2020 has been an incredibly tough year for many but especially, I’d argue, for those of us living in Melbourne and Victoria. It’s December and the warm weather is rolling in. We’re finally able to enjoy it — going outside to feel the rays on the skin while having a beer feels medicinal after such a year.
Yet unfortunately, rather than reminisce on what has passed, what has been achieved and this newfound ‘freedom’, the Australian right wing media is ensuring we are already having to look forward. Just the other day, for example, Sky News ran an inflammatory segment on how the Victorian Government’s decision to cancel the Melbourne Australia Day parade was ‘political correctness’ gone mad rather than a simple COVID safe measure.
I had to laugh. It’s not particularly funny that there are right wing media outlets trying to fan the flames of racism in a bid to maintain their hegemony, but it is funny that they suddenly care so much about going to the Australia Day parade when, for at least the past four years, the attendance numbers at this parade have been far outstripped by those who front up to the Invasion Day rally. To see the right scramble in a bid to ignore the obvious — that tides are turning and people are voting with their feet — is truly remarkable. Perhaps they’ll just have small socially distanced gatherings in their backyards of no more than 30 people instead?
It’s usually January that white blindfold think pieces around Invasion Day start, but this year they’re getting in early. I cannot help but think this has a lot to do with the right in Victoria feeling completely dishevelled and disempowered at this point in time and lashing out.
Yet it is strange that they feel as such. For months, I have seen them run ‘Dictator Dan’ columns whilst highlighting how their civil liberties have been encroached upon by the state government’s COVID measures. In a normal year, these same people tend to be in the press calling on more people to be policed or have their rights removed by the government. When the same thing happens to them, it suddenly becomes a problem.
When Aboriginal people are asking why it is they’re being incarcerated at exorbitant rates in this state or Sudanese kids are having the cops called on them because they’re having a gathering at the park, the right turn