the Asialink Council according to SourceWatch.
 
Alleged fund raiser for the Trust:
 
John Samuel – businessman and sometime associate of Tony Abbott
 
Other individuals allegedly associated with creation of the Trust:
 
Piers Akerman - The Daily Telegraph columnist
 
Applicant in original court case:
 
Terry Patrick Sharples – an accountant allegedly co-opted by Tony Abbott for this purpose by July 1998
Note: David Summers allegedly withdrew as a co-applicant with Sharples and Barbara Hazelton whose separate  proposed court case preparation was paid for by the Trust withdrew her support
           
Individuals alleged to have interested themselves in the fraud court case:
 
Tim Fischer - former National Party leader
Ron Boswell - National Party Senate leader
Bill O'Chee - former National Party senator
 
Copy of the Trust Deed for the Australians for Honest Politics Trust as supplied to the Australian Electoral Commission [AEC] on 20 October 1998 according to the fax timestamp:
 
Note: The witness signatures on Page 3 have been redacted, the remaining two pages supplied to the AEC are illegible and therefor not posted here.
 
Background:
 
Excerpt from Margot Kingston’s book Still Not Happy, John! dealing with the Australians for Honest Politics Trust here.
 
WebDiary Archive

Fairfax Archive

 
 
Abbott refuses to supply donors names to AEC when requested in 2004 via a formal notice of investigation seeking records and information

Copy of AEC response to queries concerning the Trust

Tony Abbott media releases 1998:

 


ONE (DICTATOR’S) NATION  11 August 

ONE NATION IN COURT 2 September

ONE (GUN-TOTING) NATION 24 September 

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Thursday 30 August 2018

Tony Abbott: unpopular and unwanted


Sacked former prime minister and current Liberal MP for Warringah Anthony John "Tony" Abbott in August 2018.......
Crikey, 28 August 2018:

For nearly 25 years, Tony Abbott has done nothing in politics but destroy and oppose. His party, and Australia, desperately need him to leave.

Next year, Tony Abbott will rack up 25 years as an MP. And the best way for him to celebrate it -- for his party, for the government, and most of all for Australia -- would be to retire. 2019 should be the election at which he calls time.

Abbott said to one of his media friends on Monday that he still sees himself as a young man. In fact, Abbott has always been an old man; he is the classic example of Keating's "young fogey", from his days as a student politician through his stint as a seminarian and his devotion to BA Santamaria, through his entry into politics first as a staffer and then as an MP. Abbott has only ever seen the world through the eyes of an old man furious at the changes wrought by young people, determined to reverse the desecration of all that is sacred in his world where Christian white males hold unquestioned authority.

The Monthly, 27 August 2018:

What did the rest of Australia ever do to the voters of Warringah? Lucky to live in one of the most blessed constituencies on earth, stretching from Sydney’s leafy north shore to the northern beaches, its residents have nevertheless foisted on Australia the single most destructive politician of our time: Tony Abbott. The failed priest, nicknamed the “mad monk”, has done incalculable damage to this country. And for someone who aspired to be a “junkyard dog savaging the other side”, Abbott has lately mostly savaged his own, culminating in last week’s Pyrrhic victory over Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, which slaked his thirst for revenge but left the Liberals in their worst position for a decade.

As a former director of Australians for Constitutional Monarchy, Abbott was a key wrecker of the 1999 republic referendum, denying this country a head of state who was one of us. Abbott employed David Oldfield, who moonlighted for Pauline Hanson and helped create One Nation. Realising the threat that Hanson posed to the Liberals’ right front, Abbott was the brains behind shabby outfit Australians for Honest Politics, which helped put her in jail for electoral fraud. As a pro-life health minister, under John Howard, he tried to block women’s access to the abortion drug RU486.

In 2009, Warringah’s local member tore down Liberal Opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull over climate change. It was desperately cynical even then: Abbott admitted to Turnbull at the time that he’d been a “bit of a weather vane” on the issue. But Abbott decided it was “absolute crap” that the science of climate change was settled and, right there and then, introduced a kind of madness into our politics. Ever since, the country has found it impossible to agree on an energy or climate policy.

