Without whole truth it’s just smoke and mirrors
Nearly five months after Australians rejected the Voice referendum, the Government is looking for ways to implement other aspects of the Uluru Statement. Indigenous Australians Minister Linda Burney says she is in active discussions with cabinet to develop a model for a “Truth-telling” process, flagging that it could be included in the school curriculum.
As you read on, bear in mind that what she has planned is designed to control what schoolchildren think about Australia.
So, what does Linda Burney mean by “Truth-telling”?
She says that “understanding of Australia’s colonial history and its modern-day impacts, the ‘TruthTelling’ process would help reveal the full extent of injustice felt by First Nations people”.
But we need to understand the deception being played on us here and how little “colonial history will be covered by this “Truth-telling”.
Let’s start by asking: what does this term really mean? Here is the definition from the Oxford English Dictionary: “Recognition or acknowledgment of historical injustices affecting Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people following the colonisation of Australia and re-evaluation of the impact of the discrimination and often violent treatment they have faced since that time.” (They cite an academic article from 1988 as the source of the expression.)
Read that Oxford definition again.
Read it slowly. Absorb what those words are saying.
That definition exposes the fact that “Truth-telling” is not about telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It’s about limiting the truth, censoring the truth and only telling one part of the truth.
The way this will work is made clear in an example used by Burney: the Myall Creek massacre.
During that incident in 1838, at least 28 unarmed Indigenous Australians from the Wirrayaraay group were killed by stockmen.
Descendants of the perpetrators, and of those killed, gather annually at the Myall Creek Memorial to recall the massacre in an act of reconciliation Burney described as “quite beautiful”. But Burney distorts the real truth (full truth) by leaving out the second half of the story.
The Myall Creek massacre happened just as she said – but the perpetrators were arrested by white policemen, put on trial before a white judge, prosecuted by white lawyers, found guilty by a white jury and hanged by a white hangman.
And why did that happen? Because the Indigenous victims were British subjects. That’s the full truth.
That’s what Burney doesn’t want you to know – and that is what will be censored and suppressed under the dishonest, deceptive and misleading title of “Truth-telling”.
Words matter and this dishonest, untruthful, use of words about a blinkered view of our history matters enormously. Burney says she wants to tell the truth about our “colonial history”. Well, the truth is that when this place became a British colony, everyone came under the rule of law. Everyone, regardless of race, became a British subject.
To leave out that fact is lying by omission.
Will Australian history be taught in our schools by an official policy of Lying-by-omission?
Worse than that, is the name of this process designed to deceive the Australian people?
Because under that innocent looking banner of ‘Truth-telling’ what will really happen is Lying-byOmission. We should all be alarmed. Very alarmed.