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SBS Australia
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- SBS Australia
Bridging now to next: the resilient voices of the Reconciliation Week collection
L-R: Living Black, National Reconciliation Week with Patrick Dodson, Our Medicine and The Point. This year's National Reconciliation Week theme is 'Bridging Now to Next', a call to reflect upon the resilience of First Nations peoples past and the collective strength of First Nations peoples present. It is a time for us all to step forward on the reconciliation journey together, uniting to understand the importance of the past in informing our future. The films and series contained in the Reconciliation Week collection this year reflect upon this theme, showing how one can overcome adversity and come through to the other side stronger than ever before. Living Black , the longest-running Indigenous news and current affairs program on Australian television, marks National Reconciliation Week with a special episode on Monday 26 May at 8.30pm. 25 years on from the remarkable Corroboree 2000 Bridge Walk, Western Arrernte woman, Walkley Award-winning journalist, Executive Producer and host, Karla Grant, interviews attendees from the momentous event to hear how they felt at the time and if they believe reconciliation still stands a chance in Australia. Episode guests include Former Minister for Indigenous Australians, Hon. Linda Burney and CEO of Reconciliation Australia, Karen Mundine. Living Black: Unfinished Business – Corroboree 2000 (series 32 episode 6) premieres Monday 26 May on NITV and SBS On Demand at 8.30pm. Live from Fremantle Passenger Terminal, WA, Yawuru elder, Patrick Dodson , also known as the Father of Reconciliation', along with next-generation leader Tremane Baxter-Edwards , deliver a Reconciliation keynote. At a time when Australia faces uncertainty in its reconciliation journey, this keynote calls on all Australians to step forward together to build a more united and respectful nation. Together, Dodson and Baxter-Edwards embody cross-generational First Nations leadership, with their voices reflecting the strength, wisdom and hope to carry the reconciliation movement forward, following the theme 'Bridging Now to Next'. National Reconciliation Week featuring Patrick Dodson premieres Tuesday 27 May at 11am (AEST) on NITV and SBS On Demand. National Reconciliation Week Featuring Patrick Dodson Taking viewers behind the frontline of Australia's strained medical services, six-part series Our Medicine shines an important light on First Nations professionals working to achieve better health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander patients and communities. Narrated by popular actress Leah Purcell AM , Our Medicine follows First Nations doctors, nurses, paramedics, traditional healers and other medical professionals in their day-to-day challenges as they support patients on their journey through the system. Our Medicine premieres Thursday 29 May on NITV and SBS On Demand, with weekly double episodes. Episodes air weekly at NITV starting Thursday 29 May at 7.30pm. In one of Australia's most potent stories, Namatjira Project traces the life and works of Albert Namatjira, a renowned Arrernte painter from the MacDonnell Ranges in Central Australia. Namatjira gave many Australians their first glimpses into the outback heart of the country and was widely celebrated, exhibited globally, and introduced to Queen Elizabeth. However, in 1957 he was falsely imprisoned, and in 1959 he died. By 1983 the Government sold the copyright to his artworks to an art dealer, and today, Namatjira's family fight for survival, justice and to regain their grandfather's copyright. Namatjira Project illuminates the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people today, in Australia and globally. Namatjira Project will air 8pm Wednesday 29 May on NITV and is streaming now at SBS On Demand. National Indigenous Television's (NITV) flagship news and current affairs program, The Point, returns for its tenth season on Tuesday 3 June at 7.30pm on NITV and SBS On Demand, and on SBS following World News Late. Each week, host John Paul Janke, a proud Wuthathi and Meriam man, joins expert panellists, community leaders and decision makers to explore issues that matter most to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Now marking a decade on air, The Point continues to bring Indigenous perspectives to the centre of national conversations, platforming diverse perspectives from across the continent. This season features one-hour, issues-based panel shows, alternating between episodes filmed in community and in-studio on Cammeraygal Land in Sydney. The series remains a leading source of original journalism and breaking news. This year, The Point will once again travel across the country to engage local communities and explore real solutions for the future. Locations include Hobart (nipaluna), Darwin (Garramilla), Cherbourg (Barambah), the Torres Strait Islands (Zenadth Kes), and Melbourne (Naarm). The Point premieres weekly from Tuesday 3 June at 7.30pm on NITV, and encores on SBS after SBS World News Late . It will also be available to stream free on SBS On Demand, with captions in English and subtitles in Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese. In a changing climate, this powerful documentary, draws on some 65 thousand years of Indigenous knowledge, to help us better prepare for the future. The 30-minute documentary follows First Nations land practitioners as they answer questions from younger generations on how to care for Country. Drawing on roughly 65,000 years of wisdom on Indigenous practices around fire, flood and heat management, these experts explore ways that we can better prepare Australia for extreme weather. The Knowledge Keepers is currently available to stream on SBS On Demand. Explore more in the RECONCILIATION WEEK COLLECTION at SBS On Demand. Share this with family and friends SBS's award winning companion podcast. Join host Yumi Stynes for Seen, a new SBS podcast about cultural creatives who have risen to excellence despite a role-model vacuum.