Emboldened after toppling Turnbull, the member for Warringah went on to launch a misogynistic campaign against our first female prime minister; he also embarked on a misleading “axe the tax” campaign against Labor’s emissions trading scheme, which his chief of staff, Peta Credlin, later excused as an exercise in “brutal retail politics”, given the ETS wasn’t a carbon tax at all. As prime minister, Abbott’s first great achievement was to kill off our car industry, and he went on betray his promise to the electorate that his government would make “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”. His first budget in 2014, possibly the worst in living memory, defunded schools and hospitals to the tune of $80 billion compared with forecast funding levels under Labor, and failed to pass the Senate. That year Abbott made Australia the first country in the world to abolish a carbon price. Then in 2015 he knighted Prince Philip on Australia Day, turning himself into a laughing stock, and his downfall began. When the Liberal Party turfed Abbott in September 2015, a grateful nation rewarded the new PM Turnbull with approval ratings of 68 per cent.

Ever since, Abbott has sniped, wrecked and undermined the Coalition. Although he describes his aim as being the “best possible member for Warringah”, he has never cared to represent his constituency faithfully. In the equal marriage postal survey, 75 per cent of his electorate voted “Yes” – the highest proportion in New South Wales – but Tony Abbott, a loud “No” campaigner, later scarpered from the House of Representatives.

Now, without care for the national interest, the institution of parliament, the office of PM or the electoral fate of the Liberal Party, Abbott has torn down Turnbull a second time. To what end? Not policy: Turnbull had conceded everything the hard right demanded of him. Not politics: today’s Newspoll[$] shows the damage caused by last week’s spill; the Coalition now trails Labor 44–56, and Bill Shorten is preferred PM. The member for Warringah will reportedly [$] give a “call-to-arms” speech to rally Liberal members behind new prime minister Scott Morrison. But can Abbott be trusted to serve Morrison loyally? Or will he start the work of tearing down another Liberal prime minister?

The party is desperate to put the Abbott-Turnbull wars behind it. Federal Liberal president Nick Greiner said yesterday [$] that Abbott is at least partly to blame for the divisions in the party: “Tony is an excellent political salesman, a political warrior; he should have been spending his time – and I of course said this to him – much more on bringing down our political opponents rather than focusing on internal differences.” Columnist Niki Savva was less politic on the weekend, writing: “If he had any decency Abbott would resign too, now that he has accomplished his mission.”

Former PM Kevin Rudd absolutely let rip this morning: “I cannot remember a single positive policy initiative that Abbott has championed and then implemented. Not one. As a result, unconstrained by policy, the entire energy of this giant wrecking ball of Australian politics has been focused on destroying his opponents – within the Labor Party and the Liberal Party. Of all modern politicians, Abbott is sui generis. His singular, destructive impact on national politics cannot be underestimated.”

Wednesday 11 March 2015

Has Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott re-mortgaged the family home yet again?


Most of Tony Abbott's official declarations of pecuniary and non-pecuniary interest are lost in the mists of time.

Hansard reveals that in 1995 he admitted to Parliament that he was the beneficiary of one, possibly two, family trusts - with Etonwest Pty Ltd as trustee for one at least of these trusts. 

This company, owned by his parents, was registered in 1970 when he was twelve years old and deregistered in 2004 when he was the Federal Minister for Health and Ageing.

Media reports inform us that his 1998 declaration showed his involvement as one of three trustees for the Australians for Honest Politics Trust (created on 24 August 1998).

However, little else is now readily available before 2008, when the details of his home finance becomes of interest.

In his official Statement of Registerable Interests (22 February 2008) then Shadow Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs Tony Abbott listed an unspecified joint mortgage with his wife with what is probably the Commonwealth Bank of Australia.


In 2010 it came to the attention of Australian voters that as then Opposition Leader Tony Abbott had failed to declare a $710,000 mortgage on his Forestville NSW home entered into sometime in 2008 or 2009.

This mortgage was added to his official declaration of interests sometime in June 2010 and appeared to be a shared equity arrangement with the Adelaide Bank and Rismark:


On 9 December 2013 as Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott once more declared a joint mortgage with his wife on the family home, this time with the National Australia Banking Group:


For a man who earns an est. $539,338 in combined salary and allowances and who virtually lives for free as Prime Minister of Australia, with a wife who is a paid company director/manager and no dependent children, this continuous level of debt on a house purchased in 1994 is rather curious to say the least.

One has to wonder what the Prime Minister does with his money? Do they burn $100 bills just for fun in the Abbott household with little thought for tomorrow?

Friday 13 October 2023

Two perspectives on how the ugly truths of Australia's journey to nationhood still shape our society, as well our individual and collective response to the proposal for an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples Voice to Parliament

 

For the reader's consideration......


