Peter Dutton demonstrated this week an appalling lack of basic numeracy. I’m sure it wasn’t front of mind. He was, after all, looking at the bigger picture, trying to gauge which way the wind blows. But still it happened.
He took away two things from three and declared that the remaining one was bigger than the three. This is frankly a pitiful demonstration of maths. Taking things away is division. It is not addition, and it is certainly not completing the whole.
And thus we entered the classroom of the opposition leader.
Admittedly he was in a friendly environment when he displayed his mathematical skills, or non-skills, that is talking with Peta Credlin on Sky News. Tossed a soft lob to hit out of the park, Dutton when asked why he only stood in front of the national flag at his news conferences, he probably thought he had hit a six.
It was ‘‘dividing our country unnecessarily’’ to fly the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags alongside the Australian flag, he said. If he were elected next year at the election, the other two interlopers would go.
‘‘I’m very strongly of the belief that we were a country united under one flag. We’re asking people to identify with different flags, no other country does that, and we are dividing our country unnecessarily. We should have respect for the Indigenous flag and the Torres Strait Islander flag, but they are not our national flags.”
No, the other two are not the national flag, but they are flags denoting the nations of people that make up this one nation. The flags are also officially recognised by the Australian government as official flags under the Flags Act 1953. What purpose is served by removing them from the backdrop of your news conferences? To exclude them is not to include those people they represent.
This ragged line of national pride of course dovetails into Dutton’s view of the nation, its history, its present and its future. Which is manifest in that glorious celebration of what this country really means to everyone, or what it should mean to everyone. Australia Day. A day that history has revealed to be one of different meanings to different people.
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Dutton’s flag gesture folds into both his own political history, first of boycotting the apology in 2008, then later apologising for the boycott, then going up against the Voice referendum. For one who holds some symbols to be sacred, he seems to lack consideration of what symbols can mean to others.
Running in the background there seems to be many to blame for this lack of obedience to the one true path through our history’s page. But this being the run-up to the election, let’s start with the Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who was, says Dutton, sending a message of utter confusion to people.
“The Prime Minister is not out there calling out Woolworths and not out there calling the pubs who don’t want to celebrate Australia, etc; because he wants to be all things to all people, which is why people rightly perceive him as being the weakest prime minister that we’ve had in our country’s history,” Dutton said.
“I think the fact is we should stand up for who we are, for our values, what we believe in. We are united as a country when we gather under one flag, which is what we should do on Australia Day.”
Of course, united under the present flag means that when we gaze up to it with admiring eyes, a tear forming when we look to the top lefthand corner and see the Union Jack, we are only looking back 250 years. Perhaps that is enough for Dutton, and as to the federation of the continent into half that. It is into this that he said this week that Australians should “value and respect our heritage”, by which he presumably means the heroic settler and migration stories.
“We should also speak a lot more about our migrant story, the incredible story of people who came here, particularly in the post Second World War period, with nothing, and have worked hard as tradies, as farmers, and they’ve educated their children. The next generation has done incredibly well. They’ve done well themselves. We’re a great country today because of that. We don’t talk anything of that part of our history.”
It is only really in the past few decades we’ve talked anywhere near enough of the cataclysm that European settlement had on Indigenous people, of the dispossession, the massacres and the shackles. Those of non-Aboriginal or Islander descent, just for a moment put yourself in their shoes when your flag is taken away from standing next to the national flag. How do you think they would feel? Divided.