ABC News
06-05-2025
- Politics
- ABC News
The Coalition and Clive Palmer didn't win their own election culture war
It's three years since an emotional Anthony Albanese surprised everyone — including his then minister for Indigenous Australians Linda Burney, who was in the crowd at the Canterbury-Hurlstone Park RSL — by announcing that his first item of business as prime minister would be to implement, in full, the Uluru Statement from the Heart. True to his word, Albanese took the Voice to a referendum vote a year-and-a-half later. Even though it did not have bipartisan support. Even though electoral history was frantically waving its arms to warn of near certain failure. The aspiration of the Voice was that — if successful — it would change the course of the parliament's relationship with Australia's First Peoples. But it failed. And that failure nearly destroyed one leader, then ultimately destroyed the other, in a tangled mess of political consequence that once again reduced the interests of Aboriginal people to an asterisk or afterthought, beyond expanding the range of racist sentiment and discourtesy thought acceptable in modern political debate. Albanese didn't swerve from his determination to hold a referendum. ( AAP: Lukas Coch ) The PM's courageous and costly choice To the political consequences first. There is no question that Albanese's decision to persist with the Voice referendum blew a large hole in his first term. His devout intention was to buck the long trend of national leaders paying lip service to reconciliation, then disappearing at the first whiff of political grapeshot. This was both a courageous decision and a costly one. The loss of the referendum coincided with the beginning of Labor's long slide in the polls, and thoroughly stripped the new prime minister of his new-prime-minister smell. The person for whom the Voice referendum did work quite well, meanwhile, was Peter Dutton. Keep in mind that Dutton became leader of the Liberal Party after the 2022 election mainly by virtue of unavoidable circumstance. The unavoidable circumstance was that there was no-one else. Photo shows Jacinta stands in front of Peter Dutton. They are standing in front of Australian flag, Australia's emblem also seen. "Doubling down on cultural wars" and a misreading of the Voice referendum result contributed to the Coalition's election loss, says a former Liberal minister. The 2022 election — if condensed into a Post-it note — consisted of mainstream Australia rejecting a blokey leader with a hardline immigration background and a broad streak of climate scepticism. Unfortunately, the depredations of that very election on the ranks of the Liberal Party meant that was the only type of guy they had left in the cupboard, so Dutton took the reins. But he was intelligent in the way he built trust within his party. Under pressure to oppose the Voice referendum straight out of the gates, as the National Party did in November 2022, he held his own counsel for another four long months and maintained a public preparedness to negotiate. Only when the Liberal Party was decimated in the Aston by-election of April 2023 did he commit the party to the no campaign. And when the referendum was soundly defeated in October, the legend of Dutton's strategic mastery began to take root, and was further nourished by steadily-improving polls over the course of 2024. Dutton had hoped to win in Labor seats that had low Yes votes in the Voice referendum. ( ABC News: Matt Roberts ) A lesson from the Trump playbook It wasn't just the defeat of the prime minister's referendum that set Liberal strategic noses a-whiffle. It was that some of Labor's safest seats registered a strong "no" vote, and this fed a growing view that the path back to power for the Coalition was not via the begging of forgiveness from its old voters in "teal" seats, but via the impatience of stressed Labor battlers in the commuter belt with their prime minister's fixation on "woke" issues like reconciliation. In these seats, there was also ripe anger about poor services, high tolls, housing shortages and the rising cost of absolutely everything. In the United States, these factors meshed powerfully with anti-woke and anti-immigration sentiment to produce a second presidential term for Donald Trump. The extent to which the Coalition relied on the belief that the same pattern would work here is obvious from the shape of Dutton's campaign. After the referendum, the ABC's The list of seats where the gap was highest reads like the tour itinerary for the Dutton campaign bus. Hunter, McMahon, Paterson, Watson, Whitlam and Dobell in NSW. In Victoria, Gorton and Hawke. These are the seats to which Dutton referred when he assured reporters that the Liberal Party's private polling showed a path