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The Saturday Paper, 7 October 2023:


John Hewson

The enduring stain of the White Australia policy


The White Australia policy stands out as probably the most significant blemish on this country’s national character and unity, as well as its global reputation, with continuing consequences today.


It has been said that latent racism, carrying echoes of White Australia, persists across the country and all walks of life. We have seen it emerge at football games and other events. Politicians have been known “to play the race card” when they believe that appealing to prejudice will afford them some political advantage.


In light of Australia’s colonial history, it should come as no surprise that race would become a dominant undercurrent in the public discourse about the upcoming referendum, with the “No” case appealing to those who believe the White Australia-era Constitution should not be amended. How else can we make sense of many of the misrepresentations and claims of opponents of the Voice to Parliament? How are we to understand John Howard’s call for people “to maintain the rage”, if not for its racial connotation?


Our Constitution was drafted by protagonists of White Australia, strongly supported by zealots such as Alfred Deakin, who became our second prime minister.


First Australians were not recognised as it was assumed they were a “dying race”. Among the first pieces of legislation passed after Federation was the Immigration Restriction Act 1901, which was initiated just nine sitting days after the Duke of York officially opened the Australian parliament. The law’s aim was essentially to ensure a predominantly British population, by restricting non-white, and particularly Asian, immigration and enabling the deportation of undesirable migrants. It is difficult to understand by what standards their desirability would have been judged, given the British settlements were primarily penal colonies.


I would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.


Aboriginal Australians were also targeted. A range of policies was directed at so-called protection and assimilation of Aboriginal people into white society, one of which was the removal of Aboriginal children from their families and culture. By 1912, the government was working to remove all people of mixed Indigenous and non-Indigenous descent from reservations across Australia, with the goal of forced assimilation into the white community. It is not too much of a stretch to claim that these policies were designed collectively to destroy Aboriginal society.


As Barry Jones has pointed out in this publication, at the time of the arrival of the First Fleet, Australia’s Indigenous communities had well-established traditions and practices, art and mythology, spoke roughly 500 languages and dialects, and made and traded tools, weapons and goods. So much of this was lost in the ensuing violence and generations of repression and neglect that followed. Non-Indigenous Australians still have so much to learn from First Australians about land and river and water management, among other things.


The initial focus of immigration on Britain was subsequently widened to southern and eastern Europe, to the Middle East and just a few Asian countries. After World War II there was an attempt to re-emphasise the “favoured” British immigrants, with the Assisted Passage Migration, or “ten-pound Pom”, scheme. This program invited Britons to come to work in Australia to help meet the country’s postwar industrial development and infrastructure needs.


The White Australia policy was unwound in a number of steps, starting with the Holt government’s migration review in 1966, which shifted the focus of the program to migrant skills and their capacity to contribute to the country’s priorities. In 1973, the Whitlam government formally renounced the policy and shifted the focus to multiculturalism.


However, a racial dimension to immigration policy was raised again by then opposition leader John Howard in the 1980s, when he called for a slowdown in Asian immigration, and again with the arrival of Pauline Hanson on the political scene, in her maiden speech to parliament in 1996 and subsequent statements about Muslims.


These attitudes are at odds with the fact Australia has become probably the most successful and tolerant multiracial, multiethnic, multireligious society in the world – the envy of many. It is a tragedy that our nation hasn’t come to terms with its history and built on a recognition of the world’s longest continuous civilisation, with 65,000 years of history. We cannot conceive of the vastness of the opportunity that is being lost through this myopic, frightened governance. If the referendum fails, the world will see we have missed this opportunity.


For many years I have travelled widely for both business and academia, and it has always troubled me greatly that I am so often questioned about whether this country still upholds the White Australia policy. This is still a common perception, and its persistence should bother us as a nation.


In 1967, when I was a student at Sydney University, there was no significant presence of Aboriginal people. Having been taught nothing about Indigenous history in high school, my only awareness of Aboriginal issues was some knowledge of the 1965 Freedom Ride that was designed to bring to the attention of the public the extent of racial discrimination in Australia. This publicity provided something of a basis for the 1967 referendum that finally led to the counting of Aboriginal people in the census.


I would like to imagine that in 2023 our university campuses are more engaged, and that the obvious need for First Australians to be properly recognised and heard is readily embraced and understood, without being swayed by the fear and hatred propagated by many in the “No” camp.


