CLANCY OVERELL | Editor | CONTACT
Local print supplies franchisee, Devon Hamm (57) had high hopes for the future of Australian politics after the success of the NO campaign during the 2023 Indigenous Voice Referendum.
He dreamed of a future where Peter Dutton’s Liberal Party won 80 seats and formed government with One Nation.
He had hoped that the result of the referendum would mean that he would never have to consider the feelings of Indigenous people ever again.
Because, after ten years of mainlining free-to-air Sky News on his Japanese made TV, and 30 years of listening to nothing but Alan Jones on Japanese-made car radio in his Japanese-made car – he believed that Australians are sick of this leftie constructs known as ‘multiculturalism’ – and the ‘black armband view of history’.
Devon believes that political catch phrases like ‘reconciliation’ and ‘closing the gap’ are nothing but dishonest ploys by political elites to attack conservatives like him.
That’s why he loves Pauline Hanson, because she’s not afraid of ‘saying it is how it is’.
Funnily enough, it’s also the same reason why he dislikes the long fought campaigns by Indigenous community leaders to hold official ‘truth-telling inquiries’.
A truth-telling inquiry is a process, often governmental, aimed at acknowledging and documenting past injustices, particularly those experienced by marginalized groups. It involves gathering and sharing historical truths to foster reconciliation and healing. These inquiries can be crucial for truth and reconciliation initiatives, like the one underway in Queensland.
“What’s the point [in investigating and acknowledging the decades of harmful government policies that were aimed at dispossessing and damaging Indigenous culture and families to the point where the average life expectancy for Aboriginal men in remote communities is 49 years while the community faces incarceration numbers and devastating rates of deaths in custody that are worse than those faced by Black South Africans at the height of the Apartheid]?” asks Devon.
“This kind of bureaucracy [that traces the direct cause of the extreme disadvantage faced by Indigenous people that has so far been actively swept under the rug by successive governments who had hoped saying ‘sorry’ was enough to fix the problem] will achieve nothing”