to victory that no-one else could see. In the early part of the ABC's election night broadcast, LNP senator James McGrath maintained his confidence that there was a "goat track" on a "knife-edge" through such seats. Of these poor goats, nothing has been heard since. On the night, the Liberal Party did not secure increased support in a single one of these seats, let alone win any of them. Loading How could the polling have misinterpreted things so badly? Here's where we are obliged to inspect the sausage-making techniques behind political polling. It's not workable or affordable to run a poll that asks every single person of voting age what they think about issue X or Y. That is what an election is, and they are terribly expensive. So pollsters ask a representative sample of people instead. And if the sample isn't representative, they use "weighting" — including demographic tendencies they've observed from past elections — to help them eliminate distortion. The Freshwater company is the pollster used by the Coalition, and it is also used by the Australian Financial Review (which urged a vote for the Coalition on Saturday). Its published polls were the most optimistic of the companies in the field (it had Labor leading the Coalition 51.5 per cent to 48.5 per cent in its final published prediction). Photo shows Uncle Mark Brown The outright hostility at Melbourne's Anzac Day service mirrors the long, quiet and painful exclusion of Black diggers from the national conversation. In a news story by Michael Read on Monday, the AFR reported that: "Freshwater used a person's vote at the Voice referendum as a demographic characteristic when it weighted its survey responses." In other words, it wasn't as straightforward as "Labor voters in commuter-belt seats have told us they are annoyed by woke agendas on reconciliation." It was that to some extent that assumption was baked in to the process. Here we begin to see the problem. When you're worried you might be losing an election and you're short of navigational experience, these bat signals from pollsters can take on a disproportionate significance, and the strength of this feedback loop is evident from the final week of the campaign. Eight days out from voting day, the Welcome to Country preceding the Dawn Service at Melbourne's Shrine of Remembrance was Both Albanese and Dutton condemned the disruption in the strongest terms, but by Monday Dutton had diluted his objection to incorporate the view that while interrupting the service was wrong, welcomes to country were too common and did not belong at ANZAC Day services. "It divides the country, not dissimilar to what the prime minister did with the Voice," he said. Under questioning, he broadened his criticisms to include Qantas, whose acknowledgements of country on descent to Australian destinations he described as "over the top". Cliver Palmer spent big on advertisements repeating the line that Australians didn't need to be "welcomed to our own country". ( ABC News: Will Murray ) This gelled with millions of dollars' worth of Clive Palmer paid ads, billboards and unsolicited texts advising voters that "you don't need to be welcomed to your own country". Souped-up polling isn't the only reason why a mainstream Australian political leader was able to convert "I condemn the actions of this neo-Nazi" to "but he maybe had a point, didn't he?" in one fluid move, and the space of a weekend. Photo shows Palmer scratches his head. Despite spending $60 million on campaign advertisements, Clive Palmer's Trumpet of Patriots party has failed to win a single seat in the lower house. Or why, in the final week of an election held in a country where Indigenous people's experience of housing shortages and financial stress is far sharper than that of their non-Indigenous countrymen, we found ourselves in a spirited discussion about whether or not it's annoying when a Qantas crew member takes 10 seconds to identify the approaching landmass as Gadigal or Wurundjeri land. Who are the winners from these thought bubbles? Not Dutton, as was so memorably demonstrated at the weekend. Not Palmer, who told the Daily Telegraph he spent $60 million on his Trumpet of Patriots campaign, which daubed these sentiments on billboards and banner ads to what appears to be a large round of voter indifference. Legacy media and the outdoor advertising sector benefit immediately from relieving Palmer of his extra funds, though its unclear what readers will make long term of their favourite media outlets readily ventilating an oafish misrepresentation of this continent's oldest continuing tradition of courtesy between human beings. Are they the winners? Hard to say. The Australians who lose from all this, however, are easy to identify. They're the same ones who lose every time.