The most disturbing point in this campaign for me has been the vilification of people such as distinguished academic Marcia Langton, who had the courage and good sense to draw attention to the racial undercurrents of the “No” campaign. It was not racist of her to point this out. She was stating facts. Yet many who criticised her had been running a fear campaign claiming that the Voice would racially divide our nation. The treatment of her was abhorrent and emphasises why the country so badly needs to come to grips with its history and acknowledge the need for proper recognition.


The recent speech of leading “Yes” campaigner Noel Pearson to the National Press Club hit the mark. He spoke eloquently about his vision for the future, a better future. He laid out what sort of country we should aspire to be.


He rejected the argument from the opposing camp that the Voice could divide Australia by race: “We’re not a separate race – we’re humans,” he said. “It’s just that we are Indigenous. And you go to some parts of the world and indigenous people are blond and blue-eyed. This is not about race. This is about us being the original peoples in the country.”


His comments contrasted sharply with those of Nyunggai Warren Mundine in the same forum the previous day, in which the “No” campaign leader described the Uluru Statement from the Heart as a “declaration of war”.


Only love can move us now,” Pearson said. “It’s the love of home. Our Australian home is the source of this love.”


I would hazard a guess that Pearson’s address, unlike a couple of others on this theme of the referendum, will be studied in schools in the future. It was a speech for the ages. It mattered.


In an important sense, the referendum provides an opportunity to clearly move beyond our White Australia past by responding positively to the wishes of First Australians – that is, their request as to how best to be recognised, as expressed in the Uluru Statement from the Heart. Giving them an advisory Voice can also help our leadership do better than the failed attempts of the past to develop effective policies to deal with Indigenous disadvantage.


This is not about guilt but a positive expression of love and unity for our national future.


This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on October 7, 2023 as "The stain of White Australia".


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ABC News, 7 October 2023:


Laura Tingle

The bitter politics and hypocrisy of the Voice debate will mark it as yet another ugly chapter in Australia's history


A usual plaudit for a book is that a reader "couldn't put it down". But a plaudit for David Marr's new book, Killing for Country, which documents his family's history as professional killers of Aborigines in NSW and Queensland in the mid-1800s, is that it is one you have to keep putting down.


It's not just the brutality of the large-scale killings Marr documents that requires regular pauses, but the voices of white people discussing it — either in the most cold-blooded pragmatic terms, or in terms of horror.


The chilling fact is that, no matter what was actually known or protested about at the time, the killings didn't stop.


Marr's history documents events which were not just cases of rounding up Aboriginal people accused of crimes, or events that just happened in the early years of white settlement, but the systemic shooting and poisoning of people living on land they had been living on for thousands of years, or who may have adapted to living peaceably on stations, or even in working in towns.


It continued at least into the 1890s.


The immediate horror of the story clashes horrendously with our image of ourselves, and with the lofty ambitions of those who oversaw federation, and the writing of our Constitution, as the former chief justice of the High Court, Robert French, observed in a speech to the National Press Club this week.


Noting resonances with the current referendum debate, French quoted some of the opposition to federation and the constitution at the time, with one contributor observing that "the people aren't ready to federate; they don't know what it means; [and] their leaders and their newspapers are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach them what it means".


He quoted the then premier of Queensland, Samuel Griffith, observing that "there is no doubt that here, as everywhere, there will be timid men who are afraid of launching into something new; but when was ever a great thing achieved without risking something".


French observed: "The Australian spirit evoked by the 'don't know, vote no' slogan is a poor shadow of the spirit which drew up our Constitution. It invites us to a resentful, uninquiring passivity."


Linking the past with the future

The headlines from the former chief justice's speech focused on his affirmation that, in his view, the Voice posed no constitutional or legal risks.


But his speech also manages to link up, in a way which has often not successfully occurred, the past and the future embedded in the Voice debate.


"It does not require a black armband view of history to conclude that colonisation did not bring unalloyed benefits to our First Peoples," he said. "Nor does it require rocket science logic to conclude that we live today with the cross-generational effects of that collision."


Whatever your views on the idea of the Voice, it is not just the ugly racism exposed by the debate about it — which has seen Indigenous people on both sides of the debate subjected to abuse and death threats — it is the spectacular failure, hypocrisy and opportunism that has been on display on occasions among our politicians that has already marked it as another ugly chapter in our history.


