I Am, We Are...Australians - by Andrew Bolt

Editor's Note: Andrew Bolt is a popular journalist for the Herald-Sun newspaper.

I AM an indigenous Australian. Most of you are probably indigenous, too. We were born here. We are of this land and we love it. There is nowhere else we would or even call home. We are as the Webster Dictionary describes under indigenous, "produced, growing, living or occurring naturally in a particular region."

That's US! Australians! Produced right here. Yet how often we've been insulted. At almost every Government function it's been the same. It's opened by some dignitary who tells us this country is not really ours---that we, who were born here, are in fact interlopers on the land of some traditional owners (who didn't do anything with it in the first place) we must now acknowledge.

ENOUGH! Thank heavens for Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu, who this week ruled that Government ministers would no longer be forced by political correctness to make this acknowledgment at major functions. So often we've watched a white person piously tell a room of other whites, "I'd like to acknowledge the traditional owners of....", well it's so toe-curling.

How terribly empty is this modish ceremony that was compounded further a few years ago by the leftist former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd saying "SORRY" to the Aboriginals over the phony "stolen generation" guilt trip. There's almost never some Aborigine, let alone a traditional one, to be encouraged by this pat on the head. It is entirely to display our superior compassion that we do it, with not even the expectation that it will do any good to anyone but ourselves. Not one Aboriginal child ever lifts their head to say thanks. Not one workless Aborigine suddenly finds himself in a job. What happened to our shining aim to judge each other as individuals, not by birth but how we can help this country be even better than it is.

The Way I See It....there's just a lot of non-Aborigines clutching their glasses of wine trying to look briefly concerned. But if this acknowledgment, now routine in our political, artistic and elitist academic classes, was merely useless I would probably not much care. But it is also RACIST and undermines our sense of being at home and part of a whole bigger than us under one flag. Thank you Andrew for giving us this renewed perspective.