An index of the politically partisan nature of our news media is the ‘forgetfulness’ of the commentators about the people they offer up as authorities and ‘thought leaders’.
When advancing to us Professor Marcia Langton as the voice of the yes case for the Voice to Parliament (just look up the media attention she gained on that issue for yourself), it strikes me as quite forgetful to not recall that Langton defended the corruption rife in the ‘Aboriginal industry’ in the 1990s. The self-interested direction of public funds to benefit mainly bureaucrats, including a new layer of First Nations bureaucrats, some of whom treated funding like a personal piggybank. The Geoff Clark scandal is unlikely to be the sole instance of such corruption.
My own most pungent memory of Langton was for her rôle in attacking right wing historiographer, Keith Windschuttle, in the 2000s. His heresy was to suggest that many stories about massacres of First Nations people had been confected, and offering his own research as proof. I remember Langton being one of many to excoriate him, but without ever once disproving his scholarship (which is not as hard as it seems). And I remember Langton being unable to counter Windschuttle’s own argument that she had ‘fabricated’ stories of massacres, stating them as fact, but based solely on hearsay.
The point is not so much whether Langton was right or wrong, but that she damaged her own credibility and reputation by adopting an inflexibly ideological line she was unable to support with credible evidence. This made me wonder whether she was not also one of the few beneficiaries of the Aboriginal industry, rising to a professorship more on the basis of identity than ability or scholarship.
These doubts were revived when I read her trenchant comments on excommunicating the nation from the welcome to country. A statement almost as divisive as any the Coalition has ever relied on, and curiously scrubbed from online searches of ‘reportage’ by the ABC, The Guardian, The New Daily, and any other ‘news’ organization that isn’t owned by News Corporation. That’s enough to give me a deep pause.
I don’t suppose any of this matters to most people today, many of whom weren’t adults, or even alive, when she first came to my notice. Nor does it necessarily mean she is a routinely bad scholar, or misguided in her views on the Uluru Agenda. It just means she is not as squeaky clean as some media workers would have us believe today. And that, in turn, makes me suspicious of the automatic dismissal of all arguments questioning a yes vote in the coming Voice referendum.
Right now, the biggest reason to vote yes is that Peter Dutton (and John Howard) are opposed to the Voice. But are we well served by reducing the issue to such simple-minded binary opposition? That may be good enough for party political partisans, but it is manifestly intellectually lazy.
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