The willingness of some sections of the media to perpetuate misinformation, and of other sections of the media to get lost in attempts at false balance, has made nigh on impossible a reasonably rational debate about what a permanent advisory body to the parliament and executive, whose actual remit would be defined and controlled by the parliament, might mean both symbolically and practically to Indigenous Australians.


Once again, it seems our leaders and newspapers "are not brainy enough or honest enough to try to teach Australians what it means".


And this is not because those leaders didn't know.


Conflict over how to help Indigenous people


French quotes John Howard — now a vocal campaigner against the Voice — from 2007, saying:


"I believe we must find room in our national life to formally recognise the special status of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders as the first peoples of our nation. We must recognise the distinctiveness of Indigenous identity and culture and the right of Indigenous people to preserve that heritage. The crisis of Indigenous social and cultural disintegration requires a stronger affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture as a source of dignity, self-esteem and pride."


Now, Howard says, people should vote no to "maintain the rage" against the Voice, which he says would create "a new cockpit of conflict about how to help Indigenous people".


Conflict over how to help people — if conflict was what the Voice produced — is apparently a worse outcome than possibly addressing "the crisis of Indigenous identity and culture".


Howard's self-described political love child, former prime minister Tony Abbott — who has always claimed a special interest in, and affinity for, Indigenous people — said this week that, rather than pursue the Voice, "we should end the separatism, which has bedevilled Indigenous policy for many decades now".


"Aboriginal people are fine Australians," he told ABC RN, "and they should be encouraged to integrate into the mainstream of our society."


What "integration" means is as unclear now as it was when Abbott advocated the "mainstreaming" of Indigenous services when he was prime minister.


And if there is any model that currently defines how Indigenous policy is executed at the federal level, it is the one imposed on us by Abbott as prime minister when he insisted on bringing Aboriginal affairs into the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet — a department with no experience in service delivery.


Blocking change, no matter what the truth is


No campaigners regularly now rage about some mysterious bureaucracy which allegedly worthlessly chews up billions of dollars in wasted funding to Indigenous people.


That would be the National Indigenous Australians Agency, the body set up by the Morrison government and which morphed out of the structure set up in PM&C by Abbott.


The Coalition also appointed an Indigenous Advisory Council "to provide advice to the Government on Indigenous affairs, [focusing] on practical changes to improve the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people".


The inaugural, government-appointed chair of the council — which sounds like it had a job pretty much identical to that proposed for the Voice — was another prominent No campaigner, Warren Mundine.


That the policies that many of the prominent politicians leading the No campaign are actually campaigning against come from their own side of politics, or are based on their own previous statements, and their own policy legacy, is just one more depressing aspect of what has proved a very flawed debate.


Coalition figures from Howard to Peter Dutton insist their difficulty is not with constitutional recognition but with the specific proposal for the Voice.


Robert French on Friday reflected that the very act of recognition proposed by the referendum "is the creation of the Voice".


"I do agree with John Howard that recognition in the Constitution is a strong affirmation of Indigenous identity and culture," he said.


"A stronger and practical affirmation will give content to that recognition by the creation of the constitutional voice to Parliament and the Executive Government," he said


After many months of bitter debate, his words remind us that we are back at a point where it seems that, no matter what the truth may be, we will not let it lead to any change.


Laura Tingle is 7.30's chief political correspondent.


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Thursday 29 March 2018

Mainstream media continues to amplify racist dog whistles in 2018


In September 2017 the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia (NMBA) published the new Code of Conduct for Nurses and Code of Conduct for Midwives. The codes took effect for all nurses and midwives in Australia on 1 March 2018.


The new codes for nurses and midwives can be found here.

These codes passed without much comment until far-right Senator Cory Bernardi began to bay about “political correctness” on 31 January 2018 and claim that Nurses must acknowledge white privilege and voice this acknowledgment if asked.

According to ABC Media Watch he was followed by the Murdoch media running with this blatant dog whistle, followed by Andrew Bolt, Peta Credlin and various radio shock jocks.

Misleading media coverage culminating in a truly appalling piece of journalism by Channel 7 which elicited this response…………..

Luke Pearson writing at @IndigenousX on 24 March 2018:


“BUT FIRST TONIGHT, THE CONTENTIOUS NEW CODE TELLING NURSES TO SAY ‘SORRY FOR BEING WHITE’ WHEN TREATING THEIR INDIGENOUS PATIENTS..