Epoch Times
29-04-2025
- Politics
- Epoch Times
What Is ‘Welcome to Country' and Why Are Some Australians Pushing Back?
News Analysis What was already a contentious issue bubbled to the surface following Melbourne's Anzac Day dawn service ceremony last weekend. A group of men attending the event booed and shouted during an Indigenous 'Welcome to Country' by Bunurong elder Mark Brown, which sparked condemnation. However, days later, sceptics of the Welcome to Country also began to make their voices heard, especially as the ceremonial procedure becomes more pervasive in Australian public life. What is the Welcome to Country? Started in the 1970s, the Welcome to Country and Acknowledgement of Country are ceremonies performed by Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander elders at public events. It has become a topic of debate with those in favour saying it's a mark of respect for tradition and culture, while those against say it has lost its relevance and meaning through overuse. 'Welcome to Country is delivered by traditional owners, or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples who have been given permission from traditional owners, to welcome visitors to their country,' Reconciliation Australia says. Related Stories 4/27/2025 4/24/2025 Many supporters of the Welcome, such as former MP Ken Wyatt, have emphasised the cultural meaning of the ceremony over the political, but there are proponents who say it has a place in activism. Jacob Hersant (Left) speaks to a TV journalist during the Dawn Service at the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, Australia on April 25, Support Delivering her own Welcome to Country at a Labor rally in Sydney the day after Anzac Day, former Labor MP and Indigenous minister, Linda Burney, made one point clear: that a Welcome to Country wasn't just a courtesy, it was about a 'continuing struggle for equality and a long history of dispossession.' 'Understanding our history and geography is an intrinsic part of the telling of the story and finding the truth,' Burney said. Retiring Minister for Indigenous Australian Linda Burney makes a statement at Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, on Feb. 13, comments were applauded by party faithful at the rally, including Foreign Minister Penny Wong. On April 29, Labor Finance Minister Katy Gallagher told ABC News Breakfast that her party would not change their level of support for the ceremonies, which can often cost thousands. 'The government has a position that this is a measure of respect to support Welcome to Country,' she said. 'I think the issue that Peter Dutton has raised in the last couple of days is to distract away from the train wreck of a campaign they're having.' During the final leaders' debate at the weekend, Opposition Leader Peter Dutton said Welcome to Country ceremonies were becoming overdone, while both Dutton and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said it was up to organisations to decide if they wanted to include them. Wyatt Denies Ceremonies are Political Former Liberal Party minister and Indigenous Australian Ken Wyatt told ABC Radio he didn't know 'what the contentious issue' was with Welcome to Country ceremonies. He doesn't believe they are political. 'I don't know what the contentious issue is, and whether people, as individuals, have perception that it's political as opposed to welcoming,' he said. Ken Wyatt is sworn in as Minister for Indigenous Australians by Australia's Governor-General Sir Peter Cosgrove during the swearing-in ceremony at Government House on May 29, 2019 in Canberra, Australia.'That becomes the matter that they raise with politicians, who then don't go back and do their own work in terms of finding out what does Welcome to Country really mean, and distinguishing it from Acknowledgement to Country.' Wyatt likened calls for the Welcome to be scrapped to calling for Anzac Day to be cancelled. 'I'm disappointed with anybody who doesn't take the time to understand the importance of friendship, welcoming and acknowledging that you are part of the community and you're being welcomed into somebody's home country, home region, and to politicise it just adds to the division,' he said. 