
Trump’s diversity attack is bad business
Posted on 04 Feb 2025
Workplace diversity and inclusion isn't something that can be taken for granted, says the group…
Posted on 21 Jan 2025
By Denis Moriarty
Confronting the uncomfortable truth of our colonial past is fine, unless it upsets the current inhabitants of the lucky country, says group managing director of Our Community, Denis Moriarty.
Queensland’s Crisafulli Liberal National government has closed down the Truth-telling and Healing Inquiry set up by Labor, having concluded from Australia’s rejection of the Voice that Australians (well, other than Indigenous Australians, obviously) are sick of division and opposed to anything that might make them feel bad about themselves.
On the bright side, this does create an opening for a less woke school curriculum that can present a more positive image of our past.
So, if we were to look at this through a satirical lense, I asked Our Community’s thinker-in-residence, Dr Bert Pangloss, to prepare a rough draft of a new history textbook for those Queensland 10-year-olds who aren’t already in adult jails.
‘Sixty thousand years ago, the first settlers came to Australia. Over many, many millennia they lived in harmony with the land, building cultures of art, music and dance, and forging distinctive languages and philosophies and social relations.
All you children know how cranky you can get if you’re stuck in the house on a rainy Sunday with no transport. Imagine how bored you’d get if you had to stay in the same place for 60,000 years! It’s no wonder, then, that when someone suggested a South Pacific cruise, everyone leapt at the chance, all piling into an enormous outrigger canoe and setting off for Fiji to enjoy Aperol spritzes around the pool and a nightly seafood buffet.
As it happened, though, by an extraordinary coincidence their departure was on the same day that Captain James Cook’s ship arrived from England, and he and the first settlers missed each other completely! When Cook came ashore, he immediately noticed that the country was entirely uninhabited – “Looks like terra nullius to me,” he remarked to the bosun – and stood in need of a benevolent protector to ensure that nobody ran off with it while it was unattended.
“But who can be trusted with this considerable responsibility?” Cook asked himself. “Who can preserve this continent – these gumtrees and those, let me see, I think they look like ‘kangaroos’ – for its promising future?”
“I’m just running this up the flagpole to see who salutes,” said the bosun, “But how about King George? He’s got a very nice crown already, so you wouldn’t have to get a new one made.”
“George!” said Cook and waved a magic flag.
And that was that. This meant, of course, that when the First Nations people arrived back 17 days later, they came down the gangplank on to the beach to find that all their gum trees and kangaroos now belonged to King George.
“Damn!’ said the leading elder. “If only I’d left a note, we could have avoided this entire misunderstanding!”
“Don’t feel too bad about it,” said his wife, “You can’t think of everything. Anyway, I’m sure we’ll be able to straighten this out with a little chat. This George person wouldn’t want to take advantage of the situation, surely?”
“If only that were possible!” said Captain Cook. “How happy we would be to move out and leave you to carry on! But …”
Proclaiming King George, he explained, wasn’t one of those things that you could just turn on and off. The whole country had now formally been placed under English law, and that meant if you wanted to argue the point you’d have to do it in an English court, and English judges were unanimous that what George had, he quite definitively held. A thousand pities but switching back just couldn’t be done.
Well, the elders could see the force of that argument, of course, and everybody had a hearty laugh over the surprising way things had worked out.
So the English sent over lots more ships to bring in lots more English to cut down the gum trees and shoot the kangaroos, and the First Nations relocated from the fertile parts of the country and moved to the other side of the tracks which had just been introduced to ship the iron ore out on.
The settlers and the natives got on splendidly, playing all sorts of games together, such as “Atishoo, atishoo, we all fall down” and “Playing dead” (native men, women, and children all played that very enthusiastically, and often couldn’t be persuaded to stop playing when it was time for dinner) and “Musical chairs” (which the sheep always won), and, to sum it all up, everybody agreed that this was the best of all possible histories, and contained nothing that could bring a blush to the cheek of a young person.’
The only thing I’m not sure about is whether I should bring the story up to the present date.
Looked at one way, the kids deserve to know just how this earthly paradise is being threatened by evil woke latte-sipping trans activists wanting to bring concepts like ‘truth’ and ‘history’ into a national conversation that’s already entirely committed to the cost-of-living crisis, but on the other hand, do I really want to tell the littlies too much about the horrors of ‘division’? Wouldn’t that just be putting ideas into their heads? God forbid.
No, the Government is sticking with fairy stories at bedtime, and so should I. Sleep well.
Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.
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