That’s how Today Tonight Adelaide began last night.
It continued:

“Now, it’s the latest in a string of politically correct changes for the health industry, but this one has led to calls for the Nursing Board boss to resign.”

It was followed by a five minute story with the new code being condemned by someone you’ve probably never heard of, Graeme Haycroft, explaining that: “According to how the code is written, the white nurse would come in and say, ‘before I deal with you, I have to acknowledge to you that I have certain privileges that you don’t have” followed by Cory Bernardi calling it divisive.

It goes on in this vein for a full five minutes before it cuts back to the presenter, who finally says, “The Nursing and Midwifery Board has told us that the code was drafted in consultation with Aboriginal groups and has been taken out of context as it’s not a requirement for health workers to declare or apologise for white privilege”.

And just to reinforce that point, the entire premise for the segment was false. There is no requirement for nurses to apologise for being white, which would be very awkward for the more the more than 1500 Indigenous nurses across Australia, and the countless others who also aren’t white to begin with. But, even for the nurses who are – THERE IS NO REQUIREMENT FOR THEM TO APOLOGISE FOR BEING WHITE.

So, why on Earth would Today Tonight run such a story?

Why would they base a story off the demonstrably false allegations of this Graeme Haycroft person?

To answer that, it might useful to cut back to a 2005 Sydney Morning Herald story about Mr Haycroft:

“A member of the National Party and the H.R. Nicholls Society, he (Mr Haycroft) boasts that, because of a tussle he had with the Australian Workers Union 15 years ago, the union does not have a single member shearing sheep in south-western Queensland today.

Now he runs a labour hire firm with a thriving sideline in moving small-business employees off awards and collective agreements and onto the Federal Government’s preferred individual contracts, Australian Workplace Agreements.

…Mr Haycroft’s business stands out because he is targeting lower-skilled, lower-paid workers, often with poor English – the people unions say have much to fear from individual contracts.”

Cut back to 2018, and Graeme Haycroft now runs the Nurses Professional Association of Queensland, which promotes itself as an alternative to the Qld Nurses Union.

So, a man with a long history of fighting Unions, who ‘saved’ the mushroom farming business by showing businesses how to move “small-business employees off awards and collective agreements and onto the Federal Government’s preferred individual contracts, Australian Workplace Agreements.”

According to the 2005 article, “Mr Haycroft said workers had been more than happy to sign on, most with their penalty rates, holiday pay and other conditions being rolled into a flat rate.”

“However, [there is always a ‘however’], Mr Haycroft was stripped of his preferred provider status with the Office of the Employment Advocate on Thursday, after a Sydney picker, Carmen Walacz Vel Walewska, said she was sacked after she contacted the Australian Workers Union for advice on AWAs.”

With that track record, it’s hard to imagine why nurses would want to leave their current union in favour of his ‘professional association’.

It seems as though, once again, Indigenous people have become a political football and a convenient scapegoat for issues that have nothing to do with us.

Queensland has a long history of political success found through anti-Aboriginal sentiment, so what better way to undermine a Union and recruit new members to a professional association than to accuse the Union of ‘racism against white people’ and ‘political correctness gone made’ by spreading the blatantly false and misleading accusation that white nurses now have to apologise to Aboriginal people for being white?

And just like Dick Smith’s anti-immigration campaign, Blair Cottrell’s anti-African ‘community safety group’, and Prue McSween’s call for a new Stolen Generation, it seems Channel 7 is always more than happy to ignore the facts and sensationalise issues about race and racism.

There is always one more thing.

We, and others, will soon publish articles explaining what the Code of Conduct actually calls for, and explain why cultural competence and cultural safety are important (editor’s note: we did, here’s one of them), but I can’t help but be reminded of this quote from Toni Morrison:
“The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”

So, instead of working on the very real business of ensuring best practice within the nursing industry, our Indigenous experts in this area will have to take a few days away from this important work to explain that no one is asking for white nurses to apologise for being white.
Just like we have to explain that not all Aboriginal parents abuse their children, or that we don’t want to steal white people’s backyards, or that we had (and have) science, or that Australia wasn’t Terra Nullius, or, as Malcolm Turnbull suggested last year, that acknowledging Indigenous history and addressing the issue of colonial statues and place names across Australia is not a “Stalinist exercise of trying to wipe out or obliterate or blank out parts of our history”.

So long as Australian media and politics finds value, profit and opportunity in promoting racism, there will always be one more thing.