'I think when you start to politicise elements of Aboriginal affairs or cultural practices, then you start a process of allowing division to occur.' Australians Being Divided by Race: One Nation One Nation Leader Pauline Hanson says it's the ceremonies themselves that are dividing Australians, as well as Labor's $400 million (US$257 million) failed push for a constitutional change to include an Indigenous 'Voice' to Parliament. 'It was deeply disrespectful to force these ceremonies onto Anzac Day, a sacred day to honour those who fought and died for Australia,' she wrote on X. 'But this isn't just about one day. Australians are tired of being divided by race at every event, every gathering, every opportunity. One Nation leader, Senator Pauline Hanson is seen during a press conference in Brisbane, Australia, on April 13, 2022. AAP Image/Darren England 'The overwhelming rejection of Anthony Albanese's Voice referendum sent a clear message: Australians reject race-based division. Welcome to Country ceremonies are just more of the same, divisive politics that drive Australians apart, not bring us together.' Hanson was one of the first Australian politicians to speak out against the ceremonies, believing they make Australians feel like outsiders in their own country. 'On Anzac Day, things boiled over. Instead of listening to the many decent Australians who are simply trying to be heard, the media and politicians are smearing everyone who spoke up as extremists, which simply is not true,' she said. Libertarian and Cumberland Councillor Steve Christou said the Anzac Day interruptions were not the start of the debate, but the last straw for a frustrated population. 'People are sick to death of having Welcome to Country ceremonies thrust upon them and shoved down their throat,' he said. Christou said the ceremonies made Australians feel like 'second class citizens', and urged leaders to instead focus on practical measures like housing and cost of living. A Time and Place While normally an issue tackled by minor right-leaning parties, the Coalition has in recent years begun criticising the ubiquity of the ceremony. Shadow Home Affairs spokesman James Paterson told the ABC there was a genuine place for Welcome to Country, but believed their overuse had rendered them 'tokenistic and insincere.' 'Generally speaking, often it has been overdone,' he said. Shadow Home Affairs spokesperson James Paterson at a press conference at Parliament House in Canberra on March 6, 2023. AAP Image/Mick Tsikas 'The opening up of parliament is an appropriate place to do it but when you're having a Zoom meeting probably not everybody in the call needs to do it. 'When you're having a conference, once is probably enough, not every single speaker.' Paterson said a Coalition government would not dictate on Welcome to Country ceremonies, adding that Indigenous contributions to the armed services was appropriate. 'My view is that one of the meaningful and appropriate things that does happen on Anzac Day is acknowledgement of Indigenous service in the Australian Defence Force, because the history in our country is that there are Indigenous people who signed up to fight for our country when frankly our country didn't treat them very well as citizens at the time,' he said.
Sky News AU
27-04-2025
- Politics
- Sky News AU
‘We have equality': Linda Burney's post defending Welcome to Country questioned
Sky News host James Macpherson discusses former Indigenous Affairs minister Linda Burney's recent post defending the Welcome to Country acknowledgement. 'Former minister for Indigenous Affairs Linda Burney has given an impassioned defence of Welcome to Country after the ceremony got a mixed reaction over the Anzac Day weekend,' Mr Macpherson said. 'I thought it was a simple acknowledgement … I never realised when we are doing a Welcome to Country, and when we are listening to it, we are agreeing Indigenous people are still struggling for equality in this country.'