So, I might as well clear up a few others while I’m here, and empty a few more buckets out of the endless ocean of racist misinformation.

Child abuse isn’t a ‘cultural’ thing.

Police are not scared to arrest Aboriginal people out of fear of being called racist.

We don’t get free houses.

Aboriginal people using white ochre on their faces in dance and ceremony is not the same thing as white people dressing up in blackface.

We don’t get free university.

The Voice to Parliament is not a third chamber of parliament.

We are not the problem.

Anything else?

We aren’t vampires?

We don’t shoot laser beams out of our eyes?

We aren’t secretly developing a perpetual motion machine that runs on white tears?

I’m sure I, and countless others, will undoubtedly need to keep adding to this list because, as Toni Morrison tells us, there will always be one more thing.

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Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia, Response to Media Watch, 23 March 2018, excerpt:

 Do nurses under the new code have to announce their ‘white privilege’ before treating indigenous patients?
It is not a requirement of the codes of conduct for nurses and midwives to announce or apologise for white privilege. Any claim that nurses and midwives need to announce or apologise for white privilege is completely untrue. The recent criticisms from Mr Haycroft are based on completely untrue statements. The requirements for nurses when working with Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples are clearly outlined in section 3.1 of the code.

Are nurses encouraged to announce their ‘white privilege’ before treating indigenous patients?
No.

Is there any requirement to acknowledge or announce ‘white privilege’ before treating a patient?
No.

Can a nurse be sacked for NOT declaring or addressing their ‘white privilege’ to a patient?
No.
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AUSTRALIAN NURSING AND MIDWIFERY FEDERATION, AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE OF NURSING, AUSTRALIAN COLLEGE OF MIDWIVES AND CONGRESS OF ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER NURSES AND MIDWIVES JOINT STATEMENT, 23 March 2018:
 In response to Graeme Haycroft’s recent comments, we welcome the opportunity to provide further information on how important cultural safety is for improving health outcomes and experiences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

 It is clear from the 2018 Closing the Gap Report tabled by Prime Minister Turnbull in February 2018 that Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples still experience poorer health outcomes than non-Indigenous Australians. It is well understood these inequities are a result of the colonisation process and the many discriminatory policies to which Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Australians were subjected to, and the ongoing experience of discrimination today.

All healthcare leaders and health professionals have a role to play in closing the gap.
The approach the NMBA has taken for nurses and midwives (the largest workforce in the healthcare system) by setting expectations around culturally safe practice, reflects the current expectations of governments to provide a culturally safe health system. (For more information please see the COAG Health Council 4 August 2017 Communiqué).

Culturally safe and respectful practice is not a new concept. Nurses and midwives are expected to engage with all people as individuals in a culturally safe and respectful way, foster open, honest and compassionate professional relationships, and adhere to their obligations about privacy and confidentiality.

Many health services already provide cultural safety training for their staff. Cultural safety is about the person who is providing care reflecting on their own assumptions and culture in order to work in a genuine partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.
Nurses and midwives have always had a responsibility to provide care that contributes to the best possible outcome for the person/woman they are caring for. They need to work in partnership with that person/woman to do so. The principle of cultural safety in the new Code of conduct for nurses and Code of conduct for midwives (the codes) provides simple, common sense guidance on how to work in a partnership with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. The codes do not require nurses or midwives to declare or apologise for white privilege.

The guidance around cultural safety in the codes sets out clearly the behaviours that are expected of nurses and midwives, and the standard of conduct that patients and their families can expect. It is vital guidance for improving health outcomes and experiences for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples.

The codes were developed through an evidence-based and extensive consultation process conducted over a two-year period. Their development included literature reviews to ensure they were based on the best available international and Australian evidence, as well as an analysis of complaints about the conduct of nurses and midwives to ensure they were meeting the public’s needs.

The consultation and input from the public and professions included working groups, focus groups and preliminary and public consultation. The public consultation phase included a campaign to encourage nurses and midwives to provide feedback.

The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation, the Australian College of Nursing, the Australian College of Midwives and the Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives all participated in each stage of the development and consultation of the new codes. The organisations strongly support the guidance around cultural safety in the codes for nurses and midwives.

Lynette Cusack Chair Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia
Ann Kinnear CEO Australian College of Midwives (ACM)
Kylie Ward CEO Australian College of Nursing (ACN)
Janine Mohamed CEO Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives
Annie Butler A/Federal Secretary